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Some books are 'meh' and others are bad, but some are so awful that I feel that I have a duty to warn others about them.
Plot: Burdened by the tragic death of her mother and her boyfriend's betrayal, Nikki Beckett has accepted the offer of a handsome stranger to make all of her pains go away. After being taken to a place in-between earth and hell, Nikki's emotions are fed on for a century while only six months pass on the world above. But Nikki is different from others in that she emerges from her century still sane, young, and with the memory of her old boyfriend.
Nikki escapes back to the world above, but a clock is ticking down, leaving her with only six months to say her goodbyes before she has to make a choice: become the queen of the Everneath or spend the rest of her existence in the Tunnels, where her remaining life force will be used to power the Everneath.
I was excited by this modern re-telling of the tale of Persephone and misunderstood that Nikki wasn't already a queen, but had a chance to become one. Still, it's rare in YA lit to have a girl become a queen and handle actual royal duties. My hopes were too high.
Any potential for Nikki's growth was nixed, and she hardly spent more than a sentence at a time to consider what her life as queen would be like, rather stopping to think about how ruling the Everneath and becoming an Everliving would require her to feed off of the emotions of other unfortunate souls. Just once I would like to see a YA protagonist throw off her inhibitions and do something 'wrong' like that to further herself, and then not have to read about her whining the rest of the series.
Characters
NIKKI: Dumb, weak-willed, and afraid of action are three words that best describe Nikki. Add to that lovable collection of traits the fact that not one, but two boys are fighting over her. She could have saved the reader several hundred pages of woe by making her decision within fifty pages: Jack or Cole. It's hardly even an option, considering that at the end of her six months she has to go back to the Everneath anyway, yet Nikki spends her time convinced that there is some way to escape her fate. The book would have been much more enjoyable had she come back to say goodbye to everyone and then left with Cole to begin her campaign as the new Queen, rather than nearly four hundred pages of gripping and avoiding time she should have spent actually looking for ways to escape her debt.
JACK: He takes the role of the obligatory 'good guy' in the obligatory YA love triangle. Despite having a history of womanizing, he enters a relationship with the special Nikki and settles down for a long-term relationship. But don't think that Jack is a douche! Oh no, he loves Nikki and cares about her and was broken when she disappeared for six months, never giving up the search to find her! And on the weekends he works at a soup kitchen with Nikki! Look how nice and good and loving Jack is, the reader should love him! I'd love him had he an actual personality and wasn't a cliche good guy. I was actually glad that he fell into the vortex at the end and took Nikki's place in the Tunnels...but then I realized how much angst Nikki would produce using Jack as an excuse.
COLE: Obligatory 'bad boy' to balance out the sacred love triangle of YA lit. I actually enjoyed Cole and his apparent soullessness as he tried to convince Nikki to become the queen. But then he had to go and ruin it by saying that he was in love with Nikki and that his heart was breaking for her. Honestly, I wanted Cole to be a little bit more evil and take a step close to full-on antagonist territory. Out of all of the characters, I sympathized with Cole most, but I don't think that's what Mrs. Ashton was going for when she wrote the book.
Setting: The author spent too much time describing darkness and not enough the actual scenery. The characters were in Utah, as it turns out (I had to google both Park City and the Timpanogos Caves to find this out), though the only sense of location I got was that the book took place west of the Mississippi.
Sentences akin to "the chill crept through my thin jacket" don't make me feel any colder. It's winter at the time of writing this review and sometimes I feel like I need a jacket in my own home, which is 65F...so how cold is in Park City? Throughout much of the book I could hardly tell what season is was either, and everything about Park City seemed wildly generic.
Random Thoughts
#I was moderately enjoying the anthropologist/historian's description of the bracelet that would supposedly unlock the secret on how to escape the Everneath. But then this happened: "So the bracelet has to do with the royalty of the Ring of Death. The Ahk ghosts. Or Everlivings, as some more of contemporary studies have deemed them. Of course, these are all fringe theories." So far, so good, except that he called the Everlivings...well, Everlivings, which is the name that the immortal beings of the Everneath call themselves. "....Ahk ghosts are sort of a popular legend in anthropology circles. Some of my own colleagues believe Ahk ghosts wander the surface of the earth today."
First of all, what type of anthropologists are these? Cultural, I take it, and I know cultural anthropologists personally. I wanted to be an anthropologist. I've read several anthropology textbooks. Most anthropologists DO NOT believe in what they are studying, as that might skew the objectivity and ruin their professional reputation, especially if they believe that there are emotion-stealing immortals running around the planet.
#Jack's grandpa was supposedly one of the last "old-West cowboys, a relic of the history of our town". The author does know that actual cowboys stopped being a thing around 1900, right? And if this book takes place in the modern day...that sets Jack's grandpa's age around 130, had he been a cowboy as a young man.
Why aren't they investigating that lead?
#Enough with the fragments! In some novels, fragmented sentences work, but this was not one of those cases: "But I needed to be here. Needed to glimpse, for a moment, the life I had before. The year I should've had. To see Jack one last time, despite how we left things. To see my family again. This was my chance to say good-bye. It was a chance I didn't get last time." UGH.
