 So, around ten years ago, and this continued for several years, but I used to go to Barnes & Noble every Friday with my mom because she was looking after younger kids and she would take them there for story time. And while there, I was, you know, older, so I would just wander around and look at books and stuff, and I would obviously read a bunch of them. And this was at the height of the Twilight craze, so there were knockoffs coming out left and right, all over the place. In fact, for a very long time, the Barnes & Noble that we went to had an entire shelf in the teen section that was just labeled Paranormal Romance, and it was just full of nothing but Twilight knockoffs. And I read a bunch of them, okay? It was rare that I would read the entire thing, but I would pick it up, read like 40, 50 pages, and usually I'd get bored by that point and just put it back. So I read a lot of these things, and I gotta say that when I found out Hillary Duff wrote a series of books, I was kind of intrigued. When I found out that they were Twilight knockoffs, I thought, oh dear, here we go. But having now read all three of these, I can confidently say that Elixir is the worst Twilight knockoff in existence. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. For those who don't know, Hillary Duff was a somewhat prolific child actor a long time ago. She had a show called The Lizzie McGuire Show, which some of you might have seen, and then they made a movie off of that called The Lizzie McGuire Movie. She had a musical career for a while, and I thought that she had kind of just disappeared once she entered her 20s, which honestly, by the standards of child stars, that's definitely a good thing because a lot of them just wind up doing cocaine. But I found out that she is also still doing stuff. She still does charity work. She still has a TV show called Younger, which I've never seen, but it's several seasons in so it must have some sort of audience. And anyways, the point is, at one point, she was an author. And I saw that, and I thought, you know, that's either going to be surprisingly good, it's not going to be great, but it will be surprisingly good, or it's just going to be absolutely fucking awful. There will be no in between. And well, yeah, like I said, it's the second one. So I don't know, enough rambling. Let's just talk about this specifically, and this is going to be full of spoilers for the whole series, so if that bothers you, if that bothers you, get over it. So the main character of the story is named Clee Raymond, or Clea Raymond, Clea Raymond. I honestly have no fucking clue how to pronounce her name. I've never seen it before. I don't know, whatever. She's a 17-year-old girl who is totally not a self-insert for Hilary Duff, and her father is a famous surgeon who, like, okay, here's the thing, being a famous surgeon to me would basically mean that he'd be well known within the medical community. Like if he's a very good neurological surgeon, great, a lot of other doctors would know him, but your average person probably wouldn't know him. But in the book it treats it like, yes, the average person does know who he is, and I'm just, okay, that's weird. And her mom is a senator in the United States Congress, which, again, in her own circle she'd be somewhat famous, and the average American person would probably know more about a senator than some surgeon, but again, Clea is repeatedly recognized as being Senator Weston's daughter in these books. In fact, out of all the marks I made in here, I color-coded them, all of the purple ones are ones where she's recognized for being a senator's daughter for some reason, which is stupid, and it happens quite a lot, actually. Did I mention that Hilary Duff was famous when she was a kid? So anyways, the story picks up around a year after Clea's father goes missing. Like, he went off somewhere and just went missing, no one knows what happened to him, and by this point she's accepted that he's most likely dead. And you hear that, you're probably going to be thinking, oh, okay, the story's going to be about her finding her dad, well, just wait, we'll get to that. The story starts with Clea and her friend Reina just hanging out in Paris on vacation before they enter their senior year of high school, which, okay, fine, they're from a wealthy family, that's fine, whatever, it's not a big deal. But then a picture gets taken of Clea, and in the background you can see this mysterious dark figure just standing there, and she's like, whoa, that's kind of creepy. And then she goes through some older photos that she has with her in them, and she notices that in the background pretty much all of them have this guy there. And so at first she thinks that it's a stalker, which is a reasonable conclusion to come to, but she also notices that in some of them this dude is just floating in the air, and he's also in pictures of her when she was like a baby and stuff, which is extremely odd. And so after talking to one of her friends, a guy named Ben, who is older than her, and even though he's only like 20 or 21, he already has a PhD in mythology and stuff, which I'm not even going to go near that, because if I talk about every stupid thing in these books we're going to be here all day, but she talks to him about it, and eventually he admits that, okay, her dad also noticed that this guy was there, and he had no idea what he was. He was some sort of spirit or demon or whatever, but eventually he figured that, okay, well, he's been there forever and he isn't doing anything, so I guess it's fine. Ben also admits that her dad was looking for the elixir of life, which, okay, kind of dumb, but you know what, this book's called Elixir, we had to have an actual reason for it being called Elixir. And around this same time, Clee starts having weird dreams, okay, weird dreams where