Carrie Jones (1)

Zara Whites has moved just to Maine after witnessing the death of her stepfather. She believes she has a stalker who has also shown up in Maine. There’s something strange about him: he leaves gold dust everywhere he goes. By working with her new friends, she discovers what he wants and how to stop him.

The cover of this book features gold-dusted lips set on a pale face, and dead forest branches creeping up the figure’s neck. I didn’t like the story very much. It’s Twilight redone. As I read, I found the writing to be corny and the plot line to be grating. The plot was so predictable that I could predict the entire story within 30 pages.

I found Zara and the other characters to be superficial, and their conversations to be almost painful to read. Neither of them seem to remember (or know) who they are. I felt it was hard to connect to the characters and their story. This, along with the lack of real depth and meaningful dialogue, left me feeling disappointed.

Primitive urges propel author pixies to target humans, making it hard to empathize with them and painting them as flat antagonists. As a result, it’s difficult to sympathize with them, and they appear one-dimensional villains. It makes Zara’s struggle against them less interesting and meaningful. Though the story contains werewolves, were-eagles, and were-tigers, their significance is not great.

This novel lacks depth in every part - it glosses everything over (except for the meaningless conversations between Zara and her friends). The story lacks a real plot and characters feel hollow and flat. Even the setting is generic and uninteresting.

Overall, this novel is a disappointing read.

… (més)

Finally! We finally got some action, plot points, things happening! Honestly, I didn't have high hopes for this one since I wasn't a fan of Captivate and Entice, but Carrie Jones pulled it out in the end. We could have condensed Books 2 and 3 to about 75-100 pages and just made this book bigger and it would have been perfect. There was way too much build-up in the two previous books. And FINALLY Zara isn't saying "omg NickNickNick" anymore. Things don't center around her pining for him and all that other jazz. I actually finished this in three days, which is really fast for me, but it's also a long weekend and I didn't have much else going on, so I just sat and read. Finally we get a little bit of character development too, with Zara actually gaining a little bit more maturity and depth to her.

All in all, this final book in the quartet is actually pretty good. Read Need, find a good review/synopsis for Captivate and Entice, and read this one.… (més)

This is the second book in a four book series and it has been about 2 years since I read the first one so I didn't remember much of it. There wasn't much recap of past events to refresh my memory other than there was a fight with pixies and they trapped them in a house.

I made it through this one relatively quickly but I didn't really enjoy it. I realize that this is a YA series so I'm not in the normal demographic (I'm 40) but I read quite a bit of YA books and I have to say that the writing leaves something to be desired. It seemed like it was written by a teenager for teenagers, only short, simple sentences with the same descriptions over and over.

There was really no point or plot in this book. Nothing really happened. We meet Astley, a new pixie king, and some stuff goes on that I won't say because I don't want to leave any spoilers, but it just seems like the story went nowhere and nothing was solved.

There was no character development from the previous book. They're all still just teenagers, Zara is only focused on Nick, Issie is only focused on Devyn, there's no growth or anything.

All in all, I would say to skip this entire series. If you've already read the first one and really loved it, then I guess go ahead and finish the series. But if you read it and thought it was ok, skip the other three, you aren't missing anything.… (més)

This was better than Book 2, but not by a whole lot. Truthfully, they could have combined Books 2 and 3 and made the series a trilogy instead of a quartet. This one had a lot more action than the last one, which definitely helped me get through it. I'm still not a fan of the writing itself or of the story in general. Why is it taking three books to do one freaking thing? And this one thing wasn't in the first book, so it's not like the Lord of the Rings where all of these other things are happening on their way to this one thing...no, this one thing isn't this life-altering epic saga. It's just getting her boyfriend back. You know what? People die, so she needs to just grieve and move on with her life. As you can tell, my opinion of this is not very high. The only reason I'm finishing the entire series is because I own them, so I want to read them at least once since I paid money for them. If I was borrowing them from the library? I would have stopped after Book 1. There still isn't any character growth or development, I'm just all around disappointed with this entire series. Read at your own risk.

All in all, like I said in my review of Book 2, if you read the first book and really loved it, then read the entire series. If you were so-so on Book 2, stop reading now, it doesn't appear to get any better.… (més)