 So I have thought long and hard about how exactly I want to start this video. I'm not sure if I should just rant about the worst aspects of this series that's ever-neath. It's a weird title, but you know I've got all three books here, don't have the jacket for the last one, but I got all of them there. I'm not sure if I should rant about the worst aspects of it in order to draw you in or maybe I should talk about how it starts off pretty good and has one of the biggest drop-offs in quality I've ever seen or maybe I should go on about how it's indicative of how all paranormal romance from the early 2010s was destined to be awful because they could only ever think to draw big emotions from the characters by having their relationships be unbelievably toxic. But I just I just don't know and so I think I'm going to have to start this off by telling you that this series is or at least it features the worst romance ever put on the page. This is the introduction song it's not very good but it's not too long. Like I've read worse books out out there you know I've read many worse books than this but I've never seen a worse romance in my entire life and I know some of you are already in the comments typing up um James don't you know about 50 shades of gray don't you know about 365 days and those are comparable to this yeah and they're also much more graphic than this this is pretty PG-13 don't worry but those other ones they're they're not as bad because nothing that was done in any of those books is as bad as what was done to Nikki just in the backstory here and what goes on later in the story is arguably worse than what happens in the backstory and yet Cole the man who does all of this to her is not treated as the evil sociopath that he very clearly is you know in the first book he's I mean he's almost a villain in the first book you know he is the one who puts Nikki the protagonist into a nasty spot but he also seems to be more of like I don't know a representation of the rules of this world like he doesn't want anything bad to happen to her at least he doesn't want anything else bad to happen to her because he's already harmed her quite a bit at that point and he does give her a way out of her predicament she just refuses to take it for reasons that become pretty obvious later on so her situation is really only halfway his fault the other half is just the rules of this world being shitty and I'm not trying to make him sound innocent by by any means it's just that the book seems to believe that he's more of a secondary antagonist instead of the main villain who caused all of this and it just constantly makes excuses for him and then once we get to the second and third books he becomes an ally for a while and then a villain again and then an ally again just just because and throughout most of it it's clear that in spite of everything Nikki does have real feelings for him and she does care about him I just I don't know reading this made me feel like I was talking to one of those women who marries a serial killer because she thinks he's hot and because Cole just can't be the villain you know we need to have a bad boy love interest in there the real antagonist of the story is somebody who was victimized by both Cole and some others and the real villain is only evil in the sense that she's trying to survive and really she's placed into conflict with Nikki by Cole like Cole is the reason for everything bad that happens in this series directly or indirectly and the story doesn't seem to realize that and if he was a villain that would be fine but the need for a love triangle just sinks the entire thing like the the more I think about it the angrier I become to be quite honest with you and I know some of this may be confusing right now but trust me once we get all the exposition out of the way and once you understand what goes on in the story in more detail it'll make sense trust me so everneath which is a stupid name by the way it's like underneath but ever I don't know it's a stupid name and it is the story of a young girl named Nikki Beckett who is sometimes called Bex by her friends and sometime before the story begins she is pulled into a sort of underworld which is called the everneath and it's not the land of the dead it is a magical place where these immortal people called ever livings reside now to maintain their immortality the ever livings have to drain the life and emotions from one person every hundred years and somehow before the story began Nikki was pulled down there by Cole we find out exactly what happened later now Nikki manages to get one last chance to go back to earth and spend six months among humanity again before she is consumed by the everneath forever so she has six months to get her life in order say goodbyes and try to make up for past wrongs that she's done to people and if you couldn't tell this is a retelling of the Hades and Persephone myth there are there are a lot of these for some reason you know like just while looking around a little bit for this video I saw the goddess test abandoned thief of spring and like 50 others man like some of these are paranormal romance like everneath which would by that I mean like it's our world with some supernatural and magical elements some of them are just straight up fantasy and some of them are science fiction actually like I I don't know why so many people want to retell the story of Hades and Persephone but it's it's popular and everneath changes enough from the myth that it's not just repeating stuff you know so if you're worried about that then don't worry it's not an issue but it does keep the general vibe of kidnapping somebody is sometimes okay as long as you're hot and you're also really nice to her after you kidnap her which is gross overall I just got to say this is one of the worst things I've read this entire year and keep in mind that includes shit like fourth wing and pariah like this is uniquely bad but the worst of the story isn't in the minute events that we see from page to page but it's the way they all come together you know it's the themes the overall picture that's painted that you can only see after the whole thing is complete so the summary of this series is it's still gonna be a while but it's going to be relatively short and then followed by all the problems in their own section and also there's gonna be spoilers ahead obviously I don't recommend you read everneath under any circumstances but you know there's parts of it that aren't too horrible also it's freaking freezing in here I'll be real with you guys I am kind of shocked by how not terrible the opening to the first book is like the prologue is nicky in the everneath like she's down in some dark tunnels which are very creatively just called the tunnels with a capital T and she's inside a magic cocoon of some sort along with Cole and Cole has been feeding on her for a hundred years at this stage and by feeding on her he is literally just kissing her to drain out her life energy and along with that it's also draining out all of her emotions and all of her memories and stuff leaving her as just a hollowed out husk she remembers the face of a boy whose name she can't recall in fact most of her memories are gone like I said and she's physically frail and like she's barely alive again like the feed eventually does kill the people who are who it's done to and remember this throughout the story like she's being tormented here by Cole and it lasts for literally a hundred years there's also a bunch of creatures around them which are just called shades and they're basically just living shadows you know and nicky sees a boy's face and she says she needs to go and see the boy who she saw and this goes back and forth for a little bit and eventually a shade like stabs her in the arm and actually goes inside her arm a little bit and then she is just popped back out on earth out of the everneath and she says a single word jack it is unironically a good opening it introduces important concepts and the conflicts without throwing in a bunch of exposition but it throws in enough that we get the gist of what's going on and it gives just enough information to intrigue us and for us to want to know what's happening and what led nicky to this point and we also feel kind of bad for her and want her to you know not be in the situation anymore so then the story picks up two weeks later when nicky is back in school and she thinks about how she has about six months left before the shades will drag her back to the everneath and also while she's walking around she thinks about how she's empty of her own emotions so she doesn't feel that much but she can taste everyone else's around her she's just kind of like absorbing little bits of them uh but then her own come back pretty quickly and then she can no longer sense other people's emotions she's not like an empath for the rest of the series or anything so that this whole thing leads nowhere it's kind of like if peter parker got his spider-man powers and then he lost them two days later and then the rest of the story was him still trying to fight bad guys but just as peter parker instead of spider-man you know it'd be weird now i should clarify that time works differently in the everneath than it does on earth like on the surface uh it was six months that passed that while she was gone but down in the everneath it was a hundred years but again she was missing for six months you know her loved ones are understandably upset and concerned but they're also happy that she's back and most of them think that she became some sort of drug addict and ran off and she doesn't bother correcting them because you know they're not gonna believe if she tells the truth uh and they actually don't just assume that she became a drug addict we find out later exactly why they think that but well again we'll come back to that later a lot of the opening part of the book is just nicky adjusting to normal life again you know both physically and emotionally and so while she's in class her mythology teacher brings up the myth of hades and persephone because you know why would you want subtext just come right out and say hey we're retelling that thing remember that thing that you like and are obsessed with for no reason yeah this is just a retelling of that you want more of that right like just why not why have subtext or subtlety she sees jack in class you know the boy whose face she remembered down in the everneath and the two of them have some awkward tension like they clearly know each other but something has changed between them and then she flashes back to a year ago which was six months before she entered the feed and this entire first book has a bunch of flashbacks in it which are actually for the most part pretty good and then the second and third books also have some flashbacks but not nearly as many the gist of the opening couple of flashbacks is that her and jack were friends for very very long time for a very long time since they were little kids and then after nicky's mom died and she died in a car crash a drunk driver hit her after that her and jack started dating and jack was actually very very supportive for her during that difficult time and i'll be honest throughout this entire book jack and nicky's relationship is pretty healthy and wholesome and normal at least again at least in this book in the later ones it's less good but you know it's we had something we had something for a little while and so again the next chunk of the story is just nicky adjusting to life again while knowing that yeah it's going to end soon and she does go over in a little bit more detail what happened with her and col now i knew what really happened when emotions were gone col bought himself another hundred years of life by draining me and in the abyss left over there was no peace only an emptiness that made me ache as if my insides had been scraped out now the gist of things which we see in flashbacks spread throughout the book is that somehow col convinced her to go to the feed which he thought would kill her he's actually surprised that she's still alive at the end of it and we do get more detail about how exactly he convinced her but that that is what happened here like that's what happened and this guy isn't a villain he's a villain at first but he's he's one of the love interests in this book this book series and i i really want you to understand from the get go why i'm so pissed not just at col but at this whole freaking series and why it's so bad so nicky goes around trying to mend things with her loved ones she mends things with her old friend jewels which goes pretty smoothly jewels is just very forgiving of her but then she also needs to make things up to her dad and her younger brother now after school her dad calls her up to his study and we actually learned that he's the mayor of their town which is park city but actually that's a real town in utah and remember nicky lost her mom yes but her brother also lost his mom and her dad lost his wife so nicky's not the only one hurting and then they also lost her for six months and then she came back but that said when her dad is talking to her he seems surprisingly understanding of her disappearing for six freaking months like he just thinks she was on a bender and he really just wants her to get better and like he treats her with dignity and care even though it's clear that he's you know very upset with her and very hurt by what she did but he still loves her like this is an actual healthy relationship between a parent and a child at least in this book what the hell did you just say her dad the mayor agrees to not ask her too much about what she was up to when she was gone as long as she goes to school maintains good grades takes random drug tests and spends one day working at a soup kitchen for every day that she was gone now remember this is utah so when they're testing for drugs just don't drink any coffee i guess nicky agrees to this because you know again she doesn't think she's going to be here that long anyways but then when she goes to her room to go to bed there's a man in her room and she's freaked out and then she sees it's coal oh oh edward cullen every creepy love interest will be stealing from your playbook from now until the heat death of the universe nicky is surprised to see coal and then she actually goes to give him a hug for why but she does immediately remember that she hates him and stops before she actually gives him one so this is where we learn that uh coal is actually in a band and that his bandmate max used to