she is not herself, and the mysterious dark man that is showing up in all of her photos is also there, and there in some sort of relationship. But this happens in multiple different ways, like in one instance she is a singer in a Speak Easy in the 1920s in Chicago, in another one she's some noble woman that lives in England in like the 16th or 17th centuries, and there's like I think four or five different versions of that, but every time, even though she is different, the mysterious dark man is the same, which is a little odd, and again, this is the beginning of the story where things are actually somewhat intriguing, but don't worry, that won't go on for long. So Clea and her friend Ben eventually just go on vacation to Brazil because she's rich and she can do shit like that, and while they're there, she just happens to run across the mysterious dark man on a beach, except he's real now, and so Clea wanting answers decides to run after him, but while she's running after him, she gets caught by these people who she thinks are gangsters at first, and honestly this is probably the stupidest part, one of them recognizes her as a senator's daughter, they just say, hey look, it's that senator's daughter, I'm like, you're in Brazil, okay, how many of you in my audience, how many of you recognize senator's kids, okay, do you know what Ted Cruz's kids look like, no you fucking don't, so I don't know, anyways, her and Ben escape from the gangsters, they run off into the jungle along with the mysterious dark man, his name is Sage by the way, and they hide out in this place, and while they're hiding out there, they talk to him, they demand some answers, and eventually he gives them some answers, which, oh boy, let's get into that, so apparently Sage is 500 years old, alright, he drank the elixir of life at one point and now he's immortal, seems straightforward, except that also his soul is like bound to Claire's, and she was his girlfriend 500 years ago in Italy, which she did have some dreams about, and she's just been reincarnated every 100 years, but every 100 years she also dies because she's mortal, and Sage is immortal, and look, the point is, Sage is immortal, and she's getting reincarnated, their souls are tied together, okay, sounds fine, and it turns out that Sage also met Claire's dad while he was looking for the elixir of life, and so after talking a little bit more they decide, okay, let's go look for Claire's dad, and he, the last place that they know if he went to was in Japan, so they're like, okay, we're gonna head to Japan, so they fly back to the US, and they book a flight to Japan, but it doesn't leave for another day, so the book spends a pretty substantial time, or amount of time, with just Ben, Clea, Sage, and Reyna hanging out in a hotel, and at one point Sage and Glitterus go off to get some snacks for the rest of them, and then while they're in the car she just pulls over and immediately jumps in Sage's lap, and then they start making out, and then they have sex, which don't worry, by the way, it's mentioned that Sage got a condom because he thought this might happen, which I want to make fun of that more, but honestly like it seems reasonable there was some tension there, and he wanted to be responsible, so you know, whatever, I'm fine with that, but then they both immediately profess their love for each other, and I just... okay, so the thing about all those Twilight knockoffs is that almost universally the characters say, I love you way too fast, like they've known each other for only a couple of weeks usually, but they usually, at the very least, meet in circumstances that are you know dangerous and hectic, and so their emotions are running high, so it's kind of understandable that they would feel that way, it probably wouldn't last that long, but it's understandable that they would feel, okay yes I do love this person at that point in time. Sage has known Clea for two fucking days, okay, and Clea has known Sage for two fucking days, I don't care if you've been dreaming about him, or if you feel some sort of weird connection, having them say, I love you that quick is just stupid, there's no way around it, like that I really wish I could find other ways to describe it, other than no it's just stupid, but I think it speaks for itself there, so they head to Japan and they find the last place where Clea's dad was, and it's a hidden area in a mall in Shibuya, and oh by the way, Clea is recognized by passerby while she's walking around, because I guess young people in Japan are really big fans of the children of United States politicians, we're just cool, but anyways they go there and they find this like mummified lady who's still alive hiding in the walls, and her name is Magda, and she was Sage's old fiance back in Italy 500 years ago, but she's still alive, but she didn't have the elixir of life, she apparently her mother was a mystic and cast a spell on her so that she would live forever, but she would continue to age, and my first thought when I read that was, oh okay there's other types of magic beyond the elixir of life, well this this might be kind of interesting, let's see where this goes, it never goes anywhere, like I really mean that, like throughout the second and third books there's basically no other talk of mystics or magic or magic of any sort outside of the elixir, and I'm honestly taken aback that this story could bring something like that up and then just never mention it again, the characters never bring it up again, like I have no idea how it's supposed to work, like they didn't even do the absolute bare minimum on how to make this make sense, it's kind of beautiful in its own way, and I didn't mention this earlier because I kind of forgot, but I mean the book kind of forgot too, but there are actually two different groups that are after Sage, we're