pawstoodream's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
funny
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
jeev1017's review against another edition
5.0
AWWWW......The two main characters were so cute!!! Their relationship was adorable......until the end.........what's up with the ending? -_-...............lately, there has been so much dying in every single good book i read, and it's always the character i like the most!!!! :(..................Life's cruel.
mithrilreads's review against another edition
1.0
I have thing against diary writing, and writing in the first person. And falling in love for no real reason that the audience can see. Yuck. Skimmed it .... Sooo not worth it.
miakve's review against another edition
2.0
If I had to describe this book, I would say it is a romance with some magic. There is absolutely nothing wrong with those types of books, but this one did not work for me. For one thing, the romance is INCREDIBLY unhealthy. He is controlling way too much whether she is happy or not. She was uninterested in anything other than Sebastian. The unhealthiness might have been on purpose, but then I would like for some type of moment where she realises it is unhealthy. I get there are more books in the series, but still. I also did not really like the way magic was used. One more reason I did not like it so much that I was not surprised by the twists. I saw them coming from the first third of the book. This book was really not for me.
SPOILERS!!
How does she not thing about the fact that she is in love with a 150 year old dude, who was friends with her great great great grandmother, (dont know how many great I needed) Like it is a little messed up, and adding to that is the fact that her ancestor loved him.
The use of magic in this book also annoyed me. First of all, the magic was rarely there. It always took a backseat to the crappy romance, and it felt as if it was only there to create danger. There also was not a lot of rules with this magic. Yes there was the elements thing, but other than that you could do anything you wanted, as long as you actually wanted to do it. I was a little irritated that she could flood the caves when she had only used magic ONCE before, and it was not her summoning it that first time. She was way too good, way too fast.
There was not really any depth to any of the characters. All of them were cliche stereotypes that had no depth or development. Evie only really grew in the sense of magic related things. Celeste was just the mean girl who hated the main character for a dumb reason, and even after she got hurt, did not change at all. Sarah was the same all the time, except for the magic and we learn about her third eye thing. Helen, we found out much about her in the last half of the book, but she never really changed or grew in any way, we just did not know much about her. This were the main characters! Yes Sebastian changes a little, but that is just in the first max 100 pages. It is just boring for the characters to always be the same, no matter what they go through.
SPOILERS!!
How does she not thing about the fact that she is in love with a 150 year old dude, who was friends with her great great great grandmother, (dont know how many great I needed) Like it is a little messed up, and adding to that is the fact that her ancestor loved him.
The use of magic in this book also annoyed me. First of all, the magic was rarely there. It always took a backseat to the crappy romance, and it felt as if it was only there to create danger. There also was not a lot of rules with this magic. Yes there was the elements thing, but other than that you could do anything you wanted, as long as you actually wanted to do it. I was a little irritated that she could flood the caves when she had only used magic ONCE before, and it was not her summoning it that first time. She was way too good, way too fast.
There was not really any depth to any of the characters. All of them were cliche stereotypes that had no depth or development. Evie only really grew in the sense of magic related things. Celeste was just the mean girl who hated the main character for a dumb reason, and even after she got hurt, did not change at all. Sarah was the same all the time, except for the magic and we learn about her third eye thing. Helen, we found out much about her in the last half of the book, but she never really changed or grew in any way, we just did not know much about her. This were the main characters! Yes Sebastian changes a little, but that is just in the first max 100 pages. It is just boring for the characters to always be the same, no matter what they go through.
kendracurless's review against another edition
2.0
I feel like I've read this story before. Entirely too predictable for me - the title (and cover) gives away the big "mystery" of the book, for goodness sakes!
savannah_rae's review against another edition
2.0
This book was well written, but seemed to drag in places, also it reminded me of [b:A Great and Terrible Beauty|3682|A Great and Terrible Beauty (Gemma Doyle, #1)|Libba Bray|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511E0D3K21L._SL75_.jpg|2113193]. But still overall, it was a very eloquent book.
laphenix's review against another edition
3.0
Reminded me a lot of Hallowmere. I love the genre and though this wasn't the best of it, I did really enjoy it.
lazygal's review against another edition
2.0
I'm sure I've read this before... but perhaps it only feels like it. Evie is a part-orphan (no mother, father never home) raised by her grandmother; when Frankie becomes to ill to care for Evie, her father sends her to Wyldcliffe Abbey School.
It's clear from the very start that there's something Not Quite Right about the school, about Sebastian (the boy she meets as she arrives) and about who Evie really is. No spoilers, but if you don't get the main plot twists well before they're revealed, you're just not reading the right kind of books.
It's clear from the very start that there's something Not Quite Right about the school, about Sebastian (the boy she meets as she arrives) and about who Evie really is. No spoilers, but if you don't get the main plot twists well before they're revealed, you're just not reading the right kind of books.
holly_tree's review against another edition
4.0
I enjoyed Immortal quite a bit more than I guessed I would-- it turned out to be another great addition to the Urban Fantasy genre.