date a fellow student at nicky school called meredith jenkins and meredith is also missing uh that that becomes relevant in a little while don't worry there's there's actually a lot of details in this first book that seem unimportant at first and then become relevant later it's like like a well put together murder mystery you know it's it's not bad uh but and then while she's talking with coal about the nature of the everneath for a minute we learn that old myths like persephone and osiris and such were actually inspired by the everliving and the everneath so there is a grain of truth in those old myths and also the spot where a shade stabbed nicky earlier has formed a dark spot on her shoulder and when her six months are up the shade is going to pop out and just drag her back down to the everneath back to the tunnels and during this one chapter conversation coal actually explains his motivations for the whole rest of the series like he says he cares about nicky and he wants to be with her and he says that most people die after the feed but nicky didn't somehow and they don't know how she survived but she did and the last one to do that is the queen of the everneath like coal wants to make nicky into an everliving which will mean she doesn't get dragged down to the tunnels uh and then he wants to use her to depose the queen and the two of them can rule for all eternity but again if nicky doesn't become an everliving she gets dragged down to the tunnels which is where the place where the feeds take place and then the shades will basically use her as a battery and drain her power to keep the everneath moving until she dies now at first when i read this i thought that she was being drained and it was going to last for eternity but apparently no it'll just last for a little while and then she'll die but it's still an unpleasant way to go out now again nicky hates coal and she actually refuses his gift quote unquote of immortality because she doesn't want to hurt anyone you know like if she becomes an everliving she will have to feed on other people every hundred years and she refuses to do that she thinks it's gross and she doesn't want to kill anybody to survive but coal says that as queen she'll have others bring her sacrifices like he's saying no you don't have to kill anybody others will kill people for you and just bring their energy like he just completely missing the point man some people are really fucking stupid eventually he does leave but he says that she'll change her mind when her time gets closer he actually comes back a few times over the course of the story trying to get her to change her mind but she always refuses but you know again coal and the queen who we don't see in this book have to say that the main character is important because she is the main character a big part of coles motivation for wanting to rule is because like all of the other everlivings have to bring forfeits that's people who get fed on are called forfeits to the queen so that you know she can sustain herself and sustain the everneath but coal is just kind of lazy and doesn't want to do that anymore like that that really is the only motivation he ever gives for wanting to be in charge of things so later nicky is working at the homeless at the soup kitchen feeding homeless people and she meets an old woman named mary who has dementia like she's obviously very old but she claims to only be 18 she makes a couple of references to needing to find someone's daughter someone named priscilla or panellope or something and hey wait a minute panellope that kind of sounds like Persephone and later we have a brief scene where nicky makes up with her brother for you know leaving him alone when he was at a difficult time he's only 10 years old and again he lost his mom and his big sister right next to each other but she makes up with him and goes fishing with him and you know he's barely in this series but it's nice to get a few scenes like this uh the only there are some weird bits that drag this first book down though because this first one's really not bad but there's weird bits that drag it down like how the majority of the time nicky says that she has no pain or feelings but she very clearly still does you know i just i don't know most of the time that she's making things up to her loved ones is spent with jack though because before she left for the feed he gave her a note that says ever yours this author has like a weird autistic fixation with the word ever i swear to god because the books are everneath ever bound and ever true like that those don't even make sense but nicky and jack slowly start spending time together again they're clearly still in love and still clearly care a lot about each other and he's concerned about her but she can't tell him exactly what happened and i don't have a whole lot of specifics about them and what they do throughout this part of the book it's just a sweet thing to witness other than the couple of scenes where nicky sneaks into jack's room to watch him sleep oh edward cullen creepy love interest will be stealing from your playbook until the end of time so nicky starts following around coal and his bandmates specifically one named max who is actually the only one of his bandmates that actually gets a name i think and she sees them take a woman who seems really upset to a convenience store called the shop and go and then she eats a pill that they give her and she falls into the floor and later we find out that by ingesting a piece of an everliving usually their hair at certain spots a person gets taken to the everneath and the shop and go is like an entrance to the everneath like there's a couple of spots around the world where reality is like thinner or something and they can just drop through easily like it i don't know the fact that this is in a convenience store feels like a joke but the punchline never arrives and i don't know they just they sent that woman there as a sacrifice for the queen max also makes a reference to meredith who was her classmate that disappeared a while ago and used to date max and nicky wonders what happened yeah nicky i i wonder i wonder what could possibly have happened so while at the soup kitchen she sees mary again and she starts trying to talk to her about penelope's daughter but mary is just confused and later one of the other workers says that she wasn't talking about penelope's daughter she was talking about the daughters of presephone and then nicky asks mary about that but she gets kind of cagey and runs off there's there's also a scene just kind of thrown in here where coal is playing a show and makes a bunch of people fight apparently everliving's can have their hearts crack and emotions spill out from them into other people and basically while this was going on he was like upset at nicky because you know she doesn't want to be a possession of his uh and so his you know heart cracked and spilled out and that's why people started fighting and this this never comes back up like this detail is never used again at any point like except there there is a picture of nicky in a fight that winds up in the newspaper and her dad is mad about it because that might cost me the election because he's running for reelection as the mayor and it it doesn't cost him the election but it is nice to see this caring father chastise his daughter for making him look bad instead of wondering what's going on with her and being concerned so nicky continues sneaking into jack's room to watch him sleep and eventually he wakes up and they start playing cards together at night and she also realizes that when she kisses him she actually steals a little bit of energy from him and eventually she explains what happened while she was gone like she doesn't give everything at once she just explains at first that coal can steal energy and then the rest just comes later now in flashbacks we do see nicky's relationship with coal and how it first started basically her and her friend joules went to some concerts to see him and his band play they're called the dead elvises by the way which is okay i'm not going to pretend that band names aren't stupid but that that that name is stupid let's let's be real uh but they went to some concerts to watch them play and they actually met the band it just kind of became friends with them and the first time coal fed on nicky it was actually benevolent weirdly enough because uh she went rafting with them and she actually hurt her leg uh not too too awfully but you know it got a bad cut on there and coal just you know sucked away some of her negative feelings for a bit and the way coal describes it is that ever-living steel electricity from people's brains and like i don't know dude just say it's magic you know just say it's magic there's no way to make this make scientific sense but yeah the first feeding was benevolent which is why nicky didn't have such a negative view of it at first but jack does learn that coal can steal energy it takes him until later to learn about the whole century of feeding thing now he does start to help nicky look for a way to avoid being dragged back when her time is up because she tells him she has a limited amount of time so he's like okay let's let's find a way out out of this and finally we get a flashback where or several flashbacks really where we see nicky's reason for agreeing to go to the feed so basically the driver who killed her mom winds up getting acquitted like he doesn't go to prison or anything and he he eventually he gets away with it uh nicky goes to jack for comfort but one of his female friends answers the door of where he's staying and she thinks that he's cheating on her uh so then she just is completely distraught and then she goes to coal and she begs for all the bad feelings to be taken away and he's like hey are you sure about this and she's like yes yes just do it uh and then uh when she agrees to go to the evernief though uh he takes away the like top layer of her emotions pretty quickly like which are the negative ones and then she realizes very quickly like wait no no this is a bad idea i don't want to do this and she straight up tells coal like i don't want this let's let's stop and he says it's too late and then he takes her away and again torments her for a hundred years he also says at some points that he didn't force her to do this against his will but also he like made her taste some of his own doubts about jack basically like she thought he was cheating on her partially because coal was just projecting his own emotions outward onto her so in other words he manipulated her great and it was at this point it really became clear to me that nicky wanted to do something intimate with coal but then early on she decided she didn't want to and she she asked him to stop and then he kept going against her will and i can't help but feel that that's a metaphor for something yeah there really is no excuse for what he did here like he groomed and manipulated a young girl so that he could literally suck her life out over the course of a hundred years so jack and nicky decide that while they're looking for a way to prevent her from being dragged back down to the evernief they decide okay that old lady mary must know something they find her talk to her for a bit she says something about anchors and they find out that mary is actually meredith she's the girl that got taken around the same time as nicky and she actually aged a lot due to the feed like whatever prevented nicky from dying did not protect meredith she tells jack to remember orpheus and to be strong before giving them a bracelet of some sort and then running off so then they decide okay we'll go to mary slash meredith's mother for more information remember meredith's name is meredith jenkins so her mother is just always referred to as mrs jenkins even though she isn't married so after pressing her a bit mrs jenkins admits that she is one of the daughters of persephone and that's a group where people have daughters and they raise their girls to be forfeits like specifically they raise them to be consumed and fed on by everliving and they raise them to have no earthly attachments because and they do this because if a girl becomes the queen of the evernith then her blood line is granted immortality so basically they just throw out tons of young girls and have been doing this for hundreds or thousands of years hoping that one of them will eventually survive the feed and become a queen and mrs jenkins did this to her own daughter but that also doesn't make a lot of sense because meredith had friends and stuff you know if you really want them to have no earthly attachments you'd have to raise them in isolation and meredith was not raised in isolation so i don't know and also even though normally col would have just taken either meredith or one of the other daughters of persephone mrs jenkins says that he took nicky as a sort of experiment and i guess the experiment paid off because she survived now they realize around this time that nicky did have an earthly attachment who was jack like her and jack thought of each other every day and basically we eventually learned that by jack thinking about her he actually shared energy with her and that's what kept her alive and kept her from aging for the hundred years that she was gone but it didn't work with meredith because it needs to go both ways as they explain it like it says that her mom forgot about her when the feed started which doesn't make a lot of sense because her mom still seems to care about her like maybe like i think what's going on and it's not explained super well here but i think what happened is that her mom still loved her but also accepted that she was gone whereas jack still loved nicky but he was also hung up on her now i haven't mentioned this but throughout all of this we've seen jack's older brother will a couple of times basically he was a soldier he went to war in afghanistan he came back he's riddled with ptsd and now he's a barely functioning alcoholic but he does help out jack and nicky throughout all of this like he helps track down meredith who is in idaho like she just hopped on a bus and drove up there and then he goes to retrieve her when they retrieve her they see the mark that she got similar to what nicky had and it's almost covered her whole body like the tunnels are going to get her soon and they ask what she means about orpheus and she has to be cryptic for some reason basically she just says that nicky has a debt to the tunnels and it doesn't matter who pays it and then the shades come