just gonna call them cursed vengeance and the saviors, now basically in Sage's backstory, which is revealed completely with Magda, his backstory is that he was just some nobleman who lived in Italy about 500 years ago, and he was part of this secret society which had a couple vials of the elixir of life, and they kind of just hung around and didn't actually drink it or anything, and they didn't know where it came from, and a lot of them thought it wasn't even a real elixir of life, but they just sort of had it and played around with which, okay cool, whatever, I can buy that a bunch of rich assholes would do something like that, but the thing is his girlfriend, who was the lady that Clea was, and then she got reincarnated, and his other friend also found out about it, and he told his other friend about it, his friend got a gang of people together, they stormed the place, they killed everybody, they stole the elixir, and during the fighting they actually stabbed Magda, who she did live, but Sage thought that she was dead, and so when they find her he's very surprised. It's not that important to the story at all, so I don't even know why I mentioned it, but the point is yeah, and Sage gets stabbed as well, but they force him to drink the elixir of life, and then they tie him up in everything, and they notice, oh hey he's healed, so they flee the area and tie him up in a barn, and they basically spend many weeks torturing him to test how well the elixir works, it works very well, it's a you know standard immortality, you get stabbed, it heals, you get set on fire, it heals, and so you know after a while Sage manages to escape, he kills a couple of them, and then they run off, and those guys descendants, the descendants of those guys who stole the elixir, become a group called Cursed Vengeance, and in the modern day they're after Sage, and the family members of the other people who were, I don't know like the secret society that was looking after the elixir and playing around with it, their family members became the saviors, and both of those groups are looking for Sage, but for different reasons, Cursed Vengeance, they actually don't explain that in this book, I'll get into that in the second one, but the saviors just kind of want him so that they can make more elixir and become more, so Magda shows them all that, and then she shows them the other lives that Cleia and Sage have lived, but it turns out that every time it's happened there's been another dude who's been involved with Cleia who she then leaves for Sage, and that dude gets angry, and his anger in some way leads to her death, so like for example the first one was when he brought the gang in to steal the elixir, she got killed in the fighting, another one was where he accused her of witchcraft, she got burned at the stake, and then another one was where he was a gangster, and she left him for Sage, and so he just shot them both, but obviously Sage was immortal so he lived, and it turns out that Ben was actually being reincarnated over and over again, and his soul is also tied to Cleia's, so in other words his destiny is to be reborn every hundred years and then get cuckolded by the same guy over and over again, somebody actually wrote this, and then finally Magda shows them a little vision of Cleia's dad coming to meet her and talk to her about the elixir of life a little bit, and then she apparently also told him about the soul connection and how it is destined to die, and her dad like freaks out a little bit, he's like okay I need to break the connection, and then he leaves, so I just want you to remember that they have confirmation that he's still alive, and anyways Magda then tells them that okay the only way to break the connection is for Sage to die, so she gives them this special dagger which apparently can kill him, but he has to wait until midnight on a full moon and then plunge it into his heart. Here's the thing, again this ties back into the magic never really being explored or explained in any way, but how did they make this dagger, like how do they know that it'll kill immortal people, like so far at this point the only immortal we know of is Sage, the only person we know who drank the elixir of life is Sage, so how do they know that this will kill him, have they experimented, done it before, okay, so they drive off to a secluded area of Japan and Sage is preparing to kill himself, and little does he know that Clalus has called cursed vengeance, and so they come in, they shoot at them a bunch, they kidnap Sage, end of book one. There's basically nothing in here that is redeemable for this first book, like at all, and I mean I know I spent a while describing the plot here, but a pretty substantial portion of it is taken up by characters just kind of hanging around and talking and Clee pining after Sage, and also apparently Ben is in love with her. In fact one of the worst lines ever is in this book describing Clee and Ben's relationship. Now there was a picture of them taken where she wasn't looking, but Ben was looking at her, and she's talking to Reina about it, and then apparently Reina can tell just from looking at him that he's in love with her, and okay, but then this happens, it could just be the picture I said, they caught him at a weird moment. Yeah, a weird moment when he thought no one was looking, so he showed how he really felt. I gave Reina the phone back and shook my head. Ben and I are like brother and sister, that's gross. Hey, I read Flowers in the Attic, it was kind of hot. Seriously, who the fuck would write that? Like that line alone kind of cements this as one of the worst books I've ever read, but honestly for the most part it's just boring. There's like almost nothing happening in here, because even like all that stuff with Sage and finding out about the backstory and everything, that's like