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rachaelarsenault's review
slow-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
0.25
I’m really not sure what to make of this book. It was certainly different from other installments in the series. But I don’t think that’s really a good thing.
In Forgotten, we open with a prologue about the creation of the realms – the first four pages of which is nearly identical to the opening of Kalona’s Fall. As a writer, I can’t wrap my head around literally copy-pasting a huge section of a book like that. It comes off as lazy, unprofessional, and is kind of a slap in the face to readers who followed every book as they came out. They’re gonna know they’ve read this scene before; you’re not even trying to hide that it’s the same.
Anyway, the book opens with several chapters focused on Other Kalona, Other Erebus, and Other Nyx, which seems really strange to me from a world-building perspective. These extra-planar, divine or semi-divine beings have Other World versions of themselves, too? But they oversee multiple realms – Nyx, in particular. Why can’t they see these mirror realms, too? Are they aware of their Other counterparts? And is Mother Earth an Other in this book, too, or is she one of the few entities that’s aware of the various realms and has full effect over all of them? I would assume so, since she was involved in their creation. And what about the Sun and the Moon? Do they have Others? They’re divine beings.
Setting aside the confusing world-building, the purpose of this opening is to establish that Other Kalona doesn’t fall, but also he does. It seems kind of stupid? Or at least lazy. I know I’ve already accused the beginning of this book of laziness, but I’m serious – on top of copy-pasting a significant amount of text from Kalona’s Fall into this book, the author also takes fifty pages to write out any potential problems with Kalona being risen in the Other World, clearly so that she can neatly evade writing another redemption plot for him. The problem is that nothing meaningful changes as a result of this. Kalona still ends up entombed in the earth by the Cherokee (who explicitly worship the Earth Mother, which is not part of Cherokee culture! I’m continually infuriated by this series’ insistence on conflating Cherokee spirituality and culture with Wicca/pagan practices). And because Kalona still ends up trapped in the earth, vampyres still regard Erebus as Nyx’s Consort, hence Warriors being called Sons of Erebus and not Sons of Kalona.
Well, whatever. Surely this fifty-page digression into the backstory of the world serves some sort of vital purpose to the plot and plays into a major twist. Right?
Ha. No. It’s referenced once after this and promptly forgotten for the rest of the book.
Side note: I’m wondering if that’s the theme for the book title. Maybe the author is giving a nod to all the plot points that have been brought up in this book (and the past books), only to be unceremoniously abandoned or straight up forgotten. Here’s looking at you, weapons cache in the school basement.
We end up spending most of this book with Other Neferet and Other Lynette, as well as three women they employ at a B&B in Scotland. Other Neferet is recovering from being usurped by Zoey and the Resistance, and she uses the power of Darkness to kill an entire bar for… reasons. Honestly, it doesn’t particularly matter, and the only thing I remember from that scene is the blatant fat shaming. The white bull shows up, she flirts with him because “all men are the same” (never mind that I’m pretty sure the bulls were established as masculine but genderless), and he promises her power. She doesn’t want to be subservient to him, though. She says she wants to prove herself worthy of him, so he gives her a task – woo the sprites into granting her access to the Isle of Skye, and there she can harness Old Magick to become immortal. This results in Neferet taking a private jet to Scotland, which is how she ends up enlisting Lynette’s help.
Lynette is… I can tell she’s supposed to be shrewd and no-nonsense in a way that female readers should root for and find, like, “empowering”. But she’s kind of insufferable. She brags about how her intelligence and resourcefulness are what kept her alive and in good standing when the vampyre-human war turned everything to hell, but she was a well-off white woman with lots of assets to liquidate – enough that she was able to reinvent her life and career without having to sell her expensive house or Mercedes Benz. It’s also stated that she was poor prior to this and pulled herself out of poverty with hard work and good sense, which only makes the whole situation more infuriating, especially as someone who has studied inequality. Poverty is complex and involves numerous forms of systemic oppression, from racism to sexism to ableism and everything in between. Presenting escaping poverty as a matter of “Work hard! Be smart!” is classist.
