Elixir

Elixir
Hilary Duff with Elise Allen
327 pages
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Source: Borders sale
★★★☆☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

Clea, wealthy daughter of a doctor and politician turned photojournalist, starts finding strange pictures of a man in the photos she's taken.  Then, when she meets the man in real life she's surprised and together with her best friends Ben and Rayna, she tries to figure out the connection she has to the man - the connection her missing father seemed to have already figured out.

Before I read a book I usually skim some Goodreads reviews to get a feel of what other people thought.  What bothers me about Elixir is that even after reading it, so many people wrote it off with one star just because it was written by Hilary Duff.  I think that's unfair, and while the book wasn't the best YA novel I've read this year, it certainly is not deserving of only one star.

Basically what started as a good premise for a YA story was ruined with semi-poor execution.  Scenes jumped around too much, mainly at the end of the novel, the plot was not well developed and everything happened in a convenient linear timeline (I am referring here to the scene in Clea's father's office when she and Ben are searching for information before going to Japan) and then there were some other issues.  When Clea spoke or thought, there were at times words in CAPS with too many punctuation marks!!!  This made the novel seem a bit unprofessional.

Overall I liked Elixir a little bit, I thought it was a very quick, light read that shouldn't be skipped simply because Hilary Duff "wrote" it.