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quoteablebooks · 4 months

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Genre: Young Adult, Paranormal Romance, Urban Fantasy

Rating: 0 out of 5

Content Warning: Ableism, Child death, Death, Death of parent, Alcoholism, Cursing, Bullying, Suicidal thoughts, Torture

Summary:

The first book in Alyson Noël's extraordinary new Immortals series. Enter an enchanting new world, where true love never dies...

After a horrible accident claims the lives of her family, sixteen-year-old Ever Bloom can see people's auras, hear their thoughts, and know someone's entire life story by touching them. Going out of her way to avoid human contact to suppress her abilities, she has been branded a freak at her new high school—but everything changes when she meets Damen Auguste.

Damen is gorgeous, exotic and wealthy. He's the only one who can silence the noise and random energy in her head—wielding a magic so intense, it's as though he can peer straight into her soul. As Ever is drawn deeper into his enticing world of secrets and mystery, she's left with more questions than answers. And she has no idea just who he really is—or what he is. The only thing she knows to be true is that she's falling deeply and helplessly in love with him.

*Opinions*

TL;DR - The villain should have killed both main characters and put us all out of our misery

Hello friends and enemies, we are gathered here today to talk about a book that I did not enjoy and probably has the most annoying characters I have read to date. The plot was nonsense, the characters were annoying, and somehow a book that was just over 300 pages was about 300 pages too long. The fact that there are six books in this series is truly baffling to me as I don’t understand how anyone cared about these characters enough to get through this novel let alone five more. My completeist brain is truly thrilled that I cannot easily find the rest to read for free anywhere so I can drop this book in a free little library and never have to think about it again.

I do want to provide one positive before I get into everything else I didn’t like about this novel. I appreciated the portrayal of Sabine and how kind she is to Ever, who is consistently a horrible person to her and everyone else. Sabine lost her twin brother, dropped everything, and moved so that she could take care of her niece who is now her ward. Sabine is nothing but patient and kind to Ever, a teenager who is constantly not talking to her, being mean, or getting expelled from school. Sabine is the true hero of this book for not smacking Ever into next week on a couple of occasions. I too would be working all the time if I had to live with Ever constantly being cagy, lying, and straight up ignoring her. Ava is also kind to Ever when she has no reason to be, so the adult women in this novel, for the small amount are present, have the patience of saints.

Ever is one of the most annoying main characters that I have ever had the displeasure of being in the head of. She is so self-centered and not in an “I am a teenager who is going through some horrible and confusing things” but in an “I care about no one and nothing but myself and I never let anyone complete a thought because I don’t want to hear it, even though I am psychic and read minds.” She is a horrible friend, an extremely clingy and toxic girlfriend, and almost too dumb to live. Ever doesn’t figure out anything that is happening on her own, she doesn’t do a single thing herself throughout this novel except breaking into her boyfriend’s house because…she’s mad he left after spending almost two whole days with her. She says that she doesn’t want her ghost little sister to cross over, yet is absolutely horrible to her every time she is present, is a shitty friend, and is just an overall bad person. When people do try to explain things to Ever, she gets pissed off and tells them to go away or says horrible things, but then is confused why people aren’t talking or lying to her.

The sad thing is that this could have been a powerful story about grief and dealing with the loss of family, but Ever never thinks about her parents except how she can’t see them, and only thinks about what her sister lost when it is convenient for her. She states constantly that her psychic powers are because she is being punished for the accident, but once Daimen is on the scene, she barely thinks about the family she lost or the life she no longer has. Instead of making Ever a complex character who is managing huge life changes and loss, she seems like a self-absorbed narcissist who is only upset that her parents are dead because the accident changed her from the most popular cheerleader into a “freak”. It is all so shallow that I have no sympathy for her. Then her two-day descent into alcoholism? I can’t even get into that.

Daimen is the king of gaslighting and every time he did something that was supposed to be romantic I rolled my eyes so hard I almost strained something. Daimen, a six hundred-year-old man, is obsessed with a seventeen-year-old. Usually, these types of age gaps don’t bother me in high fantasy novels, but in an urban fantasy in which Daimen is constantly dropping hints that he is so much more knowledgeable and sophisticated than Ever, it just felt weird. Sometimes I heard the start of the SVU theme song. He is also constantly using his type of magic in front of her and then denying that he is, making her feel as if she is losing her mind. A mind that he can read at times and knows how distressed he is making her, yet instead of trying to find a way to explain he continues to play mind games. He apparently loves her so much that he has searched for her in multiple lifetimes, but he also somehow never figures out that it is Darina who continually kills her. Even though Darina shows up every time she dies they get back together. This is a man who supposedly discovered the truth about immortality and he can’t see the two plus two make four? However, I completely lost it when Ever was upset and crying and his response, get on top of her and start trying to sleep with her. I hate him.