#This is a series. I'm stopping at Everneath because I know for a fact that I can't how much whining and self-imposed guilt is coming in the following installments of the series.
Plot: Burdened by the tragic death of her mother and her boyfriend's betrayal, Nikki Beckett has accepted the offer of a handsome stranger to make all of her pains go away. After being taken to a place in-between earth and hell, Nikki's emotions are fed on for a century while only six months pass on the world above. But Nikki is different from others in that she emerges from her century still sane, young, and with the memory of her old boyfriend.
Nikki escapes back to the world above, but a clock is ticking down, leaving her with only six months to say her goodbyes before she has to make a choice: become the queen of the Everneath or spend the rest of her existence in the Tunnels, where her remaining life force will be used to power the Everneath.
I was excited by this modern re-telling of the tale of Persephone and misunderstood that Nikki wasn't already a queen, but had a chance to become one. Still, it's rare in YA lit to have a girl become a queen and handle actual royal duties. My hopes were too high.
Any potential for Nikki's growth was nixed, and she hardly spent more than a sentence at a time to consider what her life as queen would be like, rather stopping to think about how ruling the Everneath and becoming an Everliving would require her to feed off of the emotions of other unfortunate souls. Just once I would like to see a YA protagonist throw off her inhibitions and do something 'wrong' like that to further herself, and then not have to read about her whining the rest of the series.
Characters
NIKKI: Dumb, weak-willed, and afraid of action are three words that best describe Nikki. Add to that lovable collection of traits the fact that not one, but two boys are fighting over her. She could have saved the reader several hundred pages of woe by making her decision within fifty pages: Jack or Cole. It's hardly even an option, considering that at the end of her six months she has to go back to the Everneath anyway, yet Nikki spends her time convinced that there is some way to escape her fate. The book would have been much more enjoyable had she come back to say goodbye to everyone and then left with Cole to begin her campaign as the new Queen, rather than nearly four hundred pages of gripping and avoiding time she should have spent actually looking for ways to escape her debt.
JACK: He takes the role of the obligatory 'good guy' in the obligatory YA love triangle. Despite having a history of womanizing, he enters a relationship with the special Nikki and settles down for a long-term relationship. But don't think that Jack is a douche! Oh no, he loves Nikki and cares about her and was broken when she disappeared for six months, never giving up the search to find her! And on the weekends he works at a soup kitchen with Nikki! Look how nice and good and loving Jack is, the reader should love him! I'd love him had he an actual personality and wasn't a cliche good guy.
COLE: Obligatory 'bad boy' to balance out the sacred love triangle of YA lit. I actually enjoyed Cole and his apparent soullessness as he tried to convince Nikki to become the queen. But then he had to go and ruin it by saying that he was in love with Nikki and that his heart was breaking for her. Honestly, I wanted Cole to be a little bit more evil and take a step close to full-on antagonist territory. Out of all of the characters, I sympathized with Cole most, but I don't think that's what Mrs. Ashton was going for when she wrote the book.
Setting: The author spent too much time describing darkness and not enough the actual scenery. The characters were in Utah, as it turns out (I had to google both Park City and the Timpanogos Caves to find this out), though the only sense of location I got was that the book took place west of the Mississippi.
Sentences akin to "the chill crept through my thin jacket" don't make me feel any colder. It's winter at the time of writing this review and sometimes I feel like I need a jacket in my own home, which is 65F...so how cold is in Park City? Throughout much of the book I could hardly tell what season is was either, and everything about Park City seemed wildly generic.
Random Thoughts
#I was moderately enjoying the anthropologist/historian's description of the bracelet that would supposedly unlock the secret on how to escape the Everneath. But then this happened: "So the bracelet has to do with the royalty of the Ring of Death. The Ahk ghosts. Or Everlivings, as some more of contemporary studies have deemed them. Of course, these are all fringe theories." So far, so good, except that he called the Everlivings...well, Everlivings, which is the name that the immortal beings of the Everneath call themselves. "....Ahk ghosts are sort of a popular legend in anthropology circles. Some of my own colleagues believe Ahk ghosts wander the surface of the earth today."
First of all, what type of anthropologists are these? Cultural, I take it, and I know cultural anthropologists personally. I wanted to be an anthropologist. I've read several anthropology textbooks. Most anthropologists DO NOT believe in what they are studying, as that might skew the objectivity and ruin their professional reputation, especially if they believe that there are emotion-stealing immortals running around the planet.
#Jack's grandpa was supposedly one of the last "old-West cowboys, a relic of the history of our town". The author does know that actual cowboys stopped being a thing around 1900, right? And if this book takes place in the modern day...that sets Jack's grandpa's age around 130, had he been a cowboy as a young man.
Why aren't they investigating that lead?
#Enough with the fragments! In some novels, fragmented sentences work, but this was not one of those cases: "But I needed to be here. Needed to glimpse, for a moment, the life I had before. The year I should've had. To see Jack one last time, despite how we left things. To see my family again. This was my chance to say good-bye. It was a chance I didn't get last time." UGH.
#This is a series. I'm stopping at Everneath because I know for a fact that I can't how much whining and self-imposed guilt is coming in the following installments of the series.