The insufferableness of Lynette’s monologue on this particular topic is not helped by the fact that Lynette is also a huge snob and sticks her nose up at anything that isn’t fine, expensive, or otherwise indicative of being high class and high status.
Mostly, though, Lynette is boring and flat.
Anyway, after a long scene where the author demonstrates a complete failure to understand how planes work, Lynette and Neferet end up at a B&B in Scotland, where the owner and two staff are sworn to secrecy under threat of death. This is where they spend most of the book. Neferet goes out onto the loch every night to leave offerings for the sprites in hopes of attaining access to Skye, and eventually the sprites appear before her and agree to fulfill her command in exchange for payment. The payment, of course, requires Neferet to solve a riddle – she must kill her past and her future – and it is also communicated through the requisite terrible poetry this series loves.
There’s a few scenes that I can tell are supposed to be touching or moments of bonding between Neferet and Lynette, but they’re both so stilted and robotic in their characterization that it’s really hard to feel anything from their scenes. It doesn’t help that the author is kind of a one-trick pony when it comes to antagonistic female characters. Other Neferet has a different backstory than the Neferet from the original series – but she’s still a rape victim, and that’s still her motive for turning to Darkness and hating humans. Lynette is also a rape victim, and she also hates men as a result. This is what she and Neferet bond over. And despite the scene clearly being intended as a bonding moment, nothing really happens - they confide in each other, and then promptly go back to discussing business. It’s completely baffling and unnecessary. There are better, subtler scenes elsewhere in the book where I can tell they get along well and care for each other without the book boldly declaring, “LOOK! SEE? THEY HAVE SO MUCH IN COMMON!”
Neferet’s plan to kill her past requires her to kill Loren, her former lover. Loren is a character I have always hated, but even I can acknowledge that his character is completely bastardized in this book and he is turned into a caricature. Loren was smarmy and creepy because he was suave and self-assured; he had a charm that a young girl like Zoey would eagerly fall for, and he knew how to approach the situation with subtly to avoid suspicion from Zoey’s friends and other staff at the HoN. Other Loren is a vapid, self-absorbed idiot who couldn’t fool anyone into anything. The author wants you to hate him so you can cheer Neferet on when she kills him. This murder is not supposed to vilify her – it’s supposed to be a sympathetic moment.
Killing her future is… Honestly? I have no idea what the hell it’s supposed to be. She basically just declares to the sprites that she’s no longer High Priestess and has abandoned that path, and Oak is like, “Seems legit.” That’s it. It requires nothing of her, it risks nothing, and it isn’t even interesting.
But when Loren met with Neferet, he spilled a bunch of information about Zoey and the Otherworld that he learned from the few Council Meetings he attended after Neferet was ousted. So, after all the work Neferet puts into wooing the sprites, working toward gaining access to Skye, conspiring to kill Sgiach… It’s pointless. None of that matters. She didn’t need to spend days wooing the sprites because she’s not acting against Sgiach anymore or asking to be granted access to the one place where sprites are still revered and remembered. She wants access to Zoey’s world, so she could just call on the sprites the same way Zoey or Kevin did. As long as she has a powerful or interesting enough payment, they’ll agree.
The sprites demand new payment for this changed plan, telling Neferet to kill her first and only true friend, Lynette. Neferet says no and literally everyone speaks in rhyme for a couple pages, which is as obnoxious and ridiculous as it sounds, and one of the girls from the B&B, Denise, offers herself as sacrifice instead. Except it’s not really a sacrifice because she doesn’t die or have anything horrible happen to her. She turns into a water sprite – which, as someone who still believed in fey and was in awe of Neferet’s magick, seems like a reward more than anything.
So everything Neferet’s section built to was ultimately pointless and she doesn’t have to sacrifice anything. The only thing that changes is she doesn’t universally hate humans now because Lynette and the women at the B&B are nice.
