Sweet Evil by Wendy Higgins
Published: May 1st 2012 by HarperTeen
Number of pages: 447 (Paperback)
Series:Yes, #1
Embrace the Forbidden.
What if there were teens whose lives literally depended on being bad influences?
This is the reality for sons and daughters of fallen angels.
Tenderhearted Southern girl Anna Whitt was born with the sixth sense to see and feel emotions of other people. She's aware of a struggle within herself, an inexplicable pull toward danger, but it isn't until she turns sixteen and meets the alluring Kaidan Rowe that she discovers her terrifying heritage and her willpower is put to the test. He's the boy your daddy warned you about. If only someone had warned Anna.
Forced to face her destiny, will Anna embrace her halo or her horns? (goodreads.com)
I disliked this
book. Yes, that's right. I didn't like a book, which happens rarely. So prepare
for a review that's a little different then usually, because I just cannot
write this review in my normal style. It's my first review with such a rating
so bare with me on this one.
Let's start from the beginning.
Meet Anna - the
ultimate good girl. So sweet, innocent and naive that it actually makes her
seem as unrealistic as a talking chair. But, Anna is not only overly perfectly
good, no, she also happens to have super powers. Anna can see people’s
emotions, which more or less works like those mood rings that I'm sure each and
every one of us had at some point when we were kids. Only that it's not in ring
form but rather like an aura. But that's not all. Anna can also hear everything
in the radius of one mile, see and smell amazingly. Saint Anna also happens to
never every lie - except once, on purpose, and let's be real, that was the
lamest lie ever.
Besides Anna,
there's also Kaiden about whom Anna said the following: “He was smoking hot.
As in H-O-T-T, hott. I’d never understood until that moment why girls insisted
on adding an extra t. This guy was extra-t-worthy.” I'm not kidding. And
she also said: "Kai, like Thai, only yummier!". Kaiden also
happens to be the drummer in a rock band and also has one of those English
accents. Now why doesn't that surprise me at all. By the way, Kaiden also has
that mood aura superpower going, more or less like Anna.
But I didn't tell
you the 'best' part about them yet ... they are related to angels. Yes, angels.
Kaiden's dad happens to be the Duke of Lust and Anna's the Duke of Substance
Abuse, which totally explains why Anna feels a pull toward both alcohol and
drugs. So, them being the kids of these Dukes means that they are supposed to
do their daddies dirty work. In Kaiden's case this means he is supposed to have
sex with random girls and ruin their lives which he treats and calls his
'work', which is just straight out wrong if you ask me. Each time he excused
himself to go and 'work' I felt like throwing my copy of the book across the
room.
“Good gracious, he was sexy—a word that had not
existed in my personal vocabulary until that moment. This guy was sexy like it
was his job or something.”
Unfortunately that isn't all, Anna's adoptive mother, Patti, also
happens to be the most irresponsible parent out there. Patti wouldn't allow
Anna to go to a Party without calling the parents of whoever throws the party
to make sure adults will be there, but she lets her daughter go on a road-trip
with a seventeen year old boy, who I repeat is the son of lust, across the
country. Sure, sounds like something that every logically thinking parent would
do, right? No. Especially because the first time Anna told Patti about Kaiden,
Patti told Anna to stay the hell away from him.
Also, Sweet Evil put's an extreme emphasis upon the fact
that Anna is a virgin and should in every case possible stay that way, which
makes sense because she just turned sixteen, but the way this topic is
discussed is just mildly disturbing.
The LOVE part of
Sweet Evil - I saw it coming. I knew it would happen at some point but it still
make me want to stop reading. Of course Anna and Kaiden have to fall for each
other. Big time. And it's all put out there in the most cheesy and predictable
way possible. Okay, this entire book is predictable but oh well. And the author
also introduces another male who will join in so they can form the thing we all
love most - a love triangle.
The 'plot' of
Sweet Evil caused me to dislike the book even more then the exaggerated main
characters. Higgins unfortunately didn't succeed in creating a angel/demon
story which would captivate me. The plot just went from one pointless thing to
another and the narrative was horrible. Sometimes I just couldn't stop myself
from face palming at the ridiculous things Anna thinks or does. A lot of the
interactions between the characters seemed awkward and made me as reader feel
uncomfortable. The way the story moved from point A to point B seemed to lack
any logic, which makes me wonder if Higgins even really considered putting more
thought into it or if she just went along with it. Here are two examples:
Anna's dad is in
jail, but he is needed out of it right about now, how handy that he happens to
have a parole hearing coming up!
Or, there's also
the thing that neither Anna nor Kaiden are adults, so they cannot rant a room
in a motel on their way to California. The solution? Let's just make Kaiden a emancipated
minor.
See my point?
The last two chapters also just put the dot above the ‘i’ for me.
They were straight out horrible and made the cringe all the way through both of
them. The ending was awful and kind of obvious.
One thing I almost
forgot which made me laugh was that in the second to last chapter Higgins makes
one of the characters say a sentence in German. As German speaker I felt more than
confused by what she was trying to say because the sentence was neither a real
sentence nor grammatically correct in any sort of way, which makes me wonder if
she just used google translate. If you want your characters to speak in foreign
languages, at least put in enough effort so the sentence is correct and doesn't
just look fancy to everybody who doesn't speak that language.
Anyway, all in all, I guess it's obvious that I really didn't
enjoy this read. For me the whole package - characters, plot, and mythology -
just did not work. Who knows, maybe it's because I don't dig the whole
angel/demon genre. I don't know. Maybe if you like that, this book may be for
you, but it most definitely was not my cup of tea.
I give Sweet Evil by Wendy Higgins 1 out of 5 Stars.
