Review: Nevermore

Isobel is the cheerleader, the blonde queen bee, a happy and normal teenager.  Of course, she's horrified when she's paired with Varen Nethers for a school project.  Varen is gothic, weird, scary, and cold.  But slowly, Isobel begins to wonder if there's something more to Varen.  There's strange writing in his journal, and he's showing up in her dreams where he has no business being.  As she grows closer to Varen she is slowly sucked into his dreamworld, where Poe's poetry is reality.  Isobel must rescue Varen from his own nightmares... if she ever wants to wake up again.

Entertainment: ★★★

Confession: I started this book rather biased against it, expecting it to be cliche and boring.  The first third or so proved my prejudices valid.  It got a bit better and a bit more interesting as the story went on, and by maybe two-thirds of the way through I was actually curious to see what would happen.  I ended the book with conflicted feelings, as you can see from the rest of the review.

Plot: ★★★★★

It started off slow but it got really good.  True, it's a little freaky in the dreamworld, but it's freaky in a cool way. 

Characters: ★

Honestly I disliked all of the characters.  I'm just going to say that point-blank, because really there's no nice way to go about it.  Isobel was so vapid and stupid and cliche, Varen was so cheesy and cliche, and all the side characters were just bland, stupid, confusing, and cliche.  I really tried to think of something nice to say here, and I couldn't.

Writing: ★★

It had potential, but it was veeeeery elaborate and overwrought.  Flowery, and not in a good way.  For example, when Isobel has the realization that Varen is special, the scene is described: She’d peered through the curtain of that cool calmness, through the death stare and the vampire sentiments and the angst and, behind it all, had found true beauty.  I just couldn't take a sentence like that seriously, and Nevermore is full of them.

End Result: three stars.  A decent book, but not amazingly excellent.