Everneath - Brodi Ashton

A Spoiler Free Bit About The Book

"Six months ago, Nikki Beckett vanished into an underworld known as the Everneath."

Now she's got only six months before she's pulled under again. For good.

My Review

I started off with high expectations of Everneath because in the first chapter it surprised me. The more teen fiction I read, the less I get surprised so I was giving it a huge thumbs up. There was a bit of action and a lot of mystery but it soon fizzled into nothing and I got incurably bored with this story.

I thought the counting down aspect could never fail. After all, it worked so tremendously in the GONE series by Michael Grant and in Looking for Alaska by John Green. But in Everneath it had no effect because I knew exactly what we were counting down to. It wasn't just that I worked it out early; we actually get told in the blurb which I summed up above.

The biggest issue I had with Everneath was that I'd heard it all before. It's a re-telling of the Persephone myth (which I'd never heard of until 2015 and now every book I pick up seems to mention it). A few books back I read Abandon by Meg Cabot which is essentially the same thing done in a slightly different way. So yes, I had in fact heard it all before. This took all suspense and fun out of reading it and I'm surprised I actually managed it to the end of the story.

But saying this, I still felt like it could've been written in a way to draw me in, even though I've practically read this book before turning a single page. I needed a kick-arse main character and Nikki just wan't that in any way shape or form. Not one single arse got kicked. Because at the beginning of the book Nikki is left without the ability to feel, everything felt dull. I need my protagonists lively. I need a reason to follow them through the rest of the book after all. But I was given no real reason to read or even care about Nikki.

I don't know whether it was Nikki, a lack of action, or that I knew where it was going but it felt like it took a long time to get anywhere. In fact, I'm not sure it did go anywhere. 150 pages in I started skimming. I have felt the need to do this only once before and that was reading the terrible Vampire Diaries book one. But even skimming was painful, I wasn't connected to the book at all. Like I said, I don't know how I finished it.

Evaluation

Overall 4/10

Would I recommend it? No. It was so predictable I could hardly finish it.

Would I look up the author? No. I didn't really get on with Ashton's writing style at all.

Everneath was dull, predictable and bland.

Molly Looby

Author / Ghostwriter / Editor / Blogger / Reviewer / Wrimo / Movellian / ZA Ready

molly.looby@hotmail.com