Evermore (Darkyn #5) in Vampires, Weres and Fae!

Nov 08, 2009 Melindeeloo rated it liked it

Shelves: urban-fantasy, vampires

3 Stars? 3.5 Stars? Viehl's books are interesting, but inspire such mixed emotions for me
I am so mixed in my feelings about Evermore, and truly, I always hestitate before buying the Darkyn books, because while there are always interesting parts to the books, Viehl in keeping her books on the dark side of paranormal romance, always seems to include a bit of twisted characters indulging in gratuous torture or victimizing sex-- I guess because when the 'good' guys are preditors that control humans 3 Stars? 3.5 Stars? Viehl's books are interesting, but inspire such mixed emotions for me
I am so mixed in my feelings about Evermore, and truly, I always hestitate before buying the Darkyn books, because while there are always interesting parts to the books, Viehl in keeping her books on the dark side of paranormal romance, always seems to include a bit of twisted characters indulging in gratuous torture or victimizing sex-- I guess because when the 'good' guys are preditors that control humans with no remorse, you've got to toss in something extreme to make the evil guys stand out.

While the torture was offsceen on this one, there was still enough of the evil guys (some human) this time indulging in thoughts of perpetrating sexual abuse or bad Darkyn compelling sex on someone in thrall, which I find disturbing. And in this book, this stuff really feels pasted in. I can tolerate a bit if it is necessary to develop some significant part of the story, but here these scenes could have been easily left out they didn't add to the plot at all. The bad guys in the first scene at the start of the book go away never to appear again and we would have disliked Nottingham even without his 'charming' introduction. While I really disliked those pieces of the book, much of the rest of the book was interesting. I liked Jahr and Byrne, both their well developed characters and their relationship, even though the language in their love scenes was a bit odd -- guess it was supposed to reflect Byrne's still medieval thinking. Also in Evermore, as always, I liked the parts with Alex, I like her character's fortrightness, insight and unwillingness to let all these moldy old guys force her into a mold not fitting a modern women and I like how her participation ties the books together. And I also liked Robin of Locksley and all the secrets.

Overall my reactions to the book were a patchwork of positive and negative much like the book was a mix of a bunch of different story threads, leaving me not knowing how many stars to give Evermore -- since for me, parts were one or two stars and other parts four or five. So I guess that averages out to 3.5 or 4 stars depending on how I weight the various sections. But, having said all that, if you are a fan of the series you will probably like Evermore because it really does have the flavor of the rest of the books in the series, and I need to learn not to buy these Darkyn books because my reaction is really always pretty much the same and the 'eeww' residual lingers. ...more

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