Kevin has a section in this book. Nothing important happens, though. He’s drowning in despair over Aphrodite’s death and will remind readers of it roughly every three pages, despite only knowing her for three days. There’s some conversation about Other Kalona, wherein Grandma Redbird is summoned by someone uttering the phrase “tribal lands” and there’s a lot of historical inaccuracies and racist stereotypes, par for the course. Kevin has a brief scene with Dallas, Erin, and Shaunee, where Dallas is pro-war against humans, Erin is slut shamed with her every word and action, and Shaunee apologizes for being rude to Kevin that one time. Then they find out about Loren’s death and Neferet’s plans to go to Skye – somehow, Loren was able to write “Skye” in his own blood on the carpet, even though Neferet was in the room for a fair amount of time while he bled out. Thus, Stark and Kevin prepare to go to Skye.
Now on to Zoey, our main character. Our central protagonist. The only person in this entire series whose chapters are told in first person.
…
There are two full chapters and two sections of other chapters told from Zoey’s perspective. Those are the only chapters we get in Zoey’s world. That seems like a really bad choice, given that a lot of readers are coming to this series because they were fans of the original – they want to see the original characters.
Anyway, Zoey has arranged for an interscholastic swim meet with human schools, which is supposed to be an impressive demonstration of her work as High Priestess. So far, the things she has accomplished as a High Priestess can be divided into two categories: a) it’s fun or glamourous, and b) she can throw money at it.
Zoey and co. chat for a bit before they go to the swim meet, mostly about how teachers should be allowed to show favoritism. This is something that if I find horrifying as someone who was exposed to a lot of deeply harmful and mental-illness-generating favoritism and special treatment in school, particularly because I know the author, P.C. Cast, is a former public school teacher. It isn’t helped that at least half the characters’ motives for giving students special treatment is, “Well, they’re pretty and can afford designer clothes, so I like them.”
They get to the swim meet, a character we just met (Kacie) rejects the Change while in the pool, and there’s a lot of drama and controversy. But, hey! Aphrodite has her fancy blue and red tattoo and at some point in an earlier scene she accidentally gifted a second chance to Kacie. I dunno how the hell that works, but sure. Kacie gets to resurrect, but instead of awakening as a red fledgling, she skips instantly to red vampyre. She also has an affinity for fire and water, which is established in the most ridiculous fashion possible and is used for a really dumb metaphor.
Kacie doesn’t appear in this book again after that.
Many, many, many pages later we get another section from Zoey’s perspective, 90% of which is just her and her friends goofng around at a park and getting ready to watch fireworks. The park and its late-night fireworks display is, incidentally, an example of “Things Zoey Can Throw Money At” in her list of High Priestess accomplishments. Eventually, the merriment is ruined when Aphrodite has a vision. Zoey’s last section involves Aphrodite recounting her vision to everyone while recovering in her suite at the HoN, and then everyone theorizing about what they need to do to prevent it from happening.
And that’s it. That’s all Zoey does in this book.
If the plot sounds dull and directionless, that’s because it is. None of this is helped by the fact that the editing in this book is terrible, giving us such gems as “I decided to enlist to help of the red vampyres”, “Lynette’s gaze didn’t waiver”, and “staring at me like I’d soddenly kicked Nala”. This is to say nothing of punctuation errors, run-on sentences (one of which is 57-words long), continuity errors, and even more spelling errors. The bonus content section about coping with grief has a particularly hilarious formatting error that resulted in every step of the ritual outlined being labelled “1”.
Overall, this book is a mess and an absolute slog. There’s no tension or intrigue. A huge part of the problem is that the book focuses mainly on Other Neferet and Other Lynette, who spend as much time discussing what outfits they’ll wear and what wine they’ll drink as they do actually working toward their goals. The ending of the book also leaves no suspense. Aphrodite’s vision showed that Darkness would overtake the world if Neferet kills one specific human. She doesn’t know who it is, but readers can tell it’s Lynette. Readers also know that Neferet has already refused to kill Lynette when explicitly told to do so by the sprites, so there’s no reason to be concerned that this will happen in Found. It’s nothing book with a nothing plot and a no-consequence conclusion.
