erica

I actually liked the first book - The Edge of Always - in this series quite a lot. It is fairly edgy for a new-adult, and is a journey about self discovery, throwing of shackles you did and didn't know you had, pushing your personal comfort limits and generally finally living life. At least it is for Camryn - Andrew is pretty much just living life to the fullest while he can, and even if the book is told from both POVs, I really felt that book one was Camryn's book.

The only reason I gave The Edge of Always 3 stars and not 4 was because the unnecessary drama at the end followed by the most sappy sugary HEA ever. I felt it didn't mesh with the gritty feeling of the rest of the book.

Redmerski got picked up by a publisher after she self-published Edge of Always, and I guess she and the publisher decided that they should write a follow-up on a perfectly concluded story, only it turned out that there was nothing more to say. Idiots.

So mostly the book felt like a boring list of series of events, where Redmerski completely failed to make me emotionally connect to her characters. I reacted to The Big Traumatic Experience of miscarriage by shrugging, because it was dead obvious from the blurb that they would lose the baby. I rolled my eyes at Camryn's self-medication with pain-killers. She was so depressed and messed up that she had a major character deviation and did drugs, and I was pretty much just meh. Such an epic fail to make me connect - this should have been painful for me, and it was, but only in a "I am so booooooooored!" kinda way. I yawned through the entire road-trip - except glimmers here and there of interesting stuff, it was a paper-cut bland cardboard version of the trip from the first book.

Despite all of this, I wasn't actively hating the book, but I was very, very bored. And then, it happened. The Epilogue of Death. Complete and utter bookicide. So I am genereally not a big fan of epilogues, because they often feel like a cheat, a summary of what happened after the book was finished, and the narrative voice somehow always shifts into an impersonal rendition of events. It is jarring when it happens, and always causes me to reduce stars because it my last impression of the book.

Now, you would think that a book that was an impersonal rendition of events would be unable to commit epilougue death. WRONG! It instead took it to a whole new level of horror, by turning the last few chapters into what was basically a very long and very boring HEA epilogue from both Camryn and Andrew's POVs. As in several chapters of that shit. Had I not been sitting on the inside of airport security at the time and therefore not able to access stabby objects, I would have killed my eReader in sheer frustration. And on top of all that, the stupid book HAD AN ACTUAL EPILOGUE! SET 18 YEARS LATER AND TOLD FROM THEIR DAUGHTER'S POV. At this point I was hating on the book so hard that my friend sitting next to me in the airport drily asked me why I bothered with this book, as I had done nothing but complain from page one.

I have absolutely no idea why I bothered with this book. Man, it sucked.