Wow, did this book have me hooked! I started reading it, sat down, and somehow wound up on page 232, with no sense of how long I had been sitting there reading. I just got sucked right in and didn’t want to stop (but got dragged away to a family dinner!).
The way this story is written is awesome! It’s done in such a way that you’re hooked from page one and have to keep reading to find out more. The book starts off throwing you into the midst of things. Nikki is in the Everneath but you have no idea what that is, how she got there, who she’s with, or how long she’s been there. Slowly, we find out the story through alternating chapters. Nikki tells us about what’s happening in her life now — post-feeding, and then she tells us how the story unfolded pre-feeding and why she decided to become a Forfeit. We switch back and forth between the two different times to slowly piece together the story and learn how she came into that situation, and then how she’s going to deal with it now.
So six months before the ‘current time’ in the story, Cole convinced Nikki to come with him to the Everneath, where he would feed on her energy and take away the pain in her life. 100 years later — which is 6 months in normal time — Nikki is back in her old life. She has six months to say goodbye to her family and friends before she is forced to return to the Everneath forever… but she didn’t realize how hard it would be to say goodbye. Nikki struggles to find a balance between comforting her family and friends, but trying not to get too close to them since she knows she’ll have to say goodbye again in six months… this time for good.
This book made me so emotional! It was probably because I had to read about Nikki trying to find a way to say goodbye to her ex boyfriend Jack, and I hadn’t seen my own boyfriend in 2 weeks. Just the nature of the story made me miss him even more! I kept thinking that if I had to be around him, but force myself to not get too close to him, and find a way to say goodbye to him, I would constantly be in tears. I don’t know how Nikki held herself together! My eyes were literally tearing up for half the time I was reading.
The one thing that annoyed me was how Nikki put up with Cole. He was a real ass. He practically stalked her, showed up in her bedroom every night to bother her, practically threatened her little brother, etc. I really wanted Nikki to rage at him or throw sharp objects at him. She obviously wasn’t pleased, but she didn’t have the kind of forceful reaction I would have expected. She usually just calmly told Cole to stop and left it at that. If it were me, I would have really raged at the guy!
Also, I’m a stickler for details and this kind of made me roll my eyes a bit:
Jack came over that night, so we could research the Daughters of Persephone. We didn’t know where to start other than Google and the search produced just two results.
Of course then I proceeded to do a Google search for “Daughters of Persephone” and got:
About 12,300 results (0.23 seconds)
I’m weird and things like that just bug me. And just to be clear, Nikki wasn’t saying that there were only two *relevant* search results, because one of the two was completely irrelevant. So she did mean two overall.
I guess the story did move pretty slowly. It kind of drags on and takes you a while to figure out exactly what happened to Nikki to make her want to become a Forfeit, and then it takes a while for her to actually make progress with Jack in ‘current time.’ But the book is so intense and full of emotion that the slow paced nature of the book is not not too big of a deal. There were a few parts were I was like, “Okaaay, I’m ready for her to make progress!” But most of the time I was really into the story and hungry for more!