the last 50 pages of the book, you know, and this is it's not a particularly long one, it's only a little over 300 pages, but still the majority of it is just people kind of hanging around and not doing much. Even in the worst Twilight knockoffs that I read before, there was some sort of actual plot there. You know, even in Twilight itself, like there were evil vampires that they were fighting. Okay, there was an actual conflict in which people could die and they could lose things that they loved, so there were stakes involved. Now, that's not to say I think Twilight is particularly good, it's not, but like at least there was an attempt there. This one has nothing. So now we move on to devoted book two, and this one is the longest. It's only 350 pages though, and well it's kind of in the same category as the first one where a pretty substantial portion of it is just people hanging around doing stuff, but you know let's get into it. So by this point it's been a couple of months since Sage was kidnapped and Klaaz has been angsting about it a little bit, and so she gets visited by this psychic family who just projects themselves in front of her and talks to her a little bit, and she's like whoa what the hell is that, and then they leave. And I know what you're thinking, you're thinking oh I thought James said they don't really do anything else with magic in this series. They don't, believe me I'll get to that soon enough. But so that happens, and while all this is going on, Reina has a new boyfriend named Niko, we'll get to him later, and her mother has an assistant named Suzanne, and Suzanne appears to be into Ben, and Klaaz feels that Suzanne is more attractive than her, and she so she sees her as a romantic rival and as a sexual rival, and so immediately when I read that I thought okay so Suzanne is gonna be a bad guy, like they weren't even being subtle about it. I was thinking okay Suzanne is gonna be a bad guy. If she's a female character who poses any sort of threat to the main female character, then yeah she's she's gonna be a bad guy at some point. Turns out I was wrong, she isn't, but they also just kind of drop her after a certain point in the story, so. And this book unlike the last one which was just told from Klaaz's point of view, this one is actually split between her and another person named Amelia. Now Amelia is one of the psychic family that appeared to Klaaz at the beginning, and it turns out through her backstory which takes up around, I don't know, a quarter of the book, like it's not that much. It turns out that she was is actually 2,500 years old. Her and her family also drank from the elixir of life. And while I will say that these segments aren't good they are better than the rest of the book by a fair margin because it mentions that she was from ancient Greece, but like they actually call it ancient Greece. You know like if you're gonna do that just say in the land we were born in the land that is now called Greece or something like that or we were born in Achaea or something. Come on guys. But anyways her grandfather went on an expedition way out into the wilderness into like Ethiopia area and he got separated from his group but he found this little pool of what he found out later was the elixir of life and so he took a sample of it and he was able to find his way back home and he used it to like bring animals back from the dead and all that sort of stuff but nobody believed him and then one day Amelia when she's only seven years old just drinks the whole thing and then her family's like well she's gonna live forever we don't want to leave her alone so they go out they find the pool of the elixir of life and they all drink from it so that they all become immortal and but they drink the whole thing like it disappears and it's not like a spring that bubbles up they dig and dig and they can't find any more and the thing about that is that that's not a terrible way of introducing the elixir like it can be this mysterious thing that we don't know where it is or where it came from or even really how it works and I would actually kind of like that you know leaving that element of mystery there would be cool but that raises the question of where did those other guys where did that secret society that sage was a member of in Italy where did they get the elixir of life like if this was the only place to get it and that's gone now where did they get it and for that matter how do they know how it works if this one family of four people is the only people that have ever drank from it I don't know so you know they live as immortals for a very long time and things are great but then more recently just a couple of years before this all starts it turns out that basically the elixir is kind of wearing off so their bodies are no longer working properly but their minds are still fine so basically what it will eventually come down to is that they won't be able to see or move or anything but their minds will still be active so they'll just be sitting there in the dark for all eternity and they're like well that sucks so let's try and get some more elixir ourselves and so there's really no good way to put this they develop psychic powers by just thinking really hard like that that's the thing about it is okay this this series has magic already if they just had been practicing magic it so that they were able to like project their minds outplaces and move stuff around and show other people dreams and stuff that would be fine okay but instead they have it so that their her Amelia's grandfather in fact I don't think any of these people get any names other than Amelia I think it's just Amelia and then grandfather mother and father but anyways her grandfather just one day says you know if we practice really really hard we'll be able to have psychic powers so we can still go around places while