Review - Blue Moon

Blue Moon (The Immortals #2)
by Alyson Noël
Date: 2009
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Reading level: YA
Book type: prose novel
Pages: 284
Format: paperback
Source: Indigo

Just as Ever is learning everything she can about her new abilities as an immortal, initiated into the dark, seductive world by her beloved Damen, something terrible is happening to him. As Ever's powers are increasing, Damen's begin to fade after he is stricken by a mysterious illness that threatens his memory, his identity, his life.

Desperate to save him, Ever travels to the mystical dimension of Summerland, where she uncovers not only the secrets of Damen's past - the brutal, tortured history he hoped to keep hidden - but also an ancient text revealing the workings of time. With the approaching blue moon heralding her only window for travel, Ever is forced to decide between turning back the clock and saving her family from the accident that claimed them - or staying in the present and saving Damen, who grows weaker each day....

(synopsis from Goodreads)

I thought this book would never end. I really didn't enjoy it, for a number of reasons.
First of all, the similarities between this series and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series are just too conspicuous. Let's set aside for the moment that the titles of both of the second books are almost identical. But when Damen disappeared early on in the novel, I thought we were in for a repeat of New Moon. The plot did end up going in a different direction, though... until I realized that Blue Moon actually has some major plot similarities with Eclipse. And then I just wanted to throw the book out the window.

My second major issue was with the writing. I don't recall having as much of a problem with the writing in the first book (though I was not impressed with it, by any means). Here, though, the author seems to have forgotten the basic rules of grammar and composition. The sentence fragments had me wanting to scream. The author needed to join her clauses with a comma... not add a period and start a new sentence with an -ing verb. Maybe she was trying to establish a voice for the character, but for me, it didn't work. Every time I ran into this horrendous bit of writing, I'd get tripped up. And since Ever uses these fragments throughout the whole darn book, I was getting tripped up a lot. Maybe that's why it took so long for me to finish it. There was no flow. How can there be, when you're trying to figure out what the character's trying to say in every second sentence?

Another issue with the writing was more amusing than anything else. Alyson, the word you're looking for is "gaze"... not "eyes". When I see eyes grazing, raking, resting, and roaming, my mind conjures up strange images of freed eyeballs doing all kinds of things they really shouldn't be doing. How exactly do eyes rake something, anyway? That sounds painful.

My third issue was with the characters. I still can't figure out why Ever and Damen are in love. The minor characters are still stereotyped and flat. Ava is a walking contradiction (she was introduced as a sort of mentor, and then turns into a vapid, materialistic child in Summerland... and then she's forgotten about at the end of the book!). And Roman was just too melodramatic to be taken seriously. He really needed a moustache to twirl while he expounded on his plans during the climax.

I hated Evermore, but I'd read so many gushing reviews of Blue Moon that I thought I'd give it a shot. I hoped it would be better. Sadly, it was worse. I think I'll be skipping the next three books in this series; I'm not that much of a masochist.

Plot: 2/5
Characters: 2/5
Pace: 1/5
Writing: 0/5
Originality: 2/5

Overall: 1.4 out of 5