Posted on September 30th, 2009 at 11:18 pm by cathyte and
The Immortal Series: Book One- Evermore
One of my least favorite parts of summer vacation is reading and taking notes on a summer reading book. I have found that most of the time I can neither connect nor enjoy the books assigned to us because they are never my genre. My favorite genre is fantasy and more specifically I like romance and chick-lit overall. In freshman year, we read The Color of Water by James McBride and at the time I believed it was one of the worst books I’ve ever read. It was non-fiction and it wasn’t that interesting- it was kind of depressing and I felt myself feeling sad for James through the book. This summer, I realized that there were books worse than that when I had to read Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. It was also non-fiction and it was a lot more depressing than The Color of Water, although if I were to say one good thing about it, I would say that I felt like I connected more with Frank and I got a better appreciation for my family and the privileges that I have growing up in America after reading Angela’s Ashes. Luckily though, I had loads of free time this summer so I managed to read quite a few interesting chick-lit novels that helped me relax and enjoy summer that much more. One I especially enjoyed was Evermore by Alyson Noel which is the first novel in her Immortal Series.
First of all, I’d like to recommend this series to all Twilight fans because this novel has all the elements of Twilight, but more plot twists. It has romance and mystery as well as a little bit of history thrown in. The novel is from the perspective of Ever Bloom as a 16 year-old girl from Oregon who moved all the way to California to live with her aunt, Sabine. Later we find out that she moves because her parents and sister, Riley, were all killed in a car crash on the way to Ever’s summer camp. For some reason, Ever is the only one to make it out alive and from her near-death experience has picked up psychic abilities such as seeing auras, reading thoughts, learning people’s life stories by touching them, and seeing ghosts- most specifically Riley. She hates this life and wishes that she could have sacrificed her life so that her family could be the ones living. One day, however, she finds a mysterious and handsome guy named Damon Auguste has transferred into the school and for some reason is hanging out at her loser table. After noticing how exotic, gorgeous, and rich this 16 year-old guy is, she realizes that he has no aura and she can’t read his thoughts and she is puzzled by that. He comes off as a romantic charmer and plucks red tulips out of thin air and out of all the girls in the school, he gives them to Ever. Soon enough she begins to fall madly in love with Damon, until she meets his friend Drina and equally gorgeous, exotic, and rich 16 year-old girl whose aura and thoughts she can’t read either. She transfers into their school too, and becomes best friends with Ever’s friend, Haven. Haven gets really close with Drina and gets a mysterious infection that nearly kills her until Damon saves her by sucking out the poison. Ever sees this and jumps to the conclusion that Damon is a vampire and has been leading her on the whole time just to kill her and her friends.
Damon is forced to tell Ever the truth: he’s an immortal and has been following her lifetime after lifetime because they are destined to be together. She finds out that he has been living for centuries and fell in love with all of her past lives, but never got far enough in any of their relationship until she is mysteriously killed. Damon was convinced that it is his punishment to never find true love, but as the novel continues on- it becomes obvious that it isn’t the case and something much fishier was going on in the background. It turns out that Drina was his ex-wife from centuries ago and has been following him and killing off Ever’s past lives in hopes that Damon will give up and go back to her. When Drina finds out that they know the truth, she sets off right away to go kill Ever- which is an easy job for her, I mean she’s killed her past lives with no problem so why should Ever be any different? It turns out that she is because she shows that she wants to stay alive and Damon shows her how to escape to Summerland, another dimension where anything you think of becomes an instant reality, although temporary. Drina has no idea about Summerland so she thinks that Ever just disappeared and later she uses the same technique to finally attack and kill Drina by hitting her weakest Chakra: her heart. Damon is finally able to experience true love without it being cut short by an untimely death on Ever’s part, and they decide together to make Ever immortal too so that they can live together forever.
That’s where the first book in the series leaves off at, and I had the pleasure of reading the second book in the series, Blue Moon (interesting “coincidence” that it has a close name to the second book in the Twilight series- NEW Moon) which has yet more plot turns. Although I would say that the genre for these novels is mostly chick lit with lots of romance, I think that any guy with an appreciation for magic and fantasy might like the books. I don’t think it’s NECESSARY for anyone to read these books, but you might learn a little about history and more specifically art and alchemy if you read them. I enjoyed these books a lot during my vacation and I am definitely looking forward to the next books in the series.
