Book Review: Everneath by Brodi Ashton

Titile: Everneath
Author: Brodi Ashton
Published: January 24th 2012 by Balzer + Bray
read in: January, 2017
Series: Everneath #1

young adult • paranormal • romance

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“In the absence of proof, all that matters is perception.”

Last spring, Nikki Beckett vanished, sucked into an underworld known as the Everneath. Now she’s returned—to her old life, her family, her boyfriend—before she’s banished back to the underworld . . . this time forever. She has six months before the Everneath comes to claim her, six months for good-byes she can’t find the words for, six months to find redemption, if it exists.

Nikki longs to spend these precious months forgetting the Everneath and trying to reconnect with her boyfriend, Jack, the person most devastated by her disappearance—and the one person she loves more than anything. But there’s just one problem: Cole, the smoldering immortal who enticed her to the Everneath in the first place, has followed Nikki home. Cole wants to take over the throne in the underworld and is convinced Nikki is the key to making it happen. And he’ll do whatever it takes to bring her back, this time as his queen.

As Nikki’s time on the Surface draws to a close and her relationships begin slipping from her grasp, she is forced to make the hardest decision of her life: find a way to cheat fate and remain on the Surface with Jack or return to the Everneath and become Cole’s queen.

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2017 started as a great reading year. Most of the book I read so far, got me some serious sleepless night, all because I was finishing them one by one in one sitting. I’ve been so productive—at reading and not at things I was suppose to do—this past few days of January, despite the biggest reading slump I had in the end of 2016. One of the book that kept me reading was Everneath. I started this book because I was so in love with My Lady Jane—which Brodi Ashton co-wrote—and I then track down all the books the authors previously wrote. Well, after Fever series, I was so excited for another Paranormal genre.

I started this book with so many doubt that it could make me more in love with Paranormal. It was surprising that this book was so captivating that I end up finishing it in one sitting. It started slow at the beginning and the author seems trying to make the reader fall in love with the characters, which surprise me, since I rarely fall in love with Nikki’s type of character in some stories. Her character wasn’t as strong as most YA’s heroines out there, but it seemed believable to me. I know at certain times, she became a spoilt girl who want to take away every pain—which if there wasn’t any paranormal stuff going on, she was referring to suicide—but like I said, believable.

This first installment is heavily focused on relationship and introducing each character individually, which I would also call it as the exposition of the series. It was told in Nikki’s point of view after she first entered the Underworld and then from there shifting backwards to the before she was there. I loved that this story didn’t only focused on romance but it also told the story about the main character’s relationship with her family and friends. That was really captivating and helped me to like the characters more and more.

I have to say that there are a potential triangle love in the book, but I have to choose Jack at the moment, since he was Nikki’s boyfriend to start with so that was an obvious choice for me. I could see how some people would like Cole with his charismatic confidence.

The world building was a bit slow in this book. It wasn’t until in the end of the book that things were unveiled. I liked it that way though, since I was focusing on the mystery myself that I wasn’t complaining about the lack of world building in the first half of the book.

All in all, I need to say that this isn’t a book for everyone. Some will probably want more action and less stories, but I really enjoyed the depth of the story that Ashton pour inside her writing. So this is a good start for a series indeed!

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