and suck her away down to the tunnels and then they mention that meredith left for the everneath two days before nicky did meaning she has two days left before they take her so the bracelet they gave her earlier has some egyptian hieroglyphics of some sort on it and they managed to contact a guy named professor spears who works at a nearby university and he knows what it says they go to talk to him he gives a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo about some ancient civilization called the ring of the dead and ox ghosts from egyptian myth like i don't know basically ox ghosts are everliving and they deduce altogether that coal's heart has to be destroyed in order to kill him and they think that if they kill him it might save nicky because they think okay he's the one that took me there so maybe if we break his heart he'll be the one that gets sucked to the tunnels or something after thinking for a while they decide oh it must be his guitar because he always keeps it with him and it's something that's important to him so they go to his condo when he's not home and they search around for a bit and coal appears but before they can smash the guitar so they're like fighting for a bit but then will comes up and he manages to destroy the guitar and then nothing happens this ain't not about music and actually the guitar wasn't his heart it was a guitar pick which he takes out and shows them and taunts them a little bit which seems like a dumb thing to do on his part but nothing comes of it so i guess it's not a big deal but now nicky's time is up so the mark grows and takes over and it forms a portal and nicky just says a tearful goodbye to jack and she tries to let the tunnels take her but instead he jumps in to take her place and then he's sucked away to the ever knee and coal taunts her for a little while about how her boyfriend is gonna die soon like he'll be drained of all energy but the book ends with nicky dreaming of jack down in the ever knee and still thinking of him so he's she's keeping him alive for now and then she vows to rescue him and that's the end of the book and i know i did talk about the negatives here but it's really not bad like it's a good book i'm not joking i'm not being snarky i'm not even really grating on a curve here it is a good book like it has strong justified emotions from the characters the story takes a little bit of time to get going but it does exist it has a clear goal that the characters are working towards and there is progress made towards that and then it ends on a really good cliffhanger like i immediately wanted to know what happened and unlike so many other books of this type nicky the protagonist has an actual personality she does dumb things but she learns from them she cares about others she makes a strong moral stand to die instead of becoming an ever-living because she would have to feed on people like she's an actual character and i did like her but that won't last i heard you got kicked out of a lens crafters the other day what happened i walked in to pick up my fucking glasses i could have stopped calling people so kohl actually has his own novella which is told from his perspective it takes place between books one and two this was actually somewhat common back then you know it'd be a novel or novella telling part of the story from the love interest perspective a lot of times it was just the entire series from their perspective or a backstory but this one is just kind of a side plot which we don't need to know everything that happens here but it does become relevant in the final book this is a really short book too like i don't have a physical copy of it i can only find it on kindle so you'll just have to use your imagination with me and pretend i'm holding one but this is a pretty short book i read it in just a couple of hours this spread out over several days but you know it's quick easy to get through and kohl's narrative voice is distinct basically neverfall is just about kohl looking for answers about how nicky survived the feed he goes to a group of people who are called the delphinians and he gets taken prisoner for a bit and then he escapes and that's that's basically the whole thing again it's a novella not a lot happens uh but here are some of the highlights while looking for info on the delphinians kohl attacks a woman for not giving him records he needs because uh he's just such a nice guy we also learned that he was alive during the black death and later we learned he's a little over 800 years old but this guy really doesn't feel like he's over 800 years old you know he still feels like a teenager and not in a good way uh we also learn about this process called marking which is where you again you mark a human and it's something that allows all-ever livings anywhere on earth to feed on them at any time and it's against the rules of the everneath because it's imposing on their free will that don't make no sense yeah i don't get how that works and it's brought up several other times in this series like kohl already imposed on nicky's free will as we saw because like sure she agreed originally to come to the everneath but then she changed her mind and wanted to go so by keeping her there keeping her prisoner against her will that place is imposing on their free will anyway so i really don't understand how that works but okay in order to get info from the delphinians kohl has to help them mark somebody so he actually steals a photo from nicky's house uh a photo of her 10-year-old brother and he brings it to the delphinians so that they can mark him again feed off of him and slowly kill him anytime anywhere i hate kohl so much but kohl does try to steal the info without actually giving them the picture and instead he just winds up being taken prisoner and thrown into a big stone dungeon cell and while he's down there he's down there for a couple of months i believe uh every day at midnight he gets eaten by rats and then he regenerates a bit like just a swarm of rats comes in eats him it's it's kind of similar to the myth of prometheus you know where he had his liver eaten by an eagle every day and then it regenerated but it's it's rats instead and uh kohl tries to scratch his way out of the cell but all the marks he makes eventually just regenerate and heal and while he's down there there's also another prisoner whose name is devin now devin was put down there because he stole some artifacts that the delphinians wanted and then he hid it from them and won't tell them where it is and actually really the most of the rest of the novella is just the two of them chilling in this place with a couple of flashbacks thrown in but i really want to emphasize to you that kohl's narrative voice is different than nicky's for example when he's describing jack being upset at nicky's disappearance he says epic lover boy was epically sad look i said his narrative voice was distinct i never said it was good uh so we do have a flashback where after he takes nicky to the feed kohl goes back to her house and leaves a note in her room so that her family thinks that she ran off and then he sees that she has one of his band shirts sitting around and he says again quote oh nicky we're going to have so much fun again he's literally just tormenting her for a hundred years thinking that she'll die at the end of it this guy is a freaking sociopath i hate him so much uh and while captive kohl also realizes that no matter what he does he can't die he's not going to be able to kill himself he does it with this line somehow knowing that i wouldn't be able to off myself made me feel even worse you never realize how much you rely on the option of suicide until the option is removed i'm not saying that sentence would make a good bumper sticker but it was the truth well kohl i can't speak for anybody else but i think you should kill yourself and then finally kohl has an epiphany where he realizes that dreams are a bridge between earth and the everneath it allows people to go there briefly and then he realizes that jack was nicky's anchor and that's why she survived she had an anchor on earth that was somebody who was still attached to her and she was still attached to them and he fed her energy over the course of the six months slash 100 years and that's how she survived and i get i keep hate to keep stopping and just reading random lines from this crap but here's another one great there was no scenario in this whole damn thing where jack didn't come off looking as awesome as the love child of thor and optimus prime this is not how a centuries old immortal would talk this is like the writer's idea of a cool person but eventually uh max kohl's old bandmate does come in and break him out by just setting the whole place on fire and then he throws him a fireproof suit and they run out together however they can't take devon because max only brought two suits and so devon just tells him where the relic that he stole is hidden because he's such a nice guy and then he dies he's burned to death and also throughout all of this there's an oracle that tells kohl his last forfeit will be his beginning and his end and kohl is convinced that what that means is that nicky is going to be his last forfeit and that jack will die soon and then he and nicky will take over the everneethan rule forever so he just decides he'll wait for jack to die so then he watches nicky sleep for a bit and then he says she'll be his and then the book ends so yeah neverfall is overall just a pointless novella like it gives us some info about the world but most of it never comes back and it gives us more insight into what kohl is like but all it makes clear is that this man is an absolute psycho who does not value the lives or feelings of other people and the author desperately wants us to think that he's charming and cool so in the end it really just cemented my hatred for him so as we go to book two ever bound i really just want to say that the covers and titles are too similar like look at them side by side they look too similar and the titles just i i it took me a while to remember what order they were even in you know it's dumb but this whole second book is basically the story of nicky trying to rescue jack and some of you may have realized by now that yes the reference to orpheus earlier does make a lot more sense because while the first book was retelling the story of hades and persephone this is retelling the story of orpheus and uricity your uricity wait i don't know how to say that okay it's greek but the story of orpheus is basically a greek myth about a man whose wife died and then he was really sad about it so he went to the underworld to get her out and he almost succeeded but ultimately he did fail and again this is just the basic idea ever bound doesn't follow the myth exactly so this book starts two months after the first one and jack has been being drained that whole time and even with nicky sustaining him he just doesn't have much time left which if you do some quick math six months was 100 years meaning two months is 33 years and four months for jack in the everneath but when they do finally find him spoiler alert uh it doesn't seem like he's been gone that long he reacts like it's been a couple of days but i don't know whatever but uh nicky and jack's brother will are actually working together to try and think of a way to rescue him because you know will was there and knows about all the supernatural stuff he also stopped drinking when his brother was taken and their mom is really mad and thinks nicky knows where he is and nicky asks col to take her to the tunnels but he refuses and uh not not a whole lot happens the first chunk of this book but she does steal one of col's hairs and then goes to the shop and go and eats it and pops down into the everneath which uh at first i was excited because i was only like 41 pages in and we're already getting into the story and i was like oh cool this is starting quick but she's not there for that long and then we have to wait a while for it to actually get going now nicky appears in a city even though col said that if she ate his hair she would just appear in the tunnels so i i i don't know exactly how that works like was he just lying or did something happen that caused her to come up here instead i don't know and if this is where everybody who goes to the everneath winds up then shouldn't somebody be waiting nearby to capture her and use her as a forfeit i i don't know but she's in the middle of a massive crowd in a city and they're all gathered around a big stage on the stage are some shades and a woman who has really bright red hair later we learn that this woman is the queen of the everneath uh we don't learn her name until later she's just the queen but later we do here yeah this is the queen and she brings a man onto the stage the shades kill him they impale him a couple of times and then he explodes into a big cloud of energy and the crowd just consumes them and they're cheering and really happy about this but while in the everneath humans actually leak energy so one of them notices energy coming off of nicky and the queen sees it as well and just over the roar of the crowd she just yelled who are you like really booming powerful voice and then col appears he grabs nicky and he pulls her back to the surface and he reprimands her for doing something stupid and then she tries to convince him to help but he refuses and says that if she does it again he's not going to save her but basically like i said it it takes a bit of time before the story gets going also when they're on the surface there's a detective looking for jack he's a private eye hired by his mother and this doesn't go anywhere he just follows nicky around at a few points but you know it it exists and while trying to convince col to help nicky says that col is a good person with a good heart oh fuck off will also start a drinking again because of the stress of the situation which does make sense but like he stopped drinking because his brother got taken and now he's drinking again because his brother got taken i don't know but when trying to talk about how it's not a big deal he makes a really weird joke stop bex let's take inventory of our priorities first go to the underworld and save my brother second don't die while doing it third start a grassroots roots campaign to add diversity to the state's conservative legislature fourth then maybe tackle my excessive drinking oh brother this guy stinks and i know that's an attempt at a joke but like it's so unfunny that it loops back around to being