Ever Shade

A dark twist on faeries. For Shade, a chance meeting with a powerful Teleen faery warrior who wields electrical currents and blue fires along his skin, has her joining him on a treacherous mission for the good Seelie Faerie Court across the land of Faerie. Magic and malice abound and nothing is what it really seems to be. The evil Unseelie Queen and her treacherous allies are around every corner as Shade makes her way across the breathtaking landscapes of the world of Faerie, which exists alongside the mundane human world. Shade discovers her own uncharted magic and meets some of the most powerful warriors in Faerie while battling evil dryads, conniving Teleen guards and challenges on her life with every step in a world where nothing can be taken for granted
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Beth says 2 Stars...
Every reader has their pet peeves (or at least I do) and sometimes a book seems to know just how to hit them.  Ever Shade did just that for me.  What irritated me the most was the language, in both the dialogue and the narration.  The language contintually switched levels of formality, from highly stilted to standard modern conversation.  I wouldn't have minded if there was a reason for it, but I couldn't find one.  Because this book dealt with high faeries and a teenager, having super formal and modern speach together in one set of dialogue would make sense.  However, it doesn't make sense to combine them in the same character and even the same sentence.  Similar things happened in the descriptions and the other text of the novel.  Perhaps my intense dislike is unwarranted, but I don't think I'm the only person who this sort of writing annoys.  The story itself was decent, however, I felt like few things were fully explained.  Maybe it's because there are more books in this series, but I really wish the culture of Faerie and its inhabitants had been explained a bit more.  Several intersting things had just a quick line or two of discussion that wasn't enough to understand anything.

I found Shade fairly irritating.  Within the first chapter she makes a series of questionable decisions and begins getting involved in events she doesn't understand.  She just forges ahead without really attempting to gather information about what's happening.  Beyond that, I didn't find her particularly interesting.  I just couldn't gather strong feelings about both her and her epic quest, except that the quest would be interesting to follow with a different person in the focus.  The other characters were equally blah.  There was a real lack of characterization in general, but especially with the members of the company who should have been significantly more flushed out.  If asked immediately after finishing the book to name all the individuals who traveled with Shade, I couldn't do it.  Again, there was a lot of potential for neat subplots and showing different sides of Faerie that was completely squandered.

As much as I love a good story about the Fey, I would pass on this one.  Maybe the series gets better, but I'm honestly not going to continue.
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