Review: Sweet Evil by Wendy Higgins

Freitag, 15. August 2014


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.

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