Librarything / Goodreads
Genre: Paranormal Young Adult
Rating: 2 stars
Pages: 410
Summary: Haven Moore can’t control her visions of a past with a boy called Ethan, and a life in New York that ended in fiery tragedy. In our present, she designs beautiful dresses for her classmates with her best friend Beau. Dressmaking keeps her sane, since she lives with her widowed and heartbroken mother in her tyrannical grandmother’s house in Snope City, a tiny town in Tennessee. Then an impossible group of coincidences conspire to force her to flee to New York, to discover who she is, and who she was.
In New York, Haven meets Iain Morrow and is swept into an epic love affair that feels both deeply fated and terribly dangerous. Iain is suspected of murdering a rock star and Haven wonders, could he have murdered her in a past life? She visits the Ouroboros Society and discovers a murky world of reincarnation that stretches across millennia. Haven must discover the secrets hidden in her past lives, and loves, before all is lost and the cycle begins again.
Thoughts: The Eternal Ones started off extremely well. It took an inherently cheesy stereotype (lovers through time), and made it not just entertaining but believable. The author gets rid of all the far-too-convenient logistics of having visions from a past life: they don't start as a teen, but as a child; Haven doesn't hide them from her family, because they result in violent outbursts; Haven doesn't immediately think they're real, because the entire town believes she's possessed by the devil (that is, except the Penecostals up the road). It's a brilliant idea: a young girl hated by Born Again Christians who was - literally - born again.
So, yeah. Everything started off well. Sure, the main character had a tendency to change her mind every few minutes, but hey, she had a traumatic childhood.
But then she ups and moves to New York to stalk a rich playboy, and the entire novel falls into a deep, dark well of I-can't-believe-someone-wrote-this-crap terrible.
And to think, it started off so well.
The rest of the book revolves around Haven going back and forth between being completely and utterly in love with Ethan/Iain (the aforementioned playboy), and being convinced that he is a lying, murdering, cheating ass. Now, if you were to ask - say - any normal person, they would tell you that these two beliefs cannot exist simultaneously. If you believe the man you met two days before is out to kill you, then you do not decide to sleep with him "one last time". You wouldn't be convinced by a couple of well-delivered excuses and you sure as hell wouldn't stay in his house. Or, if you are certain that the world is just trying to frame the man you love for crimes he never committed, then you don't go around taking the word of a stranger over his!
Over a 20-page period, Haven went from convinced Ethan/Iain was trying to kill her, then back to believing that he was her eternal soulmate who would never lie to her, until finally deciding that, actually, she might have fallen in love with the wrong guy. Seriously? Seriously?
While Haven's flip-flopping emotions were my biggest issue with this book, there were a whole bunch of other problems in it. The underlying "mystery" was an flat as a pancake (not to mention, completely illogical), the secondary characters were 10 kinds of stereotypical, and the villain was utterly deranged (but not in that cool, Disney!villain sort of way).
Bottom line? Don't read this - the illogic will hurt your brain.
I couldn't have said it any better. The fip-flopping made me C-R-A-Z-Y! I'm a fickle person and I understand the follies of youth, but holy-whiplash-Batman, no one changes their mind that fast in those extremes. She wasn't deciding what was for lunch, she was deciding if her soulmate was a crazed murder. And some of the setup was just too far fetched for me - the whole, show-up on the red carpet, swept off my feet thing I just couldn't get on bored with. Like you, I loved the beginning. I liked that people thought she was crazy or possessed, that she told her family. As soon as she ran off to New York though, the whole thing went off the reservation.
ReplyDeleteI 100% share your feelings on this one!
Megan @ Read It, See It
Wow glad I managed to stay away from this one. By the sound of it this one was awful and not worth the time or money. I love reading your reviews and you have never steered me wrong. Great review!
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