Book Jacket:
Last spring, Nikki Beckett vanished, sucked into an underworld known as the Everneath, where immortals Feed on the emotions of despairing humans. Now she’s returned- to her old life, her family, her friends- before being banished back to the underworld… this time forever.
She has six months before the Everneath comes to claim her, six months for good-byes she can’t find the words for, six months to find redemption, if it exists.
Nikki longs to spend these months reconnecting with her boyfriend, Jack, the one person she loves more than anything. But there’s a problem: Cole, the smoldering immortal who first enticed her to the Everneath, has followed Nikki to the mortal world. And he’ll do whatever it takes to bring her back- this time as his queen.
As Nikki’s time grows short and her relationships begin slipping from her grasp, she’s forced to make the hardest decision of her life: find a way to cheat fate and remain on the Surface with Jack or return to the Everneath and become Cole’s…
You can read an excerpt here.
Review:
I’m not particularly a fan of angst. Hand me yet another paranormal YA with a flowy dress on the cover and jacket copy that proclaims the story of a girl torn between two hot guys, and my first instinct is to punt it – so you can imagine my surprise when I found myself rather enjoying Everneath, which turned out to be a much better book than I was expecting (though granted, I was expecting something painful). This book may not be an earth shattering departure from the crowded field of paranormal YA, but all in all Everneath is a pleasant read that manages to elbow its way into perfectly respectable seating among the paranormal YA throng.
I really enjoyed the idea behind Becks’ predicament – a girl who has been lost, but who gets a chance to come back and say goodbye before she has to leave again, forever. I was very caught up by her painful readjustment to the living world, how she was in many ways like a recovering addict, dealing with cravings and painfully sharp senses, and how her emotions and feelings took time to return. I’ll admit, Becks wasn’t particularly proactive for the first half of this book, but I thought it made sense, given her rate of recovery and her certainty in her fate – she did, after all, just come back to say goodbye. I also really like how Ashton dropped us in the middle of the story, having to figure out exactly what had happened to Becks that got her into this mess, and what was going to happen to her once her six months was up.
As for the plotting, I really enjoyed the first half of this book – which focused on Becks’ internal conflicts – but as the book progressed, it strayed more and more into typical paranormal YA territory. The plot became more about the mythology, and I found that I liked the hints and questions about what was going on far more than the answers that followed, because they were too simplistic, too straightforward, and arrived at far too conveniently. Then the romance wallowed into standard eye-gazing, hand-holding, world-falling-apart-when-we’re-not-touching territory, and I started to feel I’d read this all before. But the thing that really irked me about the back half of this book was how it took the easy way out, again and again – especially in terms of Becks and Jack’s relationship. The set up of what tore them apart was so wonderful, but then the final reveal of what actually caused the fracture between them was, to me, a cop out. Ashton had the framework in place for something so much more interesting and complicated, but instead she played it safe, and that choice pulled the rug out from under Becks. When Ashton defused the event that was the reason for so many of Becks’ choices, it frankly left Becks looking kind of silly, if not outright dumb, for doing what she did. As for Cole, the other love interest, I like that Ashton didn’t make him a typical bad boy, but he started to be annoyingly one note after a while. This book tantalized me with its promise of emotional complexity, but then sadly it stopped short of following through, opting instead to follow the easier, well-worn tread of standard paranormal romance YA fare. Sigh.
And yet, I did really like the framework of this story – both in how Ashton played on Greek mythology and spun it out with a very modern touch, and in how she put her heroine in such a complicated situation. There was a lovely tension in Becks’ dilemma, as she got closer and closer to the people she loved, even as she was closer and closer to losing them forever, and the finale packed quite an emotional punch. The ending in a way redeemed this story for me, in that it was a choice both satisfying and gut-wrenching.
So in the end, I was pleasantly entertained by Everneath. I think there was a fair bit of potential left unrealized, but there was more than enough here to make for a respectable paranormal YA read – and I do plan on keeping an eye out for whatever this author writes next. Fans of Shiver should definitely check this book out.
Byrt Grade: B+
As Levar Burton used to say – you don’t have to take my word for it…
…This ended up being a pretty decent read even though I went into it a little afraid. I’ve since seen lots of positive reviews, but at the time I hadn’t heard a whole lot about it. And while I did enjoy the book it still had some things that I didn’t love.
Lisa O from The Nocturnal Library says:
…While this story could have easily been characterized by the well-known, trite series of clichés typical of standard paranormal YA nowadays (love triangle, love at first sight, bitchy competition and so on and so forth), it fortunately manages to avoid falling blatantly right into some of them. The love triangle is not properly a triangle (could also be a rectangle, to be honest), love is not of the instant kind and the competition is not bitchy (ok, it is and it isn’t. Half a cliché?)
…The intense prose is slow-motion grieving mixed with mythology, awakening hope and redemption—a mix ideal for angst connoisseurs.
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