Sweet Reckoning (Sweet Evil, #3)

by Wendy Higgins

[Ashley]

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2.5 Stars

Sweet Reckoning kind of ended how I feared it would: not that intense. From book one, I expected an epic WAR between heaven and hell. Imagine a war like the one in His Dark Materials. Huge, intense, all-encompassing. Sweet Reckoning didn't have a war. If anything, it had one small battle at the end. But it wasn't even a battle.. it was an argument.. inside a club VIP room. The lack of a larger, overall war made the whole conflict feel a bit trivial.

I wanted the whole book to be one epic war, but really it was just a lot of waiting, hiding, and romancing.

I hope this won't be too sensitive of a subject to bring up, but I kind of took issue with the "no sex before marriage" part of the book. Basically the idea is that Anna has to be "pure" in order to fulfill the prophecy. If she has sex with Kaidan, a man she loves, before marriage, she will become "impure" and not be able to fulfill the prophecy. But if she has a halfass, non-legal wedding with him first and then has sex with him, it's totally fine. I just think that whole idea is ridiculous. Failing to say a few words before having sex doesn't make you any less pure.

Throughout most of Sweet Reckoning, I sat there trying to figure out if I was enjoying it a bit, or if I thought it was silly. There was a lot of fussing over romance and pregnancies that had me rolling my eyes at times. But I must admit that some parts of the book were enjoyable. Sometimes Kaidan annoyed me, how he was CONSTANTLY thinking about sex. It was hot at first, but honestly it got so old. But other times, I really adored him and Anna together. Like when they got married! Parts of the actual wedding annoyed me, but the wedding night was SO sweet!

Ultimately I guess I was stuck somewhere between disappointment and mild amusement. I swung back and forth too many times for me to figure out a good "average", which is why it's so hard for me to actually rate this book. I don't think it was bad, it just never got as huge, epic, or monumental as I thought it would be. Plus I hoped there would be more involvement from heaven/angels, but they were absent the entire time. I feel like that entire part of the plot just never developed. It was all about the demons, but I expected the angels to actually get involved at some point, or at least show their faces, and that never happened other than Anna meeting her mom for about 2 seconds.

I just hoped for something a lot more "epic" and it never got there. The romance between Kaidan and Anna remained mostly sweet and fun to read, but I wanted a lot more from the plot/conflict than we ever got.