| Title: The Eternal Ones |
 |
 |
| Author: Kirsten Miller | ||
| Genre: Paranormal | ||
| Publisher: Razorbill | ||
| Elements: Resurrection | ||
| Series: Book 1 of the Eternal Ones series |
This review contains mild spoilers. But I hope you read anyway.Haven Moore can't control her visions of a past with a boy called Ethan, and a life in New York that ended in fiery tragedy. In our present, she designs beautiful dresses for her classmates with her best friend Beau. Dressmaking keeps her sane, since she lives with her widowed and heartbroken mother in her tyrannical grandmother's house in Snope City, a tiny town in Tennessee. Then an impossible group of coincidences conspire to force her to flee to New York, to discover who she is, and who she was.
In New York, Haven meets Iain Morrow and is swept into an epic love affair that feels both deeply fated and terribly dangerous. Iain is suspected of murdering a rock star and Haven wonders, could he have murdered her in a past life? She visits the Ouroboros Society and discovers a murky world of reincarnation that stretches across millennia. Haven must discover the secrets hidden in her past lives, and loves¸ before all is lost and the cycle begins again.
I've just been on a rollercoaster ride of a read, and I couldn't wait to tell you all about it. The Eternal Ones is just amazing. When I first took it from the bookshelf, I was daunted by how thick the book was. And the thickness wasn't due to a large font or a large margin; in fact, the font is just nice for my taste: a bit small, but comfortable enough to read.
The book's divided into three parts, the first being The Possession of Haven Moore. It focuses on Haven's life in Snope City, and we truly get all the background information that we need so as to fully appreciate the full story later on. We get to know of the origins of Haven's story, her family, friends, the town she lives in.
Miller has done some great descriptive writing that just meshes well with the action. I paused in awe at the appropriate places, experiencing places and sceneries through lush imagery one moment, and the next, I was rushing out of Snope City to find Iain. And the next, I was feeling Haven's terror as she is pursued by some being when she's not even sure she's being pursued. That last part? that was creepy.
You know me. I'm a finicky reader. Once I find something that jerks me away from the story, or something that just feels wrong (I know, how can it feel wrong? It can't feel wrong since the writer chose to make it such. I don't know.) I just can't put myself back in the the book, and the whole experience will be ruined, no matter how far into it I am.
But this. Miller seems to have taken the cynical, jaded thoughts out of my head, the ones that love to poke at every loophole, and turn it back on me with a suitable explanation. Or if not an explanation, a dialogue which shows that she's addressing the issue I'm talking about.
For example, it bothered me (oh alright, and made me really jealous) that Haven, practically a nobody (albeit a talented nobody), just happens to capture the attention of a billionaire heir. It didn't matter that they had past lives and had a connekshun.
Iain and Haven then had a conversation about exactly this. It was done humourously, and executed with the perfect balance of awareness that showed that not only did the characters understand what a trope their relationship could be, they also understood that some things just couldn't be explained--and didn't even try to do so. And this, it gave the characters more depth and intelligence.
The storyline is detailed, and it brought me to more places than I've ever been in a while when reading. There's practically no limit to Miller's creativity, or the places she brings the characters too. I mean, when Haven was in New York, I actually believed she knew the streets. I could see how they were, and I've never been there. And the Ouroboros Society? Oh man, so much more than you would expect. I haven't read any great books in a while, so when I come across one that just dings 'five stars' across all of my requirements, I have to gush.
Okay, so now, the characters. What a wide range or characters, and all of them playing relevant parts. No character was there, that didn't need to be. I relished the presence of every character, from Imogene to Haven's absent-but-spiritually-there-through-memories-father, from Beau to Leah, from the taxi driver to the people who helped Haven, Iain and Beau.
This book isn't flawless, though it is very close to being that.
I would love to see more development of Iain's character, as himself now, and not as Ethan. With all that has been given in this book, it might seem odd to ask for such a thing, but I hope that the sequel will give us readers a chance to see Haven and Iain's relationship as a real one, rather than that of memories, and petty fights and misunderstandings spread between plain love and lust, no matter how it is explained.
Just a small thing to nitpick, because I couldn't find anything else. Really, I couldn't. Well, I probably could, but I'm basking in the aftermath of reading a great book. This book could be The One, guys.
I am impressed. I'm going to re-read this. And this is big praise. I could be a stan. I could be this book's cheerleader. Instead, I'll just try to show you how much I enjoyed reading this, and hope that this review will convince you to try it out.
