Everless (Sara Holland)

Everless
The Everless series, Book 1
Sara Holland
HarperTeen
Fiction, YA Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: If anyone has reason to hate the Gerling family that rules Sempera, it's Jules Ember. Once, she and her father lived in the royal city of Everless, where her father was a blacksmith who helped forge blood-iron coins: time, drawn from the blood of the Gerlings' subjects, condensed into metal form and paid to the royals to extend their own lives. She grew up playing with the princes Roan and Liam... until the terrible accident that sent Jules and her father fleeing from royal wrath. Only desperation would drive her back to Everless... and desperate things have become. Her father has already traded too much of his time to the tax collectors. With a royal wedding coming up, the palace is hiring whole fleets of servants - and surely, among such a number and after so many years away, nobody would recognize one lone, lowborn girl, come to earn the blood-iron coins to pay off family debts and maybe give her ailing father a few of his hard-earned years back. What's worse is how time sometimes wobbles in her presence, slowing or even stopping; such minor abilities have led many a hedge witch to be killed. It's a gamble, of course, but one she feels she has no choice but to take.
The moment she sets foot back in Everless, she realizes that the place she remembered from a child's perspective is nothing at all like the truth. Soon, she finds herself caught up in dangerous intrigues and deceptions and mysteries that may change everything she thought she knew about the palace, the Gerlings, the ageless Queen, the legendary Sorceress and Alchemist of ancient times who first bound time to metal and blood... and even herself.

REVIEW: The premise sounded interesting, a hint of vampirism (in spirit, at least, with a ruling class demanding blood from the peasantry to extend their lives and ensure their rule) wrapped around a fantasy world. There was definite promise in the setting, and the characters seemed serviceable, if not wholly original. But something about this story never came together for me, and I think much of that had to do with Jules. She's one of those too-common main characters who can't actually put any pieces together despite numerous blatant hints until someone else patiently explains it - more than once, because of course they're too shocked and/or in denial the first time or ten the information is revealed. In her defense, it doesn't help that nobody in Jules's life bothers telling her things that are vital to her existence and survival before she's alone and up to her scalp in danger