Book Review-Jekel Loves Hyde by Beth Fantaskey

Title: Jekel Loves Hyde

 Author: Beth Fantaskey

Series: N/A

Published: May 3rd 2010 by Harcourt Children's Books  

 Length: 282 pages

Warnings: attempted suicide, kissing, profanity, violence

Other info: Beth Fantaskey has also written the Jessica series, the first of which I reviewed here. You can find Fantaskey's website here.

Summary from Goodreads: Jill Jekel has always obeyed her parents rules; especially the one about never opening the mysterious, old box in her father's office. But when her dad is murdered, and her college savings disappear, she's tempted to peek inside, as the contents might be the key to a lucrative chemistry scholarship.
To improve her odds, Jill enlists the help of gorgeous, brooding Tristen Hyde, who has his own dark secrets locked away. As the team of Jekel and Hyde, they recreate experiments based on the classic novel, hoping not only to win a prize, but to save Tristen's sanity. Maybe his life. But Jill's accidental taste of a formula unleashes her darkest nature and compels her to risk everything, even Tristen's love just for the thrill of being . . . bad

 Review: The idea was brilliant. The promise of young adult classic remixed with a romantic twist was too much for me to not be hyped up about. I ended up being slightly disappointed. The idea is that Dr Jekyll was a real person who really created a split personality, Hyde, with a separate body, documenting all his notes as he went along. Both Jekyll and Hyde went on to have families, of which the present generation is Jill and Tristen. Tristen and Jill then go on to recreate the experiments carried out by Jekyll. And in case you haven’t guessed, this goes extremely well-not.  it’s a shame Fantaskey didn’t pull this off as well as she could have done. the character introductions were standard fare romance lovey dovey ones, without a real original twist. the characters themselves were slightly flat; Jill and Tristen are perfect stereotypical romance stars: the good virginal female and the tortured dark brooding male . In fact, all the characters were sort of boring and too typecast for my liking. The whole plotline is generally boring, but the scenes in the school laboratory were very interesting. Fantaskey either did her research, or is very good at inventing likely reactions for various chemicals. there is a lot of description in this, which, depending on where you are in the book, is both  a good and bad thing. the whole book is quite slow, only really picking up the pace at the end, by which time you may have given up.

Overall:  Strength 2 tea- generally awful apart from the concept.