What you need to know: Evie Johnson is sent as a scholarship student to Wyldcliffe Abbey School for Young Ladies when her grandmother/pseudo-mother falls ill, and her dad is serving in HRH army. But from the beginning, things don’t go so great: the teachers are mean, the other scholarship girl is kind of crazy, and everyone hates her because she’s sleeping in the bed of Laura, their peer that died just before Evie arrived. Collecting demerits and bad judgments from both the Mistresses and her peers like they’re going out of fashion, Evie is starting to hate Wyldcliffe. And then she starts having fainting spells where she sees glimpses of a girl that seems remarkably like Lady Agnes, the girl that once lived and died at Wyldcliffe when it was a normal home some hundred years ago… In an attempt to get away from it all, Evie runs out one night to the lake, where Laura supposedly drowned (although others suspect otherwise), and meets a strange boy with strange depressed moods and always seems sick and like he’s keeping a secret. Sebastian becomes Evie’s nearly only friend, one she sneaks out every night to see for a few hours. Meanwhile, we read excerpts from the journal of the sixteen-year-old Lady Agnes, who in 1882 is starting to get into the Mystic Way with her childhood friend, having discovered the gift of the scared fire… Throughout the novel, we read the stories of both Evie and Agnes’s stories of discovering friendship, mysteries, and their strange ties to each other, Wyldcliffe, and, surprisingly, to Sebastian.
Immortal has strong ties to one of my other favorite series, the A Great And Terrible Beauty trilogy from Libba Bray. Where GATB is set in the late eighteen-hundreds, Immortal is set in the here and now, but both are set in the English countryside at boarding schools for girls. But where GATB is dark, Immortal is light. GATB was intense, and, well, dark. I liked it well enough; actually, quite a bit, but Immortal is like a fresher version of it. Again, the main heroine shows up at a boarding school as an outcast, is hated by the teachers, makes a circle of girlfriends close enough to be sisters, and they dapple in magic together, and the heroine falls in love with what should be a forbidden boy. But where in GATB, the girls are dark and selfish and confused but greedy of the discovered power, the girls in Immortal are pure in intent and are overall good girls.
The story was fast-paced, never lingered and dawdled, which was nice, but at the same time, I wished some of the scenes were written out a bit longer so there was more time--and matter-- to comprehend, especially the scenes with Sebastian. They seemed a bit rushed. But the turns of the plot were well thought out: not terribly surprising, but not completely predictable. And having the novel split into Evie’s story and Agnes’s journal? Very well done. Shields creates strong metaphors with the sea, which is really neat and serves a higher purpose towards the end, and the sisterhood between the two girls who lived generations apart is neat in a non-creepy way. The whole thing was very well done.
Gillian Shields: props for taking gothic romance/magic, and making it LIGHT and PURE instead of DARK and BROODING.
What you need to know: Evie Johnson is sent as a scholarship student to Wyldcliffe Abbey School for Young Ladies when her grandmother/pseudo-mother falls ill, and her dad is serving in HRH army. But from the beginning, things don’t go so great: the teachers are mean, the other scholarship girl is kind of crazy, and everyone hates her because she’s sleeping in the bed of Laura, their peer that died just before Evie arrived. Collecting demerits and bad judgments from both the Mistresses and her peers like they’re going out of fashion, Evie is starting to hate Wyldcliffe. And then she starts having fainting spells where she sees glimpses of a girl that seems remarkably like Lady Agnes, the girl that once lived and died at Wyldcliffe when it was a normal home some hundred years ago… In an attempt to get away from it all, Evie runs out one night to the lake, where Laura supposedly drowned (although others suspect otherwise), and meets a strange boy with strange depressed moods and always seems sick and like he’s keeping a secret. Sebastian becomes Evie’s nearly only friend, one she sneaks out every night to see for a few hours. Meanwhile, we read excerpts from the journal of the sixteen-year-old Lady Agnes, who in 1882 is starting to get into the Mystic Way with her childhood friend, having discovered the gift of the scared fire… Throughout the novel, we read the stories of both Evie and Agnes’s stories of discovering friendship, mysteries, and their strange ties to each other, Wyldcliffe, and, surprisingly, to Sebastian.
Immortal has strong ties to one of my other favorite series, the A Great And Terrible Beauty trilogy from Libba Bray. Where GATB is set in the late eighteen-hundreds, Immortal is set in the here and now, but both are set in the English countryside at boarding schools for girls. But where GATB is dark, Immortal is light. GATB was intense, and, well, dark. I liked it well enough; actually, quite a bit, but Immortal is like a fresher version of it. Again, the main heroine shows up at a boarding school as an outcast, is hated by the teachers, makes a circle of girlfriends close enough to be sisters, and they dapple in magic together, and the heroine falls in love with what should be a forbidden boy. But where in GATB, the girls are dark and selfish and confused but greedy of the discovered power, the girls in Immortal are pure in intent and are overall good girls.
The story was fast-paced, never lingered and dawdled, which was nice, but at the same time, I wished some of the scenes were written out a bit longer so there was more time--and matter-- to comprehend, especially the scenes with Sebastian. They seemed a bit rushed. But the turns of the plot were well thought out: not terribly surprising, but not completely predictable. And having the novel split into Evie’s story and Agnes’s journal? Very well done. Shields creates strong metaphors with the sea, which is really neat and serves a higher purpose towards the end, and the sisterhood between the two girls who lived generations apart is neat in a non-creepy way. The whole thing was very well done.
Gillian Shields: props for taking gothic romance/magic, and making it LIGHT and PURE instead of DARK and BROODING.