Let’s also take a little detour and talk about the fact that Darina made a point of telling Ever that she died a virgin in every lifetime she has had since meeting Daimen. Now, I have no intention of reading on in this series unless someone pays me money, but I can predict that when Ever and Daimen actually do sleep together there is going to be a whole thing of being her one and only partner, her first and only love, she is happy she saved her soul for him, etc. and I would have to throw up before continuing.

Darina is the most cardboard-cut-out villain I might have ever read. She is the stunningly beautiful woman that Daimen is with that gives off creepy vibes. That is the only reason why Ever hates her to begin with. Then she gets close to Haven for the sole purpose of killing her to upset Ever and make her feel like she is alone so she’ll just die when Darina finally decides to attack her all because she is in love with Daimen for some reason. Darina, who proves at the end of the book that she could have killed Ever at any moment, but just decides to play games because…plot? Then, after 600 years, she is easily confused and killed without much of a fight. While I wanted her to succeed because I hated Daimen and Ever and wanted them to stop existing, she didn’t have enough of a personality to really care about her one way or another.

Ever’s “friends”, and I use the word loosely, are stereotypes and also kind of the worst people. Miles is the less offensive of the two, he is just obsessed with his boyfriends to the point that he ignores his friends, but he at least says something when both Ever and Haven are being the worst. Haven, however, fucking sucks. Everything had to be about her and she called ‘dibs’ on a man and gets pissed when he isn’t interested in her but her friend. Remember, these people are Juniors in high school, and they are calling dibs on a real-life person. The whole bit where she joins anonymous groups and lies about having addictions or other problems because she is ignored at home is just wrong on so many levels. Then, Haven goes missing for days after another woman is murdered, and Ever is so self-obsessed she doesn’t even care, but is so extremely happy when she reappears alive. This whole town should have just been crushed by a meteor.

A major part of the plot, in which there almost isn’t any mind you, is that Ever feels as if she needs to punish herself because she believes that it is her fault that her family got into a car accident that killed them. There is this whole thread about how she has to forgive herself for the accident and thinking that she caused it, with multiple other characters explicitly saying this to her. In the final scene of the novel Daimen states that love heals and she finally forgave herself so the scar on her forehead is gone. Except, Ever never forgave herself because she found out that Darina caused the accident for the sole purpose of killing Ever. It was all just so frustrating. Ever doesn’t figure out anything on her own, Darina tells her in her evil monologue. Yet we are supposed to get this whole takeaway about love and forgiveness after Ever turns Darina to dust by accident. When Daimen started explaining that Ever hit Darina in her weakest chakra and that’s why she died I would have put down the book if I wasn’t so close to the end. Please, give me a fucking break. There had not been a single mention of chakras before this scene, not one. Also, the only other plot point besides Ever hating herself was figuring out why Daimen was acting so weird, that’s it.

I could go on for another five pages of everything I hated about this, but it would just make me angry. I would give this zero stars if that was a possibility. Save yourself the time and money and read literally anything else.

#Evermore #The Immortals Series #Alyson Noel #0 out of 5 Star #book review #booklr

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sixofravens-reads · 2 years

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also this may be entirely inaccurate but I'm wondering if part of the annoyance towards using tropes to sell books nowadays has to do with authors using popular tropes/keywords to get good engagement even if those aren't accurately represented in the book?

I don't use tiktok or twitter and don't read a lot of official marketing material (aside from the tor.com insta, which is still somehow marketing The Atlas Six as some dramatique dark academia murderfest, it is not. it sucks. anyway...) so this might be a garbage thought, but certain tropes are VERY popular right now, and I have to wonder how many authors go "ohhhhh well the love interest and MC don't immediately like each other when they meet....I guess it can be enemies to lovers even though they start being friends after like 30 pages once the bad first impression is cleared up?? and I gotta be super dramatic about it bc this is tiktok and we don't do Normal"

which leads readers to be disappointed bc "I was expecting years-long enmity and blood spilled and rage and murder and this guy was mildly annoyed because the MC tripped on the stairs when they met :/"

like I'm not saying everything has to go 100 for it to be a good story, but the idea that your marketing has to promise Game of Thrones level drama and intrigue, or Bridgerton level sexiness, when you wrote a fairly mild YA romance is....annoying.

#this is entirely based on my experience with seo and people who don't know how to use it lol #at my old job i did a lot of google ads stuff and we'd always have idiots like 'i want you to add Call of Duty to my list of searches...#...my ads show in bc a new game just came out and its really popular and people will see my ad if it shows up for that!!!!!#and we'd have to be like 'sir. you are a dentist. people searching Call of Duty are not looking for a dentist.'#people just say 'ooh word popular need to use word even if its not relevant!!' and don't care if it's false advertising #i mean no one is going to review a dentist and say '0/5 stars has nothing to do with video games'#but they will review a book and say '0/5 stars the tiktok said this was enemies to lovers but it's totally not'#ANYWAY ive wasted so much time writing posts #i need to make lunch #thinking about reading

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