Review: Eternal Ones

Eternal Ones by Kirsten Miller

published by Razorbill

Genre: YA (paranormal?)

$17.99 (hardback)

416 pages

FTC: I bought this book and will not be compensated for this review.

What it's about:

What if love refused to die?

Haven Moore can’t control her visions of a past with a boy called Ethan, and a life in New York that ended in fiery tragedy. In our present, she designs beautiful dresses for her classmates with her best friend Beau. Dressmaking keeps her sane, since she lives with her widowed and heartbroken mother in her tyrannical grandmother’s house in Snope City, a tiny town in Tennessee. Then an impossible group of coincidences conspire to force her to flee to New York, to discover who she is, and who she was.

In New York, Haven meets Iain Morrow and is swept into an epic love affair that feels both deeply fated and terribly dangerous. Iain is suspected of murdering a rock star and Haven wonders, could he have murdered her in a past life? She visits the Ouroboros Society and discovers a murky world of reincarnation that stretches across millennia. Haven must discover the secrets hidden in her past lives, and loves¸ before all is lost and the cycle begins again.

My thoughts:

I thought the idea of this book was really cool. I figured it was going to be a big, sweep you off your feet romance. Turns out it really wasn't and that I really disliked this book. I had to force myself to finish it.

The real romance didn't even start until about 150 pages into the book. In those first 150 pages, you learn about Haven's small town life and how everyone in her town thinks she's possessed by the devil. A big reason why I hated this section was because I really try and stay away from books with religions in them. Especially fanatic religions. So this whole section really bothered me. I felt like it dragged on forever and wasn't really necessary for the overall plot of the story.

The love story between Haven and Iain wasn't all that great. I loved the idea of how they had been in love for over 2,000 years and some how always managed to die before they could really have a life together. I've read other books like that (such as Reincarnation which is in my review section) and loved how that was pulled off. In this book however, it never really felt real. It felt like Miller was telling me they are in love, but I never believed it. Haven was such an idiot when it came to Iain that I never really understood if she was actually in love with him.

By the end of the book, some weird supernatural thing pops up and is never really explained. Then the ending is kinda bitter sweet and is open for another book. Bleh.

So in other words, I was really hoping for a fantastic, sweep you off your feet, love never dies romance, and instead I got a disappointing love story with some weird paranormal things and small town life. It really wasn't what I wanted.

My rating: 5/10