In Forgotten, we open with a prologue about the creation of the realms – the first four pages of which is nearly identical to the opening of Kalona’s Fall. As a writer, I can’t wrap my head around literally copy-pasting a huge section of a book like that. It comes off as lazy, unprofessional, and is kind of a slap in the face to readers who followed every book as they came out. They’re gonna know they’ve read this scene before; you’re not even trying to hide that it’s the same.
Anyway, the book opens with several chapters focused on Other Kalona, Other Erebus, and Other Nyx, which seems really strange to me from a world-building perspective. These extra-planar, divine or semi-divine beings have Other World versions of themselves, too? But they oversee multiple realms – Nyx, in particular. Why can’t they see these mirror realms, too? Are they aware of their Other counterparts? And is Mother Earth an Other in this book, too, or is she one of the few entities that’s aware of the various realms and has full effect over all of them? I would assume so, since she was involved in their creation. And what about the Sun and the Moon? Do they have Others? They’re divine beings.
Setting aside the confusing world-building, the purpose of this opening is to establish that Other Kalona doesn’t fall, but also he does. It seems kind of stupid? Or at least lazy. I know I’ve already accused the beginning of this book of laziness, but I’m serious – on top of copy-pasting a significant amount of text from Kalona’s Fall into this book, the author also takes fifty pages to write out any potential problems with Kalona being risen in the Other World, clearly so that she can neatly evade writing another redemption plot for him. The problem is that nothing meaningful changes as a result of this. Kalona still ends up entombed in the earth by the Cherokee (who explicitly worship the Earth Mother, which is not part of Cherokee culture! I’m continually infuriated by this series’ insistence on conflating Cherokee spirituality and culture with Wicca/pagan practices). And because Kalona still ends up trapped in the earth, vampyres still regard Erebus as Nyx’s Consort, hence Warriors being called Sons of Erebus and not Sons of Kalona.
Well, whatever. Surely this fifty-page digression into the backstory of the world serves some sort of vital purpose to the plot and plays into a major twist. Right?
Ha. No. It’s referenced once after this and promptly forgotten for the rest of the book.
Side note: I’m wondering if that’s the theme for the book title. Maybe the author is giving a nod to all the plot points that have been brought up in this book (and the past books), only to be unceremoniously abandoned or straight up forgotten. Here’s looking at you, weapons cache in the school basement.
We end up spending most of this book with Other Neferet and Other Lynette, as well as three women they employ at a B&B in Scotland. Other Neferet is recovering from being usurped by Zoey and the Resistance, and she uses the power of Darkness to kill an entire bar for… reasons. Honestly, it doesn’t particularly matter, and the only thing I remember from that scene is the blatant fat shaming. The white bull shows up, she flirts with him because “all men are the same” (never mind that I’m pretty sure the bulls were established as masculine but genderless), and he promises her power. She doesn’t want to be subservient to him, though. She says she wants to prove herself worthy of him, so he gives her a task – woo the sprites into granting her access to the Isle of Skye, and there she can harness Old Magick to become immortal. This results in Neferet taking a private jet to Scotland, which is how she ends up enlisting Lynette’s help.
Lynette is… I can tell she’s supposed to be shrewd and no-nonsense in a way that female readers should root for and find, like, “empowering”. But she’s kind of insufferable. She brags about how her intelligence and resourcefulness are what kept her alive and in good standing when the vampyre-human war turned everything to hell, but she was a well-off white woman with lots of assets to liquidate – enough that she was able to reinvent her life and career without having to sell her expensive house or Mercedes Benz. It’s also stated that she was poor prior to this and pulled herself out of poverty with hard work and good sense, which only makes the whole situation more infuriating, especially as someone who has studied inequality. Poverty is complex and involves numerous forms of systemic oppression, from racism to sexism to ableism and everything in between. Presenting escaping poverty as a matter of “Work hard! Be smart!” is classist.