kind of funny again i i don't know what to make of that moment i really don't eventually nicky lies and says she got some of col's hair and she's going back to the everneeth with or without him and so he relents and agrees to help her save jack and he mentions that one day on earth is six months in the everneeth uh which doing some math that means that jack has been there for about 29 years instead of 33 years whatever it's not important but it is inconsistent and that irks me will cannot go to the everneeth with them because i i don't know he just he can't go to the everneeth with them which is annoying i kind of wish he went because it would be nice to see the brother relationship focused on more like you know will and jack clearly do love and care about each other but it just doesn't get enough time devoted to it in this series uh so col tells nicky to find a tether like something that reminds her of jack and so she takes the note he wrote that says ever yours and so he and his bandmate max take her down to the everneeth and now's a good time to point out the structure of the everneeth and how it shapes like this book does have a map which shows it if i can find it i will put it up on screen it's shaped like a big circle on the outside is the ring of earth and there are five cities in that ring then there is a ring of water a ring of wind and a ring of fire which all surround the high court which is where the queen lives and that's at the very center of the everneeth now col takes her to the outskirts like the ring of earth but outside the cities and so there's no one around to see her energy and also when they're down there if she's near col and max they will absorb her excess energy that she lets off so it's less noticeable and people are less likely to notice hey there's a human down here and while they're there nicky realizes she can conjure stuff in the everneeth like she can create objects out of thin air and manipulate rocks and other materials into shapes like she she's not very good at it because yeah you have to be able to focus but you know she she can do it and uh col tells her that jack is being held in the tunnels where the feeds take place and that no one knows where they are and that they can only enter with permission at specific times you know when the feeds are going on he hopes that the tunnels are out somewhere in the void outside the cities uh but when nicky you know focuses on her tether for a bit it creates a literal compass needle on the ground where he is and it points to the high court in the center of the everneeth so they realize okay we're going to have to go through all the other rings which are a security feature specifically designed to keep people out of the high court before we can rescue jack so col says okay we'll need to prepare and they go to one of the cities which is called oros in fact i believe that's the only city that actually gets a name and they meet a friend named ash also i feel we need to point out that the rings have a bunch of deadly traps and stuff but they're also a maze so like i think this is meant to be a reference to the story of the minotaur like theses in the minotaur maybe i don't know later on they make it a bit more explicit but it doesn't really have anything in common with that myth there's also no good place to put this but when humans are in the everneeth they give off a glow this never causes any trouble or anything it just is brought up once and then dropped so anyways they go to the city and they find ash and his body is partially made of smoke which we learn later is because he missed a feed and whenever livings miss feeds they start turning into shades and he's part shade but then there's other people who miss the feed who are called wanderers and they are like punished by the queen to never get any sustenance and they like wander around like either the outskirts outside the cities or inside the maze as punishment but ash only changed part way and like again it should what are the rules for turning into a shade versus turning into a wanderer i don't know like this is really the part of the series where the world building starts to completely fall apart so they explain things to ash because he's seen the maze before he's actually been there and he does agree to help this is very very dangerous though because the queen has now offered a bounty for nick for nicky and it's not money but it's time in the elysian fields not elysium elysian with an n now the elysian fields are like the nicest part of the everneeth and the queen restricts ass access to it so time there is like the closest thing to currency that this place has and i don't know again this doesn't really lead anywhere we never see the elysian fields but it is a detail worth mentioning at one point ash assures nicky that cold definitely loves her because he has a tether that points towards her they also mentioned that as they go through the three rings each of them is going to attack something different the first one will attack emotions then the second one will attack their mind and the third one will attack their despair which doesn't make sense because despair is an emotion you think it would be like emotions mind and body whatever they're the experts so periodically the shades also shut down everything in the everneeth like there's a blackout so like the sun goes out in order to save energy which i don't know like the more we learn about the everneeth the less interesting it becomes which is weird normally it's the other way around but whatever so coal says that he only is helping nicky so that she'll owe him and i'm not reading between the lines here he just comes right out and says hey if i rescue the love of your life you're gonna owe me big time like he just comes out and says it i hate him so much now eventually they do finally enter the maze and time there apparently moves the same speed as earth so nicky has to go back and forth to avoid being missing for too long and also to replenish her energy because the everneeth is constantly draining her but as long as coal or somebody else is there at the spot she was when she left they can grab her and just bring her back into the maze right where they were so they can go back and forth anytime which really robs the tension out of this story you know it gives breaks to the characters allows them a way out of danger at all times it's kind of annoying but whatever they finally enter the ring of water they run into a wanderer who feeds on nicky for a minute and then she falls into a lake and she thinks it's water but then she falls in and she's like oh my gosh it's actually blood and then coal just kicks her back to the surface so she can recover her energy while she's there she showers and washes off as much of the blood as she can and she visits will and brings him up to speed and spends the night at his house but when she's walking home her dad drives up and finds her again she's been missing for a day or two at this stage so she he demands to know where she was and what's going on understandably but she tells her dad that jack is in an alternate reality and he is seemingly stressed about this but he does seem to believe her except not really he actually gives her some water which we find out quickly was drugged with valium and then he takes her to the doctor's office and when she wakes up she's like what happened and her doctor just explains it to her and her doctor is totally cool with her dad drugging her like the oh my god that's not just unethical that is straight up illegal like nicky's dad was originally a concerned parent whose actions were totally understandable and honestly not even that harsh given the circumstances but now he's a guy who drugs and kidnaps his daughter so that's what i meant earlier when i was referring to their relationship being healthy in the first book so while she's in the doctor's office Cole's hand appears out of the floor and she grabs it and he pulls her back into the maze where they were and he mentions that forfeits have to be willing which is why she had to grab his hand rather than him just taking her back but again nicky was very clearly not willing in the first book she changed her mind like that that means you're not willing by definition i don't think this author understands the concept of consent so finally they reach the edge of the ring of water they get chased by some wanderers for a bit and they walk through the wall of water which marks the edge and while they're walking through Cole nearly drowns and nicky does CPR to save him and it was at this stage i wondered what their immortality entailed like they live forever sure but can they still drown does it only work with magic water if you stabbed them would they die i don't know so now they find themselves in the ring of wind and some wind blows really hard and nicky loses her tether which was the note again and while there she also starts to lose her mind like she can't focus her memories are disappearing but then Cole tells her no no you don't need the token now just think of jack and then she does and it keeps her mind together and then her tether just reappears and then she sees jack and she's like oh my god jack except no it's actually an illusion it's a siren trying to lure her in but she realizes that quickly and then runs away before anything bad happens and then she finds Cole and he is also with a siren who looks like nicky and to prove who she is and prove that she's not the siren she kisses him and this time she's actually energized instead of being drained like in the everneath kissing and everliving actually gives humans energy instead of taking it away except in the tunnels because none of the rules here makes sense also i need to read you this line he smiled everliving kisses they're never what they seem are they that line makes me want to start drinking again so the siren that was trying to do whatever it was trying to do to Cole attacks and then nicky stabs him and saves Cole with very little issue so they do find max who is again wandering around in the maze away from them but ash is still gone so the two of them decide to kick nicky back to the surface to rest while they go looking for ash now nicky avoids going home while she's up there but she does talk to mrs jenkins who remember was meredith's mom mrs jenkins mentioned somebody named adonia now adonia was ash's forfeit about 200 years ago and she was actually a distant relative of meredith and mrs jenkins by extension now she survived the feed the same way that nicky did and because she was actually attached to a soldier named nathaniel and she thought nathaniel died in a war and she actually went away with ash to you know relieve herself of the pain of losing him but it turns out he was alive and just badly wounded so their attachment kept her alive but then she went back to the surface just like nicky and then nathaniel died right away he succumbed to his wounds then the queen found her and killed her in order to avoid being overthrown so all that's left of her are some ashes which mrs jenkins has in an urn on her mantelpiece she also has a medallion from nathaniel and she just gives it to nicky because i i don't know she gives it to nicky and then she goes back to the everneath so a wanderer comes and they run and then they just they reach the ring of fire like it's just it's there now this place has really shitty security which makes me wonder why no one else has done this before but the wanderer chasing them feels so much despair from the magic of the ring of fire that it just jumps into the fire and dies like the only threat here just killed itself so nicky gets burned pretty bad and that drains her of her energy so she can't walk and then kohl carries her for a bit and he gives his backstory or some of it at least basically a little over 800 years ago he lived in norway he meets a woman named gina i believe that's how you pronounce that and he becomes friends with her but gina wasn't ever living and she actually sucked off his bad emotions and when she offered to make him an everliving he agreed because his family was all dead so he didn't really have much going for him but the thing is gina wasn't doing this out of the goodness of her heart she actually wanted to die see everliving's all have two hearts they have a surface one which they carry like kohl's guitar pick and then they have an everneath one which is kept in a vault somewhere in the high court and in order for an everliving to die both of them have to be broken uh so if they had broken kohl's guitar pick his surface heart just allows him to travel back and forth between the everneath so it wouldn't have killed him it wouldn't have done anything but the shades don't like whenever living's died because their hearts are what hold the realm together and so basically gina just was using kohl as a replacement like she she brought him down there and then the shades agreed to give her her own heart and then kohl never saw her again he assumed she broke her own hearts and then became mortal and then grow grew old and died and it's like super sad i guess we also find out around this time that ash owes kohl because kohl actually hunted down adonia when she was on the surface and he told him where she was and then ash told the queen and then the queen went and killed her once again fuck kohl so much i hate him fuck this guy he's awful so they walk under an archway with a bunch of fruit and max and kohl are hypnotized by it but then some wanderers come by and nicky just conjures a stick and she puts it in the fire so it's hot and then she prods the max and kohl along so that they'll run and then they reach a bowl of fruit and eat because i guess they're just idiots and then the wanderers corner them so nicky leads them off and gets attacked and she's about to die but then ash comes and saves her he's alive you know these rings would probably be a lot more interesting if they had threats besides like the vague insanity energy and the wanderers who are you know there uh but kohl and max finally come to and they you know regain their senses uh but there are some shades there and kohl kisses nicky again gives her some energy so she can run so keep in mind she's now fed off of him twice and then while they're running they find the queen again and they try to talk their way out of this by saying nicky is just some girl who's trying to save her boyfriend and they leave out the part of her surviving the feed because the queen again would probably kill her over that but the queen just is still not happy with them