E-books & Kids

Like Twilight? You’ll love Evermore by Alyson Noel

Like the Twilight series? Then you’ll love the Immortals series by Alyson Noel. It’s like Twlight, only this series takes place in sunny, beachy Laguna Beach, CA not rainy, dark Forks, WA.

The characters are very similar. The new girl is not Belle, but Evermore. Damen is the Edward character. How similar is he, you ask? They meet in class, they have to share a book… Here, read a bit of his first description:

Damen is undeniably beautiful, with his shiny dark hair that hits just shy of his shoulders and curves around his high sculpted cheekbones, but when he looks a me. When he lifts his dark sunglasses and meets my gaze, I see that his almond shaped eyes are deep, dark, and strangely familiar, framed by lashes so lush they almost seem fake.

Oh, even though the plot is the same, in the charactarization there is a little twist: Evermore, unlike Belle, is psychic. You see she’s been in a car accident. The crash has consumed her whole family. But she lived (after walking over the bridge of death for just a few seconds…). So now she can see auras, read minds, and see ghosts. The thing is, she hates her new powers. She wants to be normal. When she was normal, she was a cheerleader. She was pretty and popular. Now she covers he blonde hair in a hoodie and hangs out at the loser lunch table with a Goth and a gay guy.

And Damen, he’s not a vampire. He’s an immortal. The only difference between an immortal and a vampire is that immortals don’t have to bite people to nourish themselves. They sip a red liquid that is not fully explained in the text.

You may think I’m being picky or snarky or overly critical by pointing out these similarities. But really, I’m not. The thing is, this sort of fantasy romance stuff is popular. So it’s not original. Who cares? It’s fun. Evermore is itself already a bestseller. A number one best seller. I'm not trying to be mean by saying it's derivitive. That's just a fact. It's a well-written, copycat story. The character’s voice is fun and a breeze to read.

I wasn’t upset by the blatant Twilight ripoff. I like Twilight. What I was not too keen on was the female jealousy theme. The bad people in this book are jealous teenage girls—girls who  fight with Ever over Damen. Ever even has a physical catfight or two. That really made me cringe. Come on, couldn’t the “bad gal” element come from someplace a little more creative than that?

Oh, also, her friends, the Goth and the Gay, were one dimensional stereotypes. I wish they were a little more whole.

And, while I'm griping, even though the whole lynchpin to Ever's personality issue was that her whole family died and she was the only one who lived, I didn't feel that she really missed her family. Sure her sister's ghost would visit her, and that showed Ever cared about her sister, but zero lines in the whole book were dedicated to her missing her mom or her dad. Zero.  The only thing we know about either of the two parent was that the dad was nice enough to feel he needed to spare the life of a startled deer,  thereby killing his whole family by swerving off the road. Such a nice guy. A real sweetie.

I did somehow find myself enjoying the few chapters in which Ever gets herself drunk every day for three weeks. I am not sure why. I liked her as a sloppy drunk, even though I in no way condone underage drinking. Underage drinking is bad and should not be undertaken in real life. But in fiction, this make Ever seem r vulnerable.  The rest of her charactarization is polished to a sheen. She's beautiful, she's rich, she has a car, she is loved unconditionally (and unexplicably) by Damen the most eligable, sexy, perfect guy... The only thing she doesn't like is the fact that she can read minds? Really? What girl on earth wouldn't love that, too.

Vampire Fantasy junkies will love Evermore. Others will not. There aren't any in-bewteens. You know who you are. You’ve been warned: Either devour it and love it, or run far, far away.