Review: Evermore

Evermore by Alyson Noel

Publisher: St. Martins Press
Publication Date: February 3rd 2009
Source: Gifted
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Goodreads

Since a horrible accident claimed the lives of her family, sixteen-year-old Ever can see auras, hear people’s thoughts, and know a person’s life story by touch.   Going out of her way to shield herself from human contact to suppress her abilities has branded her as a freak at her new high school—but everything changes when she meets Damen Auguste . . .

Ever sees Damen and feels an instant recognition.  He is gorgeous, exotic and wealthy, and he holds many secrets.  Damen is able to make things appear and disappear, he always seems to know what she’s thinking—and he’s the only one who can silence the noise and the random energy in her head.  She doesn’t know who he really is—or what he is.  Damen equal parts light and darkness, and he belongs to an enchanted new world where no one ever dies.

I started this book not really knowing what to expect. At the beginning of the book it started out as a very interesting paranormal about a girl who has been physic ever since she lived in a car accident that killed the rest of her family. I really enjoyed the beginning of the book but once I got toward the middle I became a little bit worried that it was shifting into a insta-love story, and by the end it was in many ways a mash up between the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer and the Fallen series by Lauren Kate.

Ever, the main character is a very quiet, anti-social teenager who has to deal with both the loss of her entire family and the fact that she has to keep her new physic powers to herself. Though at the beginning of the story Ever was very anti-social and often ignored everyone around her, in many ways I liked her better as a character towards the beginning of the story than I did towards the end. In the end she gets thrown into a lot of emotional and mental confusion and it really messes up her choices. Near the beginning of the story, Damen is introduced. Damen is a very attractive boy that happens to sit next to Ever in class and eventually becomes her boyfriend. After a while it becomes more and more obvious that Damen is not in fact human, and for a long time I became very worried that this was going to be another vampire book, that is not that case though it is very similar.

The story reminds me a lot of a Twilight series and Fallen series mash up. Both contain insta-love with different forms of portraying the paranormal aspects. It seems like this book takes place over a few weeks if not days and in that time Ever and Damen have seem to have fallen in love very very quickly. The paranormal aspects I did generally enjoy and I am glad that they were included in the story.

Overall this story was great in the beginning but slowly it became less enjoyable for me.