and she orders the shades to take them away to be consumed and they actually try to hurt her ash throws a sword at her but she can conjure anything just like nicky so they can't hurt her like ash throws a sword at her and she just conjures a tree which catches the sword in the middle of it it sounds kind of stupid when you say it like that but that is how it works but then nicky realizes who the queen is and shows off the medallion it turns out the queen is actually adonia you know the girl that ash thought died a while ago like she she didn't die she overthrew the last queen but she's now hiding her identity for reasons that are never explained actually i assume the twist is just there because we needed a twist like if she became queen shouldn't mrs jenkins and her other relatives have become immortal like it maybe they're not direct descendants of her like she's their great great great aunt or something instead of their great great great grandmother so it only applies to her direct descendants i i don't know now ash actually tries to apologize and says he only had her killed because he loved her and she's justifiably very mad at him for that uh so she's there with max and ash and i guess they somehow get away because in the next book they're they're fine uh but nicky and coal run away and jump into a nearby lake which isn't actually a lake it's the entrance to the tunnels so we're almost there they've almost gotten to jack now while they're searching col mentions that because jack is you know losing out on energy he might be old now and he asks nicky like what if he's old and you have to feed him mashed peas and she's like well i love him i'll do it anyways and then col says that's kinky oh dude what what the fuck like col's dialogue is what happens when a bad boy is written by somebody who has only ever met boys at church so they finally find jack and he's in kind of a hole surrounded by dirt uh and nicky has to dig him out a bit and before that she is like really exhausted you know she's trying to dig him out but she's just really really tired so col gives her a little bit more energy with a kiss so she's now fed on him three times in the ever knee and then he snatches the tether and kicks her back to the surface and she winds up in the shop and go and the store clerk there sees her his name is ezra by the way and he's known about ever livings the whole time like he he said a couple of things throughout these books but we're just now learning he actually knew about this the whole time and col pays him to keep quiet and i just i don't know this again this doesn't come back but it is something worth mentioning now nicky thinks that col betrayed her at the last second and she tells will about this and will is trying to be positive so he says maybe he sent some sort of danger there and kicked her to get her out of the way but he never tries pulling her back or anything and in her dreams there's no sign of jack so she's thinking oh man he he really is dead now she goes to mrs jenkins house but she's also dead like she was drained by somebody and she calls the cops and the police think that she's been dead for a couple of days because you know being drained make made her body decay a little bit more and so nobody you know suspects nicky of anything and you know she's like super sad and moping for a bit and then jack just appears in nicky's bed while she's sleeping oh edward cullen every creepy love interest will be stealing from your playbook until the end of time yeah jack says that somehow the note pulled him to the surface like he's also a lot bigger and taller now than before for some reason like noticeably and nicky thinks that's weird but she's also unconcerned and she's just happy that he's back and she also takes him to their friend joules who remember exists and then they hug and cry for a bit in a very short scene and then coal reappears and he's actually shocked that jack is there like and he comes right out and says yeah nicky i betrayed you like because it turns out that feeding on coal in the everneath three times has turned her into an everliving you lie you're a fucking liar like becoming an everliving is it's like a magical std i suppose like her surface heart is i don't know how coal knows this but her surface heart is a compass which is just on her desk and he just grabs it and puts in his pocket right away and her everneath heart is gonna be somewhere in the queen's vault and coal says that yeah i betrayed you and i did something horrible but now you'll have an eternity to forgive me for everything and then he also mentions that max and the rest of the band are the ones that killed mrs jankins and the book ends with nicky deciding that she's going to destroy the everneath now i will say that while this isn't as good as the first book at all mostly because it tries to redeem coal a little bit uh it is it does have an exciting story and it does end on a solid cliffhanger just like the first book and after i finished this one i actually took a break to read night bane and i all admit i did have high hopes for the finale because i was thinking okay yes coal just is a villain now like he'll be bad in the last book and we can stop treating him like a love interest right wrong i heard she was a lesbian that just means she likes what i like so then we go to book three which i don't have a jacket for uh it's ever true and i'll all be honest you don't need to put ever in front of everything it's kind of annoying to be honest now this third book doesn't follow any specific greek myths at least not that i noticed and i think that's part of why it was the worst of all three you know like i'm not even talking about like how awful the characters are or anything which is worth bringing up believe me we'll get to that just like the events themselves like there is a clear goal that nicky is working towards there is a time limit and there's very clear consequences for failure the problem is that most of the events in ever true are just nonsensical and random and don't really lead into each other and the real villain is not coal it's queen adonia but she's barely in it so i think i'm gonna go a bit faster here and we should hopefully be done with the summary quicker so the book starts with nicky telling jack that she is an ever living now but she's also unable to feed on him and but i don't know basically this information is drip fed to us basically her body is still adjusting to being an ever living so she needs to feed off of coal for a little while before the transformation is complete and then once the transformation is complete she needs to feed on a human right away or she'll die like that's that's the basics of it okay that's all we need to know so they break into coles condo they find a jack in a box and when they open it there's a note inside taunting them and then jack is really really mad when they're outside so he just punches a tree and destroys it with his bare hands like he's again he's bigger and stronger but he's just like stupidly powerful now but again he also has serious anger issues and is breaking stuff when he's mad which people boys girls everyone steer clear of men like that that's that's bad news that that's like 80 red flags right there a mark also appears on nicky's wrist and she's getting weak and pale and sick and that's when coal shows up and explains everything to her and kisses her a bit to feed her and he also shows up at their school as neil which i i didn't mention in the first book he showed up at her school a couple times in disguise as a student named neil and i don't know i i i don't know why it was there it was kind of weird but uh him and nicky are partnered together for a mythology project about hercules and nicky mentions that hercules was dumb but he really wasn't you know like if you know the myth of hercules and the 12 laborers he's pretty intelligent at times but whatever not important so cole forcibly kisses nicky and she explains what is going on to jack and she has to calm him down from violently attacking cole lovely and they tell their friend joules about some of it and again she doesn't do anything but they do tell her that bad things are going to happen and they find max who remember coles bandmate and they ask for help like because again they're planning on destroying the everneeth and preventing nicky from turning into an everliving like they think that's their best course of action here completely unprompted max tells them that they're now planning a revolution and that they're gathering up a bunch of girls to use as forfeits to boost their power and if nicky becomes queen then they won't die in their revolution and we also learn why jack is so huge and it is remarkably stupid cole raised an eyebrow he climbed out of the tunnels the energy it took to do that was massive each inch would have been the equivalent of i don't know say 100 weightlifting sessions so someone who is beefy before would become extra beefy he seems suddenly bored with the explanation so jack climbed out of hell and it just gave him a workout uh sure sure sure well fuck it sure we'll go with that so cole offers to make jack and ever living as well and then he and nicky would rule together while jack was just her concubine and they don't trust him so they say no and they take a document that they found at mrs jenkins house to the professor from before professor spears and say that they want to destroy the underworld like again they just tell everyone everything but professor spears is surprisingly cool with this and he tells them that the the heart of every everliving must be destroyed to destroy the everneath and they also have to destroy the membrane which is holding the place together which is the shade network as we learn later which i guess makes sense but i don't know how this guy knows this and he has not enough time to give any sort of interesting backstory or anything so he did he just knows shit i guess so uh then they go to coles condo and a man there attacks her and actually this this happened at the end of a chapter and i actually went to bed after that chapter and took a week to get back to this book because i just did not give a shit about what was happening anymore but then jack saves her from the bad man and they run off and it takes one page and nicky also passes out when jack takes her away because i i don't know the main character just has to pass out sometimes so they realize that she passed out because she missed a feed and they're like okay we need to go find cole again and they go back but cole is gone and his place is ransacked and somebody seems to have stolen the hearts that were there including nickies and so she goes to sleep she dreams she sees queen adonia and adonia sees her through the dream and then nickies like ah and then the queen scratches her and a real scratch appears on her cheek in the waking world and they realize like okay she's coming after us now they get a text from the soup kitchen uh because there's apparently a man there who doesn't speak english and is asking for nicky and they go there and it's cole and he kisses her giving her some energy but jack gets violent and uncontrollable again for a minute again so many red flags with this guy like their relationship was so fine to begin with and now it's this uh but yeah cole had a bunch of his memories erased so he only speaks norwegian now and when they ask him what happened he says jeeg vet ike hava som skede i i hope i'm pronouncing that correctly or at least kind of correctly but according to google translate that means i don't know what happened and spoiler alert we never learned what happened either like the the band got captured by bounty hunters and taken away and later we see the rest of them are all still captured but somehow cole got out like was he released did he escape who cares he still understands everything they're saying though so nicky is able to teach him to speak english in just a couple of minutes but he has a very thick accent after that so i don't know they're not sure what to do with him so they stashed him in a hotel and he doesn't actually remember who nicky is only that he wanted to find her and he doesn't really remember anything else either like about who he is or the fact that he's immortal or what they were up to anything and while they're in a hotel room nicky and jack try to be like they try to be sexy i think like nicky takes off her hoodie and underneath she's wearing a t-shirt and both jack and cole are way too into it they're like it's like she's in her underwear or she's completely naked or something the way they react to it it's like like she's revealing her arms and her elbows and they are just like yes mistress i shall do whatever you say please show me what it's it's weird but uh nicky tries to get col to help by telling him that the everliving killed his family and she also lies to them about to him about them burning down his entire village so yeah they're lying to get him to help them that won't backfire in any way or at least that's what i thought at first it actually it actually doesn't come back and backfire in any way col also mentions that to him death seems inevitable i don't know what i did before maybe it's because i'm hundreds of years old as you say maybe my subconscious knows i'm supposed to be dead maybe that's why death feels so natural so inevitable you know in my notes after i got to that point i just wrote swear to god they're trying to redeem him and yeah yeah yeah past james you are correct they are trying to redeem him and they really shouldn't have but they decide to go to the everneath and find ash and they are like okay he's our best bet to figure out what to do next and like i said there is a bounty on col and nicky so when they find ash he says that bounty hunters are after them like the man at col's condo who had black eyes was actually 10 shades that banded together to possess a single living person and at this point ash mentions that the reason he missed his feed was because he lived on the surface with a human for a while and like that's why he's turning into a shade like sure whatever so then ash leaves for a bit to go turn them in but they follow him and they wind up in some sort of tunnel like not the tunnels where the feeds take place but like just some sort of underground area under the city and they find a big chamber with a massive glowing orb which is surrounded by shades and they get found out and they run away and they barely manage to escape and go back to the surface and right before leaving ash tells them that