[Book Review] Undying by Corina Bishop

Sentra has woken up not knowing where she is, who she is, or why she's been taken into a lab daily to be experimented on and tortured. She doesn't know why she's having dreams that feel so much like memories of a family she doesn't know. However, she one thing she is certain of is that she would do whatever it takes to gain her freedom.

**Full disclosure, I have been given this book to review by the author. However, this does not change my opinions or feelings whatsoever.**

3.5 STARS

This is one of the harder books to review because on one hand, I think the characters and the plot were really well done and once the action started to happen I was hooked. I rooted for the good guys and hated the bad guys. I felt my heartbeat go quicker during the more suspenseful scenes and I felt for the characters in the sadder scenes. The experimental scenes in the beginning were written so well that I felt nauseous at times. It wasn't overly graphic, but it is detailed enough that if you couldn't help but really feel for Sentra.

However, on the other hand I had a lot of issues with the abundance of grammatical and editing errors that definitely negatively impacted my reading experience. It just didn't feel like a final draft, editing wise. I feel like one or two more editing sweeps would fix the grammar, formatting issues, and small punctuation problems. But that is strictly talking about the editing and technical parts of the writing. From the dialogue, character development, story arc, and overall descriptions you can tell that Corina Bishop is a really great writer and storyteller. It was her storytelling abilities that kept me reading, because typically I put down books with a lot of grammatical issues. But this time I couldn't I needed to know what was going to happen.The story itself had a good story arc that I really enjoyed and I felt like it was a good beginning, middle, and end. Especially if it is a first book in a series. If Undying is a stand alone, I have to admit I really want more.

I would say the story is definitely a 4 star rating, because of how much fun it was. However, I cannot look past all the editing issues, so I had to give it 3.5 stars. There is a massive amount of info dumping in the first 80-100 pages or so that definitely made it hard to get hooked in the story and slowed down my reading time. Once Sentra starts getting information about everything that is happening, the reader starts to, which made it easier to slip into the story. I wonder if there will be more with the series because of the way it ended! Bishop is obviously a great story teller and I would easily buy the next book in the series to know what is going to happen. If there is a next book.

Overall, I really recommend this book. I think the story is worth trudging through the beginning and dealing with any editing issues. And although I do wish that there was more editing and polishing before publication, I still am really happy I read it and I am excited to see what else Bishop writes.

Side note: Erica Robyn Reads and I buddy read this book together so check out her review here!

Thanks for reading!