Invision Summary:Think your life is complicated and confusing? Nick Gautier was born to bring about the end of the world…It’s not easy being the heir of a demon overlord.
But Nick is determined to thwart his destiny and get into a good college. To be more than his genetics and prophecy foretell. No one is ever going to tell this stubborn Cajun who and what he really is. Or how to live his life.
Not even the Fates of the Universe. But now that he and his team of ancient gods and demons have claimed the Eye of Ananke and he sees the missteps of the future, he has to battle the demons within that are far deadlier and more treacherous than any he’s battled before. All the while his arch nemesis is back and determined to reclaim his place as the harbinger for Armageddon. Even if it means killing Nick and barbecuing everyone he loves to do so.
Invision Review:
So, I ready this book about four weeks ago and I needed some time to collect my thoughts. What I hoped would be another epic novel in this series, turned out to be kind of lacking. This book took one year to come out, and what could have been spectacular got ruined by main characters, info dumps and poor story telling. That is not to say that this book was horrible. It wasn't. It was much better than a lot of other books I've read and for die hard fans of the Dark Hunter world, it's a fascinating read. The main problem was that it was just too confusing and sometimes pushes too far.
I'm putting out a warning that there may be spoilers and some ranting. Parts of the book can't be discussed without mild spoilers.
So, as I said above, the biggest problem for this book was the confusion. That was because there was too many new character being introduced, too many flashbacks that kept showing up, and too many big reveals. Now you might be thinking, how can secrets being revealed be bad? Well if you have them on every other page that don't actually have any connection to the plot, it gets bad. On top of that, it's connected to characters that we barely know or it's connected to the last couple of books. That means that Ms. Kenyon is assuming that we can connect the dots and understand who is related to who with a couple of sentences. A great example of this was the beginning of the Malachai race, and surprise, surprise they were evil! So we figure this out and two new characters are shown along with two new groups/species. In a few pages we know have to figure out what all of this means. If you can, it's incredibly interesting. If you can't, well your going to banging your head against the wall for a while. Obviously, Ms. Kenyon needs to explain these big reveals in a lot more detail. Now, there was one reveal that was done extremely well. For any Dark-Hunter fans, you were probably screaming in joy at this point. It was discovering Caleb and Xev's parentage. There was buildup from the last couple of books, including the DH ones, and more than two chapters was taken to explain this. She did a wonderful job on that!
Another big problem was the characters, mainly Nick. I get that sarcasm is an important past of all her novels and it provides a lot of good comic relief. But there is line between using it for humor and using it to literally tell the story. Ms. Kenyon has stepped over the line, one to many times. In the earlier books, it made sense. Nick was 14 and he was growing into his skin. Nick is almost 18 now, still using sarcasm in every sentence and shown that he has not grown at all. He seems to mature in body and mind, yet he cannot let go of this. He does to the point that other characters will start to ignore him! On top of that it seems like he can't take life seriously, instead of the charming, young man that he is supposed to be. The sarcasm ends up rubbing off on the other characters. On top of that, we have WAY too much referencing to older books. In the first 5 chapters alone we have gone into the past plots more than 6 times. It comes off as lazy writing when there no substantial plot. Clearly, Ms. Kenyon could have taken that extra month to fix all of this writing, sadly it seemed to be overlooked.
This was a good on though! Couldn't keep from laughing!
“Holy crap, Caleb! You're my uncle." Nick
"No!" Caleb
"It's worse. He's the half-brother of your great-grandfather." Kody
"You're not helping." Caleb
"No, but I'm entertaining myself at your adorable expense." Kody
"Yeah, y'all are missing the important fact. To a Cajun, that makes him my uncle." Nick
"Great. I always wanted to be a monkey's uncle. Nice to know I finally succeeded." Caleb
This leads into my last problem which was the flashbacks. Game of Thrones does a good job of incorporating flashbacks by making a character interact in the flashback. It brings a sense of real emotions and isn't looked upon as a way to get some extra minutes or waste time. Ms. Kenyon clearly missed the memo on that. There were maybe two or three flashbacks that were relevant useful to Nick's development. The others? Not so much! One example was Kyrian's life. It was great! Really! He's one of my favourite characters in CoN and any tidbit of this life is interesting, especially with the depth of research done into the civilization. But this parts of this scene were described countless times throughout CoN and DH. Ms. Kenyon could have put up this scene as a freebie or a novella since in did not develop Nick at all. It didn't even help get more control with his powers.
One AMAZING flashback was of Caleb and Lilliana! I need more of these two. And it didn't develop the plot that much, it did make it easier to connect with secondary characters. She should just write a short story on the two.
“I sense in you a true heart. A faithful heart. And by your wounds and scars, I can tell that you are fearless. So I shall call you Caleb, the faithful, fearless warrior who defends what he believes with everything he has. That is what I see when I look upon you. Not a demon. An ever-courageous, noble warrior. One day, I suspect, you shall look into a mirror and see the same noble man I do."
The secondary characters in this series tend to bring up the book. Nick by himself is incredibly interesting especially with the secrets coming out now. But Ms. Kenyon does something really good. She connects the secrets of the secondary characters to Nick. And I know, lots of authors do this, yet it's different in this series. It brings us onto a more intimate level with the characters and gives us the ability to connect with them. You could actually be more connected to Caleb or Xev or Dagon than Nick at this point.
Following this, the genealogy is more like an info dump than anything else. What could be a great way to connect with character, ends up being a chore. You have to remember each and every name because it will come back and play a significant role. Then you have to remember their relations. I started doing one for CoN because it was getting way to confusing. It's much easier when it's on a piece of paper. Also, write down all the lore. That'll come to bite you in the butt later. This was a problem in the previous books as well. Readers enjoy discovering things themselves, for the most part. That's why there are cliff-hangers between chapters, breaking away from scenes and laying out all the clues. We want to understand what is happening at all times and see that the character follows the same journey. Have a magic jewel (?) that basically spells everything out isn't always right. There needs to be more showing than telling. It's kind of boring without it.
Now the juiciest bit of all! The Epilogue. This was, by far, the best part of this book, and I am not exaggerating it. Previously in the book, Nick time traveled and discovered some very mind blowing secrets. All of sudden, in the present we find that evil is back at it. You read it once not fully getting the implications. Then you read it again and your head just explodes. You're left feeling numb and in awe and then sadness overtakes because you have to wait another year for the secret to be revealed. If you want more information on the ending you can go onto darkhunter.com and go into Mikro Chasers. That will give you a bit of an explanation into the epilogue.
Overall, this book was below expectations. It was filled with lazy writing, yet interesting secrets. If there was more of a plot and explanation to new characters’ secrets this could have been amazing. With the epilogue, this was book was a four star read. It's sad to see this series get any less than a five-star rating. Hopefully the next book proves to be more entertaining and organized.
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