The insufferableness of Lynette’s monologue on this particular topic is not helped by the fact that Lynette is also a huge snob and sticks her nose up at anything that isn’t fine, expensive, or otherwise indicative of being high class and high status.
Mostly, though, Lynette is boring and flat.
Anyway, after a long scene where the author demonstrates a complete failure to understand how planes work, Lynette and Neferet end up at a B&B in Scotland, where the owner and two staff are sworn to secrecy under threat of death. This is where they spend most of the book. Neferet goes out onto the loch every night to leave offerings for the sprites in hopes of attaining access to Skye, and eventually the sprites appear before her and agree to fulfill her command in exchange for payment. The payment, of course, requires Neferet to solve a riddle – she must kill her past and her future – and it is also communicated through the requisite terrible poetry this series loves.
There’s a few scenes that I can tell are supposed to be touching or moments of bonding between Neferet and Lynette, but they’re both so stilted and robotic in their characterization that it’s really hard to feel anything from their scenes. It doesn’t help that the author is kind of a one-trick pony when it comes to antagonistic female characters. Other Neferet has a different backstory than the Neferet from the original series – but she’s still a rape victim, and that’s still her motive for turning to Darkness and hating humans. Lynette is also a rape victim, and she also hates men as a result. This is what she and Neferet bond over. And despite the scene clearly being intended as a bonding moment, nothing really happens - they confide in each other, and then promptly go back to discussing business. It’s completely baffling and unnecessary. There are better, subtler scenes elsewhere in the book where I can tell they get along well and care for each other without the book boldly declaring, “LOOK! SEE? THEY HAVE SO MUCH IN COMMON!”
Neferet’s plan to kill her past requires her to kill Loren, her former lover. Loren is a character I have always hated, but even I can acknowledge that his character is completely bastardized in this book and he is turned into a caricature. Loren was smarmy and creepy because he was suave and self-assured; he had a charm that a young girl like Zoey would eagerly fall for, and he knew how to approach the situation with subtly to avoid suspicion from Zoey’s friends and other staff at the HoN. Other Loren is a vapid, self-absorbed idiot who couldn’t fool anyone into anything. The author wants you to hate him so you can cheer Neferet on when she kills him. This murder is not supposed to vilify her – it’s supposed to be a sympathetic moment.
Killing her future is… Honestly? I have no idea what the hell it’s supposed to be. She basically just declares to the sprites that she’s no longer High Priestess and has abandoned that path, and Oak is like, “Seems legit.” That’s it. It requires nothing of her, it risks nothing, and it isn’t even interesting.
But when Loren met with Neferet, he spilled a bunch of information about Zoey and the Otherworld that he learned from the few Council Meetings he attended after Neferet was ousted. So, after all the work Neferet puts into wooing the sprites, working toward gaining access to Skye, conspiring to kill Sgiach… It’s pointless. None of that matters. She didn’t need to spend days wooing the sprites because she’s not acting against Sgiach anymore or asking to be granted access to the one place where sprites are still revered and remembered. She wants access to Zoey’s world, so she could just call on the sprites the same way Zoey or Kevin did. As long as she has a powerful or interesting enough payment, they’ll agree.
The sprites demand new payment for this changed plan, telling Neferet to kill her first and only true friend, Lynette. Neferet says no and literally everyone speaks in rhyme for a couple pages, which is as obnoxious and ridiculous as it sounds, and one of the girls from the B&B, Denise, offers herself as sacrifice instead. Except it’s not really a sacrifice because she doesn’t die or have anything horrible happen to her. She turns into a water sprite – which, as someone who still believed in fey and was in awe of Neferet’s magick, seems like a reward more than anything.
So everything Neferet’s section built to was ultimately pointless and she doesn’t have to sacrifice anything. The only thing that changes is she doesn’t universally hate humans now because Lynette and the women at the B&B are nice.