a cronus tantalus can help but none of them know what that is but it's the only clue they have so they decide to follow it nicky feeds on col again and we find they get his full backstory basically he lived in norway in the year 1186 he lived on a farm and a man named gunnar was coming to challenge him to a home gang which is a duel basically and when col lost they would lose the farm not to goon they're goon they're sin he's the best fighter in all of norway that accent was spot on and you know it fuck you like that doesn't make sense because a home gang was for settling disputes it wasn't for randomly stealing someone else's property like that that's not how it worked but okay whatever and col is like hey no matter what we're going to lose so he tells his mom and his brother like let's just leave but and they refuse to leave but he runs off expecting that the two of them will follow eventually but they don't and then goon they're goon they're sin and his gangs show up and they just attack and kill his brother and his mom and then he runs off we also see another memory from col this one shows adonia being held captive before she was queen and then she kills her captor who i believe was the previous queen and there's i don't know i feel like we could have filled in the blanks there on our own but whatever that's the thing then in the real world some shades attack them and col gets hit and they kill the shade but he is drained of energy and seems to be dying and so jack realizes okay i can just feed him some of my energy but he doesn't want to kiss him so he just puts his lips really close to col and that works but bro this is life and death you can set aside your homophobia for 10 seconds so finally with the help of will they realize that cronus is a reference to the greek myth like cronus was the father of zeus and he actually castrated his own father with a sickle and then they're like well of course there must be a sickle of cronus out there somewhere who and that's the only thing that can destroy the shade network which again is the membrane holding the everneath together and i'll be real with you that's a shitty clue like he didn't say anything about a sickle or anything if he said cronus sickle then that would be something but he cronus tantalus and like okay they just are magically able to find out what he meant by that and tantalus is another greek myth tantalus being a man who was punished to be hungry and thirsty for all time and he was sitting in a lake under a tree but he would never be able to eat the fruit of the tree or drink from the lake again that's a shitty clue but there are they are able to figure out what it means because kohl suddenly remembers that there is a lake in the everneath and when you go to that lake you'll find whatever it is you most desire but you can only do it once per lifetime so he was just saving it for a big occasion so they go to the lake and all three of them sit in the branches of a tree and then that causes a platform to rise up out of the lake and they try to get off the branch but then the platform starts falling back down and they realize okay kohl and jack need to keep their weight on there to keep the platform in place so nicky just has to go off and get it on her own but then a massive swarm of beetles appears and then nicky just runs across them climbs the platform grabs the sickle and then she falls off the platform gets swarmed by beetles and she nearly dies but then jack saves her because why would we ever want the protagonist to do something on her own and then they set out to find the helmet of hermes which they need to mask their energy in the everneath which it's called the helmet of hermes but it's actually a pendant i may as well just say that now and the pendant was actually owned by mrs. jenkins before she died and so they call a woman who was next in chain for the custody of the pendant and then kohl suddenly remembers a storage unit and then he runs off goes to it and opens it and grabs a package while he's there and a bounty hunter appears and attacks them and again they don't have any weapons or anything but to defend himself jack just grabs the first thing he finds in the storage unit which is a saxophone so i'm just imagining him swinging that around it's pretty funny but they incapacitate the bounty hunters then steal their car and flee and the package that kohl got has the pen has the pendant in it it has the helmet of hermes and then kohl tells them the story about devin his cellmate from when the delphinians had him held prisoner in his novella and this was apparently the artifact that devin had and told him about but also mrs. jenkins owned it i don't know i don't know how any of this works man so now they have what they need to destroy the everneath uh they realize that the big orb they saw underground was actually the membrane so they just need to destroy that with the sickle and then somehow they're going to destroy the hearts and jack just says he has like he just has faith that things will work out which is kind of stupid but whatever that's a thing and then nicky starts wondering a bit about why exactly she's destroying the everneath she wonders am i just doing this to save myself or am i doing it to save all of the forfeits that will be killed but then in one of the quickest ways of making me hate a protagonist i've ever seen in my life she thinks nah all the forfeits are guilty because they chose to go to the feed and just like that i hated nicky so much like she she knows exactly how manipulative the everliving can be but she refuses to acknowledge that others could have fallen victim the same way she did like fuck you nicky seriously fuck you so they go back to will and they recruit him to help and will suggests that in order to destroy all of the hearts at once they should just go to the vault and blow it up and he says that he can just contact some of his old army friends and they'll help him make a bomb that's stupid use your common sense yeah sure man they aren't just gonna call homeland security on you like they're going to assume that you're helping your little brother destroy the underworld not that you're gonna blow up a school or something and then they also talk to professor spears and he says yeah that'll work and he also says that destroying the vault might kill the queen too which again don't know how he knows this but sure he just he just does and nicky specifically mentions that she is protective of coal like she says that she cares about him and wants to keep him safe fuck off now remember the other members of coals band got captured a while ago and they are all set to be consumed at a feast that the queen is running you know again like just bring him up on stage kill them all and then the crowd consumes them which don't feel bad again remember they murdered mrs. Jenkins and who knows how many others over the years like it don't don't feel bad so the others try to rescue them and they go to the everneath in the middle of the feast and the other band members are immediately killed and consumed so they like they just they had no chance to save them and the heroes run off immediately go to a cavern that houses the you know the big orb the membrane of the everneath and nicky hits it with the sickle to try and destroy it and nothing happens so then she hands it to jack and then he hits it with the sickle and it works perfectly the whole thing is destroyed because why would you want the protagonist of your story to actually do anything and they escape the cavern but oh no now the everneath is on lockdown and they can't leave like they originally left the pendant with the orb so it would mask the energy like basically it just would absorb all the energy coming off of it so that no one would know they destroyed it but kohl actually stole the pendant from it and brought it back which is why the everneath is on lockdown and they realize that what happens during lockdown is all of their surface hearts get taken to the vault where their everneath hearts are which prevents them from going back and forth from the surface and so they realize like oh okay that's convenient we can destroy all of their hearts at once also because they destroyed the membrane now the shades are free and they're gonna leave the everneath and go to the surface and start feeding on humans soon which means that nicky and company really have to destroy the hearts now or people are going to die so you know that information might have been a little more useful to me yesterday and they meet back up with ash and he takes them to a special entrance to the high court like it's the entrance that the shades use don't know how he knows about it but sure he knows about the special entrance to the high court and they reach the vault and in order to open it jack just rips the vault door off its hinges like i don't know how he's planning on explaining that to people when all this is over like humans aren't that strong i don't know how he's gonna explain to people that he can lift up cars and shit but whatever now they don't sense nicky's heart when they're down there and they realize that her everneath heart is not fully developed and it's probably wherever coal hit it on earth or something once again things that could have been brought to my attention yesterday i don't know i don't know again like their everneath heart is supposed to just be in the vaults coal doesn't remember anything it's just things are happening now so some shades appear and jack fights them and holds them off and then nicky and coal run to find the hearts and ash and will just disappear while this is going on i guess and then so nicky finds coals heart but then the queen appears and she knocks coals out and she's holding nicky's heart the compass and coal regains consciousness and then jack and will appear again ash is just kind of gone and then they manage to all grab onto coals heart the pick and then they all hold together and go back to the surface and then while they're there they're like okay we need to go back and set the bomb off as soon as possible so coal spends a bit of time teaching nicky how to conjure stuff in the everneath she figures out how to make sparks and flames which will set the bomb off and then will says he'll show her how to make the bomb again like that this guy just waltzes into an army base and asks how to make high explosives and they just they just go with it so they go back to the vault and now it's being protected by magical thorny vines jack places the barman bomb in there but his arm is stuck and at first i thought like he was going to stay there and sacrifice himself but now they just get him free and then they set the timer and run and the bomb explodes and the vault is destroyed but the everneath is still there everybody is gone except for queen adonia and then the queen asks if nicky knows what happens when you destroy an ever living's hearts and she's like kind of implying that it doesn't take their immortality or doesn't just take their immortality and then she says something to nicky about like well your mom died in a car crash because her ribs were crushed and she suffocated i don't know how she knows this like can she see how everyone died unexplained she just she just knows this so then she conjures a glass box and fills it up with water and stuffs nicky in it and so nicky starts drowning and then coal appears and he hits the queen with some sort of club and incapacitates her for a minute like again he can just do that now and then he draws a heart on the glass and nicky realizes she needs to think about the queen's heart to summon it and the queen has this little necklace with some sort of design on it and she's like okay well clearly her heart looks like that so she just thinks about it and the heart gets summoned to her and it flies towards her hits the glass and both the glass and the heart get broken and then the queen ages and then dies and turns into dust within a couple of seconds once again very nice for the protagonist to barely do anything in the climax the solution is just given to her in fact that's weirdly common in this genre for some reason i find it a little strange that something that is seemingly aimed at teenage girls to only ever have the teenage girl protagonist be saved by men i'm not sure what that means or says about people but yeah the everneeth starts falling apart and everyone goes back to the surface except for coal and nicky and by everyone going back i mean like jack and will uh and also coals memory is back now and he pulls out their two surface hearts like the guitar pick and the compass these are the last ones in existence i always had it nick ever since we went back to look for it at my condo i found it in a guitar case and i took it even though at the time i didn't really understand what i was doing what about the compass that the queen had that was just another compass i'd found in the vault apparently compasses are common objects for hearts to be turned into sure fuck it sure he just he has this sure actually his memory returned a little while ago like it was right after the feast when the bandmates were killed and right before you know the actual climax began so he's had it for a while he just didn't say anything and they have a bit of time where coal continues to try to be redeemed but nicky realizes because she's like wait a minute the queen died when we destroyed her hearts and she realizes that when she destroys the hearts of an everneeth it returns them to their natural state so they're they'll age all at once like the queen aged 200 years at once and if coals heart is destroyed he's going to age 800 years at once now personally i think that'd be great but nicky is apparently sad about it i bit my lip to keep it from trembling give me your heart i said he tilted his head leaned forward watching my eyes the entire time to make sure it was okay and kissed me lightly on the lips you already have it i hate this man so much so yeah they break the two hearts and then cold eyes and the last of the everneeth is it just falls apart and nicky goes back to the surface after that there is one last chapter and it's it's not called an epilogue but it essentially is and it's just really really short it's only like three pages and basically we learned that the everneeth is gone and nicky's dad because again she kept disappearing for the last two books which was about i don't know two or three weeks is the time period it took place over uh so he's sending her to rehab now and her and jack are just in love and she's like yeah