our bodies are not moving and for starters that's just it doesn't quite fit with this setting you know like the idea of psychic powers in this manner is a little bit different from magic at least it feels different from magic and so it just doesn't quite mesh with this setting it feels very anime and on its own it might have been okay but it just clashes with the tone that this is setting not to mention that they just straight-up admit that they don't know how the powers work at all like listen to this unlikely but not certain that was the thing with our psychic powers it was hard to say what we could and couldn't do it changed something we could easily do one day might be impossible the next or something one of us had never been able to do could suddenly be simple that is just Hilary Duff coming straight on looking at the camera and saying these powers are just a plot device and granted I've read stuff where the powers are just a plot device before like they can just do whatever they need to at that point in time but I've never seen somebody just admit it so anyways Amelia and her family need to get more elixir of life and it turns out that the best way to do that is by allowing the saviors to kill sage in that ritual I described before which will then turn his blood into elixir and then they can all drink from it and sweet they're immortal again seems pretty straight forward except Amelia doesn't think that it's right that they should do that and so she's secretly trying to help clalla's this is throughout this the okay that's fine like I said Amelia's parts in this book are the best but that's not saying much so while they're searching for sage Ben and clalla's eventually go looking for cursed vengeance the people who are trying to kill him for some reason and through a long not particularly interesting investigative process they find their hideout and they get captured but cursed vengeance doesn't immediately kill them they just sort of show them around and show them all their training and everything and they explain that yes they are all descendants of those guys who stole the elixir and forced sage to drink it before and it turns out that them and all their descendants have been cursed for hundreds of years like none of them ever live past the age of 30 and the years before that are really nasty like they get horrifying diseases they have awful luck they get in car crashes all sorts of just bad stuff and they want to kill sage because killing him and restoring the elixir to the earth is apparently the only way to lift the curse again how they know this I don't know but cool like cursed vengeance are the good guys now like I know that they were probably trying to do something where the bad guys are just sympathetic but in this case no they just made the bad guys the good guys because sage already kind of wants to die like that's why he was trying to kill himself before and him being alive causes nothing but misery for not only cursed vengeance but for Clea and Ben and anyone else that might be affected by their soul bond so yeah curse of vengeance are the bad are the good guys now hey remember how at the end of the last book the last they knew of Clea's dad was that he was still alive and yeah they never look for him in this one or in the next one like there's really no good place to put that in because partway through the second book in fact just a little ways into the second book she's looking at her dad's grave and just thinking man I miss my dad he's dead like the last time you saw him he was alive he's still out there somewhere that that's what the witch lady told you aren't you gonna look no okay it's almost like the author just decided that that was a dumb plot point and didn't want to expand on it so Amelia shows Clea some more visions of what sage is up to in captivity and apparently his captors are trying to make him fall in love with another girl in order to like break his bond between him and clalla which okay fine not none of the magic is ever explained in this in any way shape or form and like look I know I'm a type of guy that likes to have things explained to me a lot because I find that interesting and not everybody is like that but I would appreciate at least the bare bones bare minimum explanation for what's going on and how this works and how people know that it works like just a little bit a little something I would appreciate so seeing this Clea gets jealous so she takes Ben out somewhere makes out with him a little bit because she knows the psychic family is gonna show that vision to sage and it'll make him jealous or something because Clea has basically no personality in this other than just being kind of a petulant child at times so do you remember how I mentioned that Reina has a boyfriend named Nico well it turns out he's a member of cursed vengeance oh yeah he's cursed and several of his siblings have already died because of the curse and so he wants to fix it and just you know they he talks with Clea a little bit and they agree that like okay we don't need to fight right now but I don't want you to kill sage because I love him I knew him for two days and I love him so much so seeing all that sage decides you know what she'll be better off so he decides to break the bond and allow the saviors to kill him which okay fine whatever and then Amelia manages to give the location to Ben who then tells Clea and then they tell cursed vengeance and they all swarm attack the compound and while they're there there's a gunfight that ensues and it's a race against time you know sage is tied to the altar they're about to kill him at the stroke of midnight all that nonsense and the psychic family is also like throwing around trees and stuff using their powers and at this point I feel like the imagery should be at least kind of cool but it's just not quite clicking yet