Kevin has a section in this book. Nothing important happens, though. He’s drowning in despair over Aphrodite’s death and will remind readers of it roughly every three pages, despite only knowing her for three days. There’s some conversation about Other Kalona, wherein Grandma Redbird is summoned by someone uttering the phrase “tribal lands” and there’s a lot of historical inaccuracies and racist stereotypes, par for the course. Kevin has a brief scene with Dallas, Erin, and Shaunee, where Dallas is pro-war against humans, Erin is slut shamed with her every word and action, and Shaunee apologizes for being rude to Kevin that one time. Then they find out about Loren’s death and Neferet’s plans to go to Skye – somehow, Loren was able to write “Skye” in his own blood on the carpet, even though Neferet was in the room for a fair amount of time while he bled out. Thus, Stark and Kevin prepare to go to Skye.
Now on to Zoey, our main character. Our central protagonist. The only person in this entire series whose chapters are told in first person.
…
There are two full chapters and two sections of other chapters told from Zoey’s perspective. Those are the only chapters we get in Zoey’s world. That seems like a really bad choice, given that a lot of readers are coming to this series because they were fans of the original – they want to see the original characters.
Anyway, Zoey has arranged for an interscholastic swim meet with human schools, which is supposed to be an impressive demonstration of her work as High Priestess. So far, the things she has accomplished as a High Priestess can be divided into two categories: a) it’s fun or glamourous, and b) she can throw money at it.
Zoey and co. chat for a bit before they go to the swim meet, mostly about how teachers should be allowed to show favoritism. This is something that if I find horrifying as someone who was exposed to a lot of deeply harmful and mental-illness-generating favoritism and special treatment in school, particularly because I know the author, P.C. Cast, is a former public school teacher. It isn’t helped that at least half the characters’ motives for giving students special treatment is, “Well, they’re pretty and can afford designer clothes, so I like them.”
They get to the swim meet, a character we just met (Kacie) rejects the Change while in the pool, and there’s a lot of drama and controversy. But, hey! Aphrodite has her fancy blue and red tattoo and at some point in an earlier scene she accidentally gifted a second chance to Kacie. I dunno how the hell that works, but sure. Kacie gets to resurrect, but instead of awakening as a red fledgling, she skips instantly to red vampyre. She also has an affinity for fire and water, which is established in the most ridiculous fashion possible and is used for a really dumb metaphor.
Kacie doesn’t appear in this book again after that.
Many, many, many pages later we get another section from Zoey’s perspective, 90% of which is just her and her friends goofng around at a park and getting ready to watch fireworks. The park and its late-night fireworks display is, incidentally, an example of “Things Zoey Can Throw Money At” in her list of High Priestess accomplishments. Eventually, the merriment is ruined when Aphrodite has a vision. Zoey’s last section involves Aphrodite recounting her vision to everyone while recovering in her suite at the HoN, and then everyone theorizing about what they need to do to prevent it from happening.
And that’s it. That’s all Zoey does in this book.
If the plot sounds dull and directionless, that’s because it is. None of this is helped by the fact that the editing in this book is terrible, giving us such gems as “I decided to enlist to help of the red vampyres”, “Lynette’s gaze didn’t waiver”, and “staring at me like I’d soddenly kicked Nala”. This is to say nothing of punctuation errors, run-on sentences (one of which is 57-words long), continuity errors, and even more spelling errors. The bonus content section about coping with grief has a particularly hilarious formatting error that resulted in every step of the ritual outlined being labelled “1”.
Overall, this book is a mess and an absolute slog. There’s no tension or intrigue. A huge part of the problem is that the book focuses mainly on Other Neferet and Other Lynette, who spend as much time discussing what outfits they’ll wear and what wine they’ll drink as they do actually working toward their goals. The ending of the book also leaves no suspense. Aphrodite’s vision showed that Darkness would overtake the world if Neferet kills one specific human. She doesn’t know who it is, but readers can tell it’s Lynette. Readers also know that Neferet has already refused to kill Lynette when explicitly told to do so by the sprites, so there’s no reason to be concerned that this will happen in Found. It’s nothing book with a nothing plot and a no-consequence conclusion.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood
Moderate: Death
Minor: Body shaming, Fatphobia, and Rape
Sex shaming
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