i'll be gone for a little while but at least i'll always have you and then they have an entire paragraph about how cold redeemed himself which i just it's disgusting i just refused to even read it on here okay just it's disgusting and i don't know i just i was asking myself like is that what the series was about cold redemption because i don't think that's what it was about and throughout all of this throughout this entire last chapter nicky never stops and realizes she killed all of the ever livings like there's probably thousands of them there and she killed all of them like it would be one thing if she thought that they deserved to die because they're all essentially parasites that can only exist by killing other people and i mean nicky was willing to die instead of become one of them so if she held some sort of disdain or hate towards them that might make sense but let's also not forget that col pushed her to this like he was so obsessed with owning her that he forced her to become an ever living and she was so she like she was so desperate to avoid doing that that she became a mass murderer or okay i guess mass manslaughterer is more accurate but whatever like she would have left them alone if col hadn't turned her so she doesn't have any real hatred towards them seemingly but she and everyone else just ignores the elephant herd in the room like they never even think about how they just killed all those people and yeah that's just that's how it ends nicky kills an entire civilization and her dad is sending her to rehab but it's all okay because she has jack we have a lot to do when you get home jack said we have time to do it he sighed time he said the word as if it were something we'd fought for something we'd risk our lives for time i love you i said he kissed my head i'm ever yours and i was ever his and like that that's how it ends you know that's that's it oh shit where's my fucking glasses so that took a while but believe me it could have taken longer and now that you have all the needed context you can see the whole picture of this series like most of the problems aren't immediately apparent while you're reading they only start to really pop out and become obvious looking back so now i can go over them one by one but before i get into the problems i do want to talk about the positives because like i said i unironically like the first book and there's still parts of the second and third that i enjoyed and i've said this already but it bears repeating all three books have really really strong openings and climaxes and well okay the last book doesn't really have a strong climax but it's stronger than anything else in that book up until that point like the story of all three books they all have clear goals the first one is keep nicky out of the tunnels second one is save jack the third one is destroy the everneath and by doing so save nicky and the first two at least do have a really good sense of progression from beginning to end and there's even some decent twists throughout like you know adonia being the queen although it doesn't make much sense is a good twist in that it at least caught me off guard and it did make me feel something it just you know looking back on it didn't make sense uh at the end of the first book jack's sacrificing himself that was a good twist the band members all being killed right away instead of the heroes rescuing them that was a good twist but the entire story just crumbles by the end and even the good parts of the story just can't save the absolute horrific subtext or how everyone involved is completely awful like i don't know i this whole part is just about how the story actually works and is kind of good maybe it's too short to warrant its own section but i just i needed to be fair to this series you know the stories are good when they're following greek myths and when they're not following greek myths they're passable i suppose one thing i did enjoy about the first book is how everyone in it felt real you know even if they weren't particularly deep they were real you know from niki to her dad to jack to mrs jenkins and even col they all seemed like people that i could actually meet they weren't necessarily good people again i've gone into why i hate col already but they felt real and then we meet in the second book adonia and ash and they similarly felt real like they were traumatized they were betrayed they were guilt-stricken and by the end what's become of them all well by the end they've all turned into horrifying creatures that the author wants us to love in spite of everything so let's start with col whenever col talks about becoming the ruler of the everneeth and wanting niki to be queen in the first book he seems to want to rule just so he doesn't have to bring any sacrifices to the queen like it's not out of any moral objection like he hates himself for doing this or he thinks it's wrong he just seems kind of lazy and i'm not sure how he would actually be the ruler if niki took over because the current queen is the one who has all the power and she has no consort or king of any sort so i guess col is just thinking niki would be in charge and she would feel like she owed him so he would just get to chill in the high court i don't know and col never has any other motive for wanting to rule he just doesn't want to do the work of grabbing forfeits now his motive for wanting niki to be immortal makes sense like he says he loves her and wants to be with her really he just wants to possess her and like that's not a good motivation but it is a motivation like one that would work for a villainous character and in the first book he warns niki that she'll be dragged into the tunnels and drained away to nothing by the shades if she doesn't become an everliving so he's not killing her like not directly at least but he does seem to sympathize with her and he does want her to make the choice to save herself but then early on in the first book like when he first sneaks into her room he actually he just straight up asks her why she came to earth instead of just going straight to the tunnels and when she refuses to tell him he threatens to feed on her younger brother to get her to talk because again fuck this guy i hate him so much uh but then she tells him she wanted to come back to see her loved ones just a little bit more before she dies which isn't exactly hard to guess like i think most people would make that choice but col is a straight fucking sociopath so i guess he's not able to grasp that like he he's not able to understand basic love and connection that people have so if he's a straight up villain he works like he's just too evil to be anything else but he's not he's a love interest he's the third leg the losing leg in a love triangle in books two and three niki makes it clear that she does care about him and she doesn't love him as much as jack but she doesn't want anything bad to happen to him like she doesn't trust him because she has to in the second book and it's if she did she'd probably be expecting him to betray her at some point she thinks of him as a friend and in the last book this part is confirmed but i felt protective of col i couldn't deny it anymore i'd been so worried about letting go of my anger and my hate but my mistake was thinking it was actually my choice i had about as much choice in the matter as an ice sculpture on a sunny day drop by drop without my permission my anger and hate had melted away maybe i would get screwed because of it but i no longer had a choice like again she's just coming right out and because col is like so charming or whatever she just decides she doesn't hate him anymore and then at the end he sacrifices himself to destroy the everneath but we don't know exactly why like was he doing it just because it would make nicky happy or because he doesn't want to live anymore like the the issue isn't his character or his actions so much as his as the attempts to redeem him like you know this series could easily be asking the question of like what actions if any are too horrible to come back from like that that's an interesting question like the god of war video games ask that specifically the more recent norse ones and by the end of that series kratos is redeemed redeemed but it required him changing no longer constantly acting on his violent impulses as he did before and just becoming a protector of normal people but that question is never asked here like hell for all we know col just killed himself at the end because he realized like okay with the everneath gone there's no way for me to go to the tunnels and feed on people anymore so i'm just gonna age and die soon anyways i may as well just go out now like we don't know we he never says it and we don't get to see it from his perspective because remember col would have had to feed on several other people before nicky and just out of self preservation you know just trying to keep himself alive but he never feels guilty or remorseful for it and remember this is a metaphor for sexual assault like i don't know if that's intended by the author but it certainly comes across that way it's a metaphor for sexual assault so this guy is basically just a serial rapist and he taunts nicky about her horrible experiences and he clearly enjoys feeding on her and manipulating her because remember we see his perspective in neverfall like if this was all seen through nicky's eyes and he came across this way that would be one thing because again he did horrible things to her but then the the opportunity if you're trying to redeem him would be to look at things from his perspective and try and make us realize like okay he's not a horrible guy but no he comes across even worse after reading his novella so any redemption arc would require some serious work but here all we have is him losing his memory and then helping to destroy the everneath but remember again the queen wanted him dead too so because he was plotting a revolution like his time was running out already so the queen would have tracked him down and killed him eventually so him helping to take her down was basically just self-preservation and like i said when he killed himself at the end we aren't privy to the reasons that he does so it's like the author just decided that he needed to be good now and the thing is had Cole state a villain or at least had he been the final villain of the series in the last book after his betrayal in the second one i would be praising him i would be praising this book series for writing one of the slimyest and most despicable villains i've ever found but Cole doesn't stay the villain i'm supposed to like him and i can't like him i can't forgive him he doesn't deserve forgiveness he deserves to be smashed across the face with a piece of heavy mining equipment so his character starts off okay and then decays over time then i need to talk about niki and adonia but i need to talk about them at the same time you'll you'll see why in a minute niki is a traumatized victim at the start of the series but she does keep true to her beliefs she will not become an everliving and feed on people under any circumstances even if it means that she'll die she just refuses to do it and then when jack saves her she's willing to do anything to return the favor and rescue him so she's somebody who survived the feed and maintained her good nature at least at first now we contrast that with adonia now queen adonia is portrayed as this cold heartless monster that only exists to prevent niki from achieving her goals but the thing is she didn't want to be queen she wound up there by chance like she thought her boyfriend died and she wanted to make the pain go away so ash fed on her you know she is a scared manipulated victim exactly the same way niki was and we find out at the end that when she was trying to prevent them from destroying the everneath she was actually fighting to save the lives of herself and thousands of other everliving that niki was trying to kill so at the beginning niki set herself set out to make herself mortal to avoid killing anyone in the name of survival which is a noble goal but then she winds up killing a bunch of people in the name of her own survival and honestly if her and adonia ever had the chance to talk i feel like i feel like they could have just destroyed her hearts and maybe coals as well and then gone their separate ways and they they would have gotten along okay but then if the everneath continued on then forfeits would have continued being consumed by the everliving so no matter what people were gonna die like it it's a morally gray situation to say the least but the story treats niki's actions as if they're all unambiguously good like you could argue that it was right to kill all the everliving since you know they're like vampires they can only survive by sucking the life out of others you know sucking you off like a god damn vampire or whatever it is olivia rodrigo says but everyone we see in this series became an everliving either against their will or with lies and coercion niki adonia and even coal like they all became everneaths against their will not feeding would not just kill them it would turn them into shades i think again it's the series is kind of goes back and forth like it whatever it would either turn them into a shade or it would turn them into a wanderer and that that wouldn't just kill them it would be a horrible eternal fate but niki never spares a thought for any of these everliving's who might have been trapped in this shitty situation you know books are the books are so focused on her and her problems that they wind up turning her into a worse monster than the villain and by the villain here i mean queen adonia like imagine if niki found out ahead of time that all the everliving's would die when she destroyed their hearts and destroyed the everneath like she could wrestle with the morality of killing them you know instead of being a blank character who is just always right because she's the protagonist she would be a scared confused teenager fighting for her life and the best way to have niki decide to die rather than to turn into an everliving would probably be to show her what might happen if she does become one like imagine if they met an everliving at some point in the series who became one unwittingly or unwillingly and has been completely destroyed mentally by it like they feed every 100 years but they feel unfathomable shame and guilt and self-loathing over it but they're also so afraid of turning into a shade or wanderer that they keep doing it you know that this person