Review #25: Eternal Eden, by Nicole Williams

I think I found Eternal Eden on the 99 cent list. I know better. The 99 cent list should be banned. First of all, nothing good is 99 cents, except for the iced tea I get every morning at my secret Dunkin' Donuts. Second of all, the only time you should pay 99 cents for a book is either a) at a yard sale, in which case it should be two for a dollar, or b) at the Friends of the Library bookstore, in which case you should pony up the extra penny becuase it's for a good cause.

Anyway, I downloaded it, because I never learn. And I've been on this weird YA kick lately, and this looked semi-YA, because they were in college, and it made me feel less weird reading YA books than when I read YA books about high school kids.

Our story starts with Bryn, who is starting her first day at Oregon State University (go Beavers?). She immediately meets dreamy William Hayward, which pisses off the mean girls. Bryn has a dark secret, plus she has zero self-esteem, and she can't understand why William's got the hots for her. But you see, William has a secret, too! Turns out he's Immortal. And he's been looking for Bryn for almost 200 years. It's like it's meant to be, and she must fall just as in love with him as he with her.

Ah, but trouble awaits the young lovers! The Council of Big Fat Jackass Immortals has rules, and one of those rules is that Immortals can't love Mortals. The goon squad shows up to threaten Bryn and William in a bizarre mafia-esque middle of the night attack, and William decides to leave Bryn "for her own safety". Bryn, distraught over the loss of William, wanders in to the ocean to escape...

...and wakes up days later in a mansion owned by John, the head of the Council of Big Fat Jackass Immortals. Turns out, William loves Bryn so much that he knew she was dying, and he just had to save her, and the only way to do that was to turn her Immortal. Bryn, because she's an idiot, isn't mad about this, not when William tells her that she's not allowed to have kids, not when she discovers she can no longer go back to her former life, and not when William tells her that the Council is going to make all her decisions - including who she's going to be Immortally Married to for the rest of her life. Bryn's a little bit dumb (clearly), and she doesn't figure out till about 200 pages after the reader that John wants her to marry him, not William. William figures it out about thirty seconds before Bryn does, and now they have to figure out how to escape from the mansion.

There's more but I'm not going to bore you. I'll just go right to the end, where the book just...ends. When I bought this thing, I didn't realize that it was a trilogy. The frst rule of a trilogy is that the books should stand on their own. This one practically ends mid-sentence. I'm sure that's because Williams wants me to buy the other two books, but... no way. I've got too many other things to read.

Review #9: Crash, by Nicole Williams

When I was younger, reading YA fiction when I was actually, you know, a "young adult", Judy Blume's Forever was the scandal du jour, the book every library needed to ban so that we wouldn't learn about The Sex. Judy and Forever are about as harmless as a puppy when held up against Nicole Williams and her first book in a trilogy about the "good girl" and the "bad boy".

On the surface, it's not a horrible book. Good girl Lucy meets bad boy Jude on the eve of her senior year in high school, and they fall in love as only seventeen-year-olds can. He is inappropriate for her in every single way, and they both know it, but she doesn't care. He has no family - is living in a foster home, in fact - and her family is a ghost of what it once was, tragedy having torn them to bits years earlier. They come together and fall apart a half a dozen times, finally culminating in a cheesy gradution speech that would make John Hughes cringe.

If all this book was was an on-again, off-again teen romance, I would set it aside, sigh a little at the fact that kids these days have crappy books to read, and move on. (And possibly think about my own high school boyfriend a little bit, and the drama we created. I think I may owe my mom some apologies for that.) Dig beneath the surface, though, and you have a romantic lead who is prone to violent outbursts, which Williams shows in a positive light, and a relationship that is so codependant, so disfunctional, Anna and Christian Grey look like the poster children for a healthy marriage. In fact, you know what this book is? It's the YA equivalent of Fifty Shades, only without the sex. That's terrifying to me and this is why: Fifty Shades didn't bother me because of the sex, or the "abuse" or the psuedo-BDSM business; it bothered me because Christian Grey was an obssessed, possessive, scared little boy, and controlled Anna in more ways than just the bedroom. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the bedroom was the only place that Christian didn't control Anna.

Jude is like Christian Grey, only without the handcuffs and grey silk tie. His possessiveness isn't sweet or endearing or romantic - it's scary. It's the prequel to the husband who slowly but surely isolates his wife, who loves her with the kind of obssessive love that makes you wind up a Lifetime movie of the week. And Lucy's determination to save Jude is admirable, but he's not a puppy she can save, and at seventeen, she needs to be more concerned with her own future than his.

As a single mama who is trying my damndest to teach my daughter that she is a strong, independent woman, and, quite frankly, to teach her that I am, too, especially after years of not being one, I'm appalled at the underlying message this book sends. If Jude is the new romantic leading man that we're selling to our daughters, I fear for their future.