Friday, July 10, 2009

Blue Moon

Blue Moon, Alyson Noel

It's three weeks after we last left Ever and Damen in Evermore, and Ever has decided that she will become an Immortal and spend eternity with Damen.  He's teaching her how to use her powers and blend in, when at school there's a new student, and suddenly Damen  isn't the same, and the whole school turns on her.

Ever goes to Summerland seeking answers to set things back right and is shown a way to save her parents and sister from the horrible crash the year or so before.  She'd lose Damen, but her family would be alive.

I liked this one.  It was an interesting story that kept me wondering what the heck she was going to do.  Parts of it dragged (descriptions of Summerland.  I get it. It's perfect.) and I couldn't understand why she would trust Roman and Ava.  I never trusted either one of them.  Especially after Ava's behavior in Summerland.  So some character inconsistencies maybe?  Or plot twists?  You decide.

And since the comparison is completely unavoidable, let me tell you something I discovered about this and the entire series while reading; I would let my daughters read this book before I let them read New Moon by Stephenie Meyer.

Why?  Because in New Moon, Bella goes apocolyptic over a boy.  Granted, it's a fairy tale and she's like the princess locked in the tower because her one true love abandoned her, but it's a bit too dramatic for any teenage daughter of mine.  Mine specifically.  Because she will definitely have moody, dramatic tendencies, and come by it naturally, because she's mine.

The other three Twilight novels, I'm okay with.  They have their own issues, don't get me wrong, but New Moon in particular worries me.

Anyway I digress.  But in Alyson Noel's novels, not only is sex only alluded to and the word never said (I think virginity was used once), but Ever has a life that involves more than Damen.  And yeah she loves him and he's her true love, but she has Haven and Miles, and Sabine, and her family, school, etc, and what it means to lose all of that for Damen and vice versa.

The question itself is dramatic, I know, but at least it's more normal than the year of sadness in New Moon.  That is a book that would require some serious conversations between me and any child of mine that read it.  Because the concept of doing scary things to move on from a love is really not that uncommon, and really dangerous for a teenage kid to read and have to contemplate without, ya know, adult supervision.

Back to Blue Moon.  It's YA, and distinctly different from it's unavoidable comparison cousin Twilight, and a series in a way that Twilight is more of a ... saga.  Hahaha, see what I did there?  I make myself laugh.

I liked it enough to think that waiting till January to find out how Ever deals with the revelations in this one is just mean.  Noel commented recently that Shadowlands went into editing just this month so I guess it takes 6 months to edit something into publication.  I'll be buying the next one.  It's worth reading if you liked Twilight and are into the whole teenage angst, love triangle, supernatural stuff.  And I am, at least perhiperhally.

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