Releasing tomorrow!
3.75 / 5 Stars
This book leaves me feeling very conflicted.
The premise is about the cursed Everly’s and how once a generation, an Everly goes missing.
The set up to the story is great. The prologue draws you in and sets the scene of uncovering what has plagued the Everly’s for generations.
This book reads like a movie. That’s the best way that I can think to describe it. It’s third person narration, but it’s not from any set point of few. It skips around from all the characters’ perspectives, so you know way more than the lead characters for most of the book. The majority of it is set from Violet Everly’s perspective, as she’s the one who is determined to find her mother and break their curse.
I often found myself not immersed in the book, because we would get the story moved along by another perspective while Violet was on her adventure, and we missed so much of her character’s development because of it. The same goes for Aleksander, though some of his development is explained a bit more later on in the book. Penelope, our villain, appears as evil incarnate, though some of that changes over time and when you see her compared to others like her.
This story is wrought with extremely flawed characters, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there wasn’t much chance for redemption for those flaws, as the story just moved along. The ending I was rather expecting, yet not everything was set in stone, so you get to draw your own conclusions to a few things. I both like and dislike that equally.
There were some very unique things about this world, which I thoroughly enjoyed, I just wish that we learned more. Also, I found myself forgetting that I wasn’t reading a young adult book, because it felt like one the entire time.
I give this book more of a 3.75 but will round up to 4 on review sites, as I know there will be so many who truly love this book. It’s not entirely my cup of tea, but it’s not bad by any means.
Thank you NetGalley & OrbitBooks for providing me with an advanced reader copy!
Book blurb from Goodreads:
A young woman descends into a seductive magical underworld of power-hungry scholars, fickle gods and monsters bent on revenge to break her family’s curse in this spellbinding contemporary fantasy debut.
For centuries, generations of Everlys have seen their brightest and best disappear, taken as punishment for a crime no one remembers, for a purpose no one understands. Their tormentor, a woman named Penelope, never ages, never grows sick – and never forgives a debt.
Violet Everly was just a child when her mother Marianne vanished on a stormy night, determined to break the curse. And when Penelope cannot find her, she issues an Violet has ten years to find Marianne, or she will take her place. Violet is the last of the Everly line, the last to suffer from the curse. Unless she can break it first.
To do so, she must descend into a seductive magical underworld of power-hungry scholars, fickle gods and monsters bent on revenge. She must also contend with Penelope’s quiet assistant, Aleksander, who she knows cannot be trusted – and yet whose knowledge of a world beyond her own is too valuable to avoid.
Tied to a very literal deadline, Violet will travel the edges of the world to find Marianne and the key to the city of stardust, where the Everly story began.