and I think part of the problem might be that this entire climax takes place over the course of like six pages so during the fighting Nico has this super special magic dagger and he's about to kill sage with it but he just can't bring himself to do it and then Ben tackles him and Nico gets stabbed with it and dies and then while this is going on somebody else grabs the dagger and stabs sage with it and his blood spills out as the elixir of life into a bowl and they're like yes we won but then the bowl spills and all goes to the into the earth and it stops being good so no more elixir no more immortals yay also Amelia is fighting her parents and her family using her psychic powers and I think that she kills all of them and herself it's never made clear what happens and again their powers can kind of just do whatever the plot demands so I don't give a shit but here's the thing when sage's soul was torn out of his body because he was immortal or something it's it was seeking out a new vessel and so it went into Nico's body that's the end of book two devoted so now we move on to book three which is true and this one is the shortest of all of them it's only 287 pages long and I know that the first two books didn't have much plots but this one has just none okay there's there's a climax which lasts about 12 pages at the end but everything other than that is just no so at the beginning they find out that sage now in Nico's body is no longer immortal like the stab that killed him originally has healed up but other than that he's just a normal person now but it's a good thing that he happens to be in a similarly aged body of a man who is also very attractive by Claire's standards so you know that that's nice they can still have a happily ever after or something anyways and it starts off with them trying to tell Reina that Nico is dead and oh by the way this one also has several chapters from Reina's point of view but those are even more pointless than the Amelia ones actually no I will say that whatever else about the Amelia chapters they did they did serve a point to the plot to the story but this one the Reina chapters are mostly just I am sad here's me remembering stuff that the audience already saw but from a different angle but I am sad anyways that they tell her that Nico's dead but she doesn't see sage in Nico's body so she freaks out and runs off and I just want to put this in now that much later in the book like almost halfway through I think they actually she actually sees Nico walking around with Klee and she freaks out thinking that they lied to her that he was dead because he was cheating on her with Claire that's the dumbest fucking thing in a book full of dumb fucking things throughout this entire series so far these books have been horrifyingly boring and extremely annoying at a lot of points but nothing in them has really made me angry up until now because at this point they start realizing that something is wrong with sage that his soul isn't quite taken to his body right and what's going on is that he's having memory lapses like at one point him and Klee go up to her room and eat some dinner and then they leave and come back and the plates are there and he's like hey wait we should eat and she's like we just already we already just ate and sage just completely loses his shit starts yelling at her and then like breaks the plates and okay like at this point it just becomes an abusive relationship because it continues on for a while where sage will forget something she'll remind him of it he'll get very angry start breaking shit and yelling at her and at a couple of points he actually does physically hit her and so she has this I mindset where she's thinking okay it's something wrong with his soul it's not his fault I'm gonna try and fix it and at this point this actually did get really under my skin this actually did anger me a lot because the thing is that this is abusive okay like it's straight-up abusive I mentioned that already and a lot of these Twilight knockoffs like I said I read a lot of them a lot of them do portray an abusive relationship like Twilight itself has Edward trying to cut Bella off from her friends and family trying to isolate her and trying to control her which is obviously not okay but at a glance you could maybe say like okay that's not straight-up abusive because it's not physical this is very blatantly physically abusive and the fact that Clee has this mindset of well that's okay it's not his fault I can fix him it's okay I love him no no get the fuck out right now like the instant that he started breaking those plates the first time that he lost his shit that's when you should have gone because that's indicative of something much much worse and this is aimed at younger people okay this is aimed at teenage girls so the fact that that is being portrayed as romantic just no okay that actually pisses me off a lot so while they're trying to fix him Clee hears about this place which is basically just a cult where you can get a different soul put in your body and so she goes there for a while and she finds out that they don't have much to say but then she finds this one person whose soul actually did get taken out of her body and it was replaced with the soul of Magda the old witch lady from before and oh yeah Magda killed herself it I didn't mention it because it doesn't actually affect anything whatsoever Magda only exists in this story to give exposition so anyways Clee's talking to Magda in her new body and Magda says like oh yeah go talk to the Greeks ooh and that like that's all she gets and then Clee tries to leave the cult but they won't let her and then her friends come back and they're like hey let our friend out and they're like whoa whoa she's here willingly and they're like she's a senator's daughter and they're like oh okay well let yeah let's