could be like a barely functioning alcoholic who is hardly even lucid you know it's they're barely living at all and this would contrast with queen adonia as the two past that niki would go down if she becomes an everliving she could either be an unfeeling monster who leads a demonic empire built on lies and death or a sad shell of a person who spends eternity trying to forget themselves and i think the best candidate for this would be max you know like coles bandmate who does a few things but never really gets a personality you know like imagine if he had a similar story to niki where he gets turned into an everliving either unwittingly or against his will and maybe he even tried to go into the tunnels to rescue his loved one at some point but then he failed you know more similar to the story of orpheus at that point uh but unlike her he decides to feed on people so that he can live and then he has to grow old and watch his remaining loved ones die from far away and then he also just for the next however many hundreds or thousands of years he has to keep in mind that i only exist because i kill other people like hell he could even be the one who decides to help rescue jack and decides to help her rescue jack and then coles kind of gets dragged along you know and he could tell niki that the everliving's die when their hearts are destroyed like he could just make it clear to her what the rules are here and that would force her to grapple with the idea that yeah the everliving's do subsist by killing other people but many of them didn't choose this life you know people can be victims and villains at the same time and eventually she would just come to the conclusion that she's willing to kill them all in order to prevent more victims from being created and that would be really unfortunate but it would also be the only way to end the cycle but we just we never get that you know niki is just treated as unambiguously good even though she's a mass murderer at the end then we got jack who starts off good but then in the last book he's like weirdly violent and angry and niki has to beg him not to attack and hurt people multiple times and then max the bandmate seems fine at first but then he helps murder mrs jankins so i hate that guy that guy too and then ash but okay ash didn't really decay he was always an asshole but i mean again he at least has some personality like pretty much all the characters here start off good then they fall apart by the end like the only good characters here are will and adonia to a lesser extent like will has a whole backstory which is barely even hinted at and then he overcomes his ptsd to help save his little brother and niki and then there's adonia who does bad things but we see exactly how she became the way she is you know she she didn't want to be here she didn't want to be the queen of the everneath she's hurt and traumatized and lashing out but she is also trying to protect herself and others remember when the everneath falls the shades start going out to kill people like again it's given a couple lines of dialogue and then never mentioned again but that is a thing that happens like someone needs to hold that place together and then niki kills adonia without a thought and it's treated as this as this triumphant moment you know like i just i kept imagining the story from adonia's perspective you know like just the same events but just from her perspective like she loses a loved one and then when looking for solace she gets dragged to the underworld and drained of her soul except somehow she manages to survive then she becomes immortal and takes over this place she barely knows watching from afar as all her friends and family die and are forgotten then this other girl appears in her realm and says she wants to save the man she loves and adonia doesn't know anything about her surviving the feed at that point remember now she needs to maintain some sort of order in this place that she's doomed to spend eternity in so she tries to have this girl killed but then this girl and some treacherous underlings destroy the everly the everneath the place that maybe she hated maybe she'd grown to love but either way it was all she had and that place is gone along with all the people that lived there so she's alone now forever not to mention that the shades are about to start killing people so she failed in her job to try and keep them in line and before she can try to fix anything or even get revenge she is killed and just just no matter what form she was in at the end of her life i could only see her as that scared heartbroken young girl who ash tried to suck the life out of so he could live another hundred years and i see her dying alone surrounded by the ruins of her destroyed home while this rapist and his victim celebrate you know it's just i don't know it's impossible for me to feel happy about this climax it just is so by now you should know that coal is the worst third leg in a love triangle that has ever been created just ever the worst ever like first let's remember that he groomed and manipulated nicky when she was in a very vulnerable spot remember he's a much older man who went after this teenage girl in a difficult time and he's done this to plenty of others over the last 800 years but then he takes advantage of her desire to save jack to force her into being an ever living in other words to force her to be with him remember like he left jack in the tunnel tunnels to die like jack escaped on his own like coal was surprised that he lived and all of this was so that he could possess nicky and hopefully take power for himself from the queen he didn't love her he never did and yet when he dies nicky is sad like this is how not to do a bad boy love interest guys a bad boy love interest is someone who skips school to smoke at the park or is just kind of boisterous and refuses to respect authority not a magical rapist like his entire relationship with nicky was so gross i felt like i had been dipped in sewage every time i had to listen to her say that she cared about him but okay you understand by now that's bad what about the otp nicky and jack well at first their relationship is fine but then in the last book he's showing all sorts of red flags like it if he has to be talked down from violently assaulting people on multiple occasions that's a sign of anger issues okay we're like right now it's coal but tomorrow it could easily be nicky and she's not as bad as coal he's not but this is still all kinds of not okay i don't think i ever even mentioned that uh when nicky went missing for six months jack and her friend joules started dating and then as soon as she comes back jack leaves her for nicky and it clearly hurts joules feelings like the books acknowledge that this crushes her but no one ever stops to consider that she doesn't deserve to just be tossed aside you know she's she's shown to be worried when jack is missing and when he returns home she holds him in cries for a bit it's a very short throwaway scene but that happens and she doesn't even get any mention in the epilogue like we're just supposed to forget she exists is she hung up on jack does she find somebody else who cares i guess like she's not the main character so she doesn't matter do i even need to mention the other romances here like the love triangle between ash adonia and nathaniel like there is not a single romance in this paranormal romance book series that makes me feel anything other than fatigue sorrow anger and or annoyance i wasn't exaggerating when i said this was the worst romance ever put to paper it features a rapist who forces immortality upon somebody who doesn't want it but then she still loves him then they kill thousands of people together like what the fuck am i even supposed to do with that sure 50 shades of gray and some others also are romance stories with abusive partners sometimes they're sexually abusive sometimes they're otherwise abusive but a lot of those are just porn you know it's a sexual fantasy there's not a lot of points of looking at it from a realistic perspective i don't think underneath whatever else it is it's not porn this is supposed to be sweet and heartwarming and tragic but it's not it's just gross this isn't a romance it's a collection of wicked actions painted over with something that's supposed to resemble an alluring story i suppose it might be nice if you're dumb enough to fall for it but i am not and i think a lot of people agree with me at least in general terms about this series since the last book in the series has the lowest score on goodreads like normally on goodreads the first book has the lowest score and then they get higher over time because people who dislike the first book usually aren't going to continue after that but i think everyone who read and enjoyed the first ever neath book were dismayed when they saw what became of it to be honest all the good stuff from the first book here feels like it was done by accidents you know like the author just threw darts at an idea board and threw it all in without thought like did the author make nicky refuse to be an everliving because she wanted the protagonist to have a personality or because she just needed the plot to happen did nicky have some difficulties with her dad because it makes sense for both of them to be like that or because the books needed to reach a word count did kohl feed on nicky because he's a parasitic evil person or because that makes him look dark and mysterious the more i look at this it just becomes more of a mess the more i look at it at the end of the day what is everneath you know like what is the core of the story what's it really about and after thinking it over for a bit i have to say it is an attempt to whitewash the terrible actions of terrible people like kohl is a rapist jack has violent mood swings nicky destroys an entire civilization her father drugs and kidnaps her max burns devin alive and then he and the rest of the band lure in and kill who knows how many young girls plus mrs jenkins and mrs jenkins specifically raised her daughter to be a sacrifice in the hopes of gaining immortality for herself like they're all awful people yet the books only sometimes acknowledge this when it's inconvenient to acknowledge that they're awful people they just sweep it under the rug like this is a dark fantasy with morally gray or even morally black heroes but it wants to masquerade as a cute romance and the last chapter especially the last line are just kind of insulting considering everything that led up to them you know the ending here isn't happy it's bittersweet at best but it wants you to think that it's happy weirdly enough i'm reminded of the ending to metro 2033 and basically in that i'm not getting into all the details but at the end of the first book artyom kills all the dark ones and at the last second he realizes that they weren't hostile so he did save his home station but it was at the cost of murdering thousands of sentient beings all because the people of the metro were too shorted to too short sighted to even attempt to understand them and the ending of everneath is like if dmitry glukowski wrote the same ending to metro 2033 but then he added in another scene where artyom shrugs and wonders what's for dinner and then kisses his girlfriend like i don't know i suppose that's the best note i can end this on everneath ignores its own morality and messaging in favor of feel good nonsense but that makes the feel good nonsense ring completely hollow it's like a house with a fresh coat of paint and no one living in it so uh that took a long time not just this video but like getting it out it's been almost six months since i finished breathe or closer to five i guess but it's been a long time since i finished breathe and i had to pause reading everneath to do red queen and then fourth wing and then knight bane and since so many people really liked my very brief summary of red queen i want to do another one of those like a book series that isn't really awful or stupid enough to warrant the deep dive that stuff like this gets but still something that's worth making fun of for a couple hours you know i'm i'm considering maybe doing vampire academy but i've also heard stuff like nightshade or deep blue or maybe chemical garden might fit this bill i don't know it just it seems like it might be fun so let me know how any of those work or if you have any other suggestions because those are all supposed to be dumb and funny as for my next super deep in depth review well i know what i'm doing there see this one i wanted to be a change of pace rather than anything fantasy or young adults i wanted to branch out you know mainstream stuff for adults is perfectly capable of being dog shit too this one is a spy thriller about a british guy who works for the cia for some reason still not sure how that works and it's written by a youtuber and you know that is just a mark of absolute fucking quality just all the time this one is written by a man so good at reviewing movies he can make up his mind about literally any movie months before he even sees it a man so perfect of a writer he can mock writers striking for better pay when he makes upwards of half a million dollars a year a man so good at understanding media he complains that ken in the barbie movie has nothing to do but simp for barbie a man so brilliant he doesn't need to elaborate on a single point he ever makes a man so knowledgeable about japanese cinema he couldn't name a single japanese movie when asked so tune in for redemption by will jordan uh or as he's known on youtube the critical drinker seriously if you couldn't tell from that last bit fuck this guy and his shitty book this thing is terrible and he's a goodbye hello huge thanks to all of my patrons you see these names here yeah these are my patrons uh their names are very cool you should sit here and read all of them especially a thanks to all of my ten dollar and up patrons who are oppa savalainen olivia reyan brother santotes buffy valentine carolina clay chib zahoy dan antcelliovich dark king deo echo flax jalal delul james m lexie delorm lyza rudakova lord tiebreaker microphone mist boy mitzimona peep the toad roby reviews sad martigan psych xs selene sillier the vixen stone stairs tesla shark vaivictus vimek zole and wesley all of you you're you're all amazing i swear all of you you're great and if you watch until this point well you're even more amazing or so yeah uh see you later goodbye like the video comment on it subscribe consider donating patreon what why am i still talking