Book Review: Everlasting

Yet another book from my near-eternal to-read list but this one actually had an interesting sounding premise when I looked it up on my library's website! Well, it actually had a premise which is a bit of a rarity in and of itself, but DC you are very strange in so many ways, but what it sound did seem interesting and after a couple of duds I was ready to read something I really liked.

Everlasting by Angie Frazier

Camille is excited by her latest, and most likely last, sea voyage with her father out of 1855 San Francisco and, while she's happy that it'll be longer than expected so she has more time to work out her feeling about her fiancee, she's upset that he kept this extended journey a secret from her. In fact he kept it a secret from everyone, and also a letter from Camille's supposedly dead mother that might explain this whole journey...

Sadly this book didn't end up being as good as I had hoped when I checked it out, I could be generous and say it was still okay but really I won't remember this book in a few months which means it has broken the cardinal sin of good story-telling and was boring. It had a good start and set up a series of conflicts for Camille to deal with, her feelings for her fiancee, her relationship with her father, and then whatever excitement the actual sea voyage was going to bring. But once the characters got out to sea and Camille possibly-does-but-maybe-not summons a curse then the story just sank. The story wasn't sure if it wanted to be an adventure with romance, a romance with some adventuring or what exactly but it just ends up being a mess. There is romance and then characters who are set up the way a romantic interest would be and then aren't, while I would usually appreciate platonic different-sex relationships in a story the execution just felt odd enough that I couldn't take them seriously as friendships (even the one Camille had with a family member which really threw me off). And in the end there was never any serious "drama" or even fights between Camille and her significant other, it was such a forgone conclusion from the very beginning that I wondered why the story focused on in the way they did. This wasn't a story about falling in love and then figuring out how to deal with love, it was a story about discovering a love and considering how obvious it was that didn't work either!

Continuing with ideas that did not work well, the blurb for the story makes it sound like Camille's quest for the legendary stone was going to occupy the bulk of the book and yet they only acquire the map well after the halfway point and from there the quest is extremely short and simple, so simple in fact I can't believe that no one else has already found the stone. The story is set in Australia in the 1800s so there haven't been European settlers present for very long but it still baffled me (also, no Aboriginal characters at all?), the story's villain also certainly found it easily enough! And finally, when Camille finds the stone there is no price to be paid for it, the story hints that there might be a price farther down the line but that wasn't for using the stone but for not using it correctly. Originally I was going to call it a poor, tiny sequel hook but Amazon informs me that there is in fact a sequel and I can't see myself reading this sequel at all. The story was resolved completely-enough here for me to not feel like I'm missing anything and again, this book just ended up being a mess and a dull one to me at the end, guess I'm still not out of my string of bad books yet!