let her we have to let her go now and under normal circumstances that would make sense like it does make sense like okay this isn't just some random person this is someone who's connected to a powerful politician let's not fuck with that we'll let her go that does make sense but the thing is if Clee was constantly getting recognized all over the place not just in the US but in foreign countries as well why don't these people know who she is shouldn't they have immediately recognized her as well I mean she was there under a fake name but yeah okay so they go back home and throughout all that they discover that apparently there's still an echo of Nico's soul inside of his body which is why Sage's soul can't properly bond with it and why all this other stuff is going on again giving him an excuse for his abusive behavior but just fuck it man we're going past that because I'm just gonna lose my mind at Hillary Duff if that keeps going Hillary what the shit but anyways so they find that out and through some more research Ben discovers a way to get the remnants of Nico's soul out of his body and so he tells them and apparently when Magda was saying help the Greeks get the Greeks what get him to the Greek whatever what she meant was that they have to go to the Boston Commons where there used to be a hanging tree where they used to hang pagans I have not been able to find anything to corroborate that like they did hang people from that tree yes which it's been cut down now but they did used to hang people from that tree and they did hang people for heresy but it was mostly like hey you're Catholic you're not supposed to be Catholic like from everything I found there was no pagans that got hanged there okay whatever so they start the ceremony and as it's going on it switches to Reyna's POV and apparently apparently Ben wrote down his evil plan like I actually posted this on Discord because it was so fucking stupid I'm just gonna read this but everything Ben wrote was about finding ways to get rid of Sage's soul out of Nico's body not to help Nico but to get rid of Sage forever the worst part was the word scrawled in huge dark pen strokes and underlined three times convinced Reyna Nico's soul is in danger to get personal item I was livid so I dropped it but I don't give a shit so in other words Ben literally just wrote his evil plan down in a notebook like yes haha I will kill sage and then clearly the will be mine haha like that that's literally just what he wrote and then her friend found it and then so during the ceremony she just tackles Ben and it's over like like in less than a page it's over and like they send Nico's soul out of his body at that point um so everything's great now and then the epilogue picks up like six months later clear la la la and sage are just living together and she's about to start college and her and Reyna are still friends but Ben is out of their lives and they apparently still talk to him now and again and they ask sage like hey would it be alright if we were friends with him again and sage is like eh I'll just go with what clay is wants to do because it's not like this guy tried to murder you or anything as dumb as this whole book is as dumb as this whole series is the last line is probably the most insulting the last line is please saying because the most important things in life dot dot dot they're eternal I'm like really that is the dumbest like pseudo intellectual pseudo philosophical shit I've read in a long time nothing in life is eternal okay this is a story about immortality at least it's supposed to be a story about immortality and the thing that just about every story about immortality gets right is that immortality would kind of suck okay because you're still living but your loved ones will die and fade away all the things you love will die and fade away it doesn't matter what we're talking about that you love it could be things it could be places it could be institutions it could be people it could be the relationships you have they're not eternal okay and that's another thing about this that I wouldn't say quite angers me but it does annoy me to the point where it's almost anger and that's the way that it portrays romantic relationships and I don't mean like the abusive stuff I already talked enough about that I mean it starts with sage and clouded by la la la having a literal soul connection like they're destined for each other they're meant for each other they can never have anybody else and or they won't be happy and then that that's not how real relationships work okay it's two people or three or four or ten people I'm not gonna judge you but it's usually two people and it's that they mean each other they have stuff in common they like each other they compliment each other's flaws and they make up for each other's weaknesses and they just enjoy being around each other that's the gist of how it romance works that's the gist of how all relationships work really and sometimes that doesn't work out okay sometimes you'll only be together for a short time other times you'll be together for a long time but then you'll realize that one or both of you change and so you split like that's why divorces happen because people once loved each other and now they don't and sometimes it goes until one of you dies and if that's the case great but again this idea that there's a soul connection that you are only meant for one person that you'll never be happy if you don't meet the love of your life when you're 16 I mean again this is aimed at kids this is aimed at teenage girls so I don't like that they did that and then that very last line where it says the best things in life are eternal well obviously they're not okay nothing is eternal like I was already saying and just it's just dumb and it makes no sense and I hate it so for several years now I've said that blood rose rebellion is the worst series I've ever read and that's no longer the case now it is elixir by Hilary Duff that is the worst series I've ever read blood rose rebellion at least had some stuff in there that I could point to and say yeah that was okay like the climax of the final book I pointed to in my review and I said yeah that was all right that was that was okay that was a decent that was decent you know it wasn't great but it did something right and there were a couple of ideas that throughout to the books that though they were usually executed pretty poorly I could at least see what they were trying to do and I could say yeah that's that's neat you could maybe do something with that you would need to get a better writer for it but you could do something there but this just has nothing okay and even like I was saying before twilight and the other clones they at least had an actual plot okay like most of those I didn't find very good but occasionally I would find one that was good because and it was usually because there was a supernatural element like okay there's demons coming out and I'm in and the teenage girl is in love with a demon and he she needs to help him out with fighting the demons cool that's that's fine like that's basically the plot for all of them this one just has nothing okay it might have seemed like there was an actual plot the way I was describing it but that's because I was just describing the events that had actual meaning like if I described everything that happened in these books I'd be here like three times as long and I'd be describing a lot of Clee and men eating at diners and when I'm talking about how twilight has a better plot with higher stakes and then this you have failed completely okay Stephanie Meyer at least had a basic idea on how to construct a story this has none of that and here's the thing Hillary Duff does definitely deserve the blame for why this is bad or at least the lion's share of the blame but she doesn't deserve all of it because celebrities write books sometimes and they're almost universally bad like Steven Seagal wrote one a while ago Sean Penn wrote one a while ago and they're both awful and the reason for that is because they don't need to be good in order to sell like like I said they're celebrities they have they have name recognition they have brand recognition which means that if they just have an idea for a book and they're like oh okay this is it could be a vanity project it could be something that they have actual passion for and they want to do it so I don't I don't blame them for wanting to publish something they will just go to a publisher and the publisher will say like okay since we have the name recognition of this person we won't really need to spend money on advertising or anything so yeah let's just let's just get it out there let's not put any effort into it so they don't need to do things like editing they don't need to do things like multiple drafts and the authors themselves don't need to spend years honing their craft and practicing to get better at it because regular people who become authors that's what they have to do so yeah I can't really blame Hillary Duff because she was kind of screened from the beginning like there's no way that publishers were going to invest more money to make this better when one she has the name recognition and two it was a twilight clone that came out during the height of the twilight craze like it was guaranteed some sales and granted this one wasn't New York Times bestseller but like also a lot of times when celebrities write books at all they usually will buy a bunch of their own copies in order to bump that up and then they'll like give away copies at fundraisers and stuff like political pundits do it all the time like whenever you see Ann Coulter or Bill O'Reilly at the on the New York Times bestseller list that's usually what they're doing but anyways the point is that Hillary Duff was still the one that came up with a lot of this dumb shit in here and she was still the one that was writing a self-insert story because remember I never really described Clee in here because one she has no personality whatsoever I believe I mentioned that a little bit like she's just kind of exists like she likes photography great oh and also just a little dumb bit that I didn't have a chance to mention is that she publishes her photographs under a fake name and that fake name is Alyssa Grande okay first sue somebody secondly they spell it two different ways in the book which again just kind of reaffirms my position that these were not edited and the only description we get of Clee physically is that she has blonde hair blue eyes and fair skin and that's that's it and also on the front cover for this copy the model is literally just Hillary Duff so it's very much just a self-insert type of fanfic thing the difference being that usually those are just published online by some nobody teenager Hillary Duff was 23 when this first book came out you have no excuse girl and that's really all I have to say this is this is just the worst series ever I mean everything about it just everything about it was either boring annoying or rage inducing so it's only a little bit worse than blood rose rebellion but it's still the worst series I've ever read like the worst book I've ever read is still the lovely bones don't worry I don't think anything will ever knock that off its perch but I don't know I guess let this be a lesson to you about I don't know what lesson there is to be gleaned from this but thanks for watching please like and comment and subscribe and all that other stuff I'm supposed to say here um sorry my memories going away I got to go hit my girlfriend later thanks to Christopher Hawkins and Joseph Pendergraft and all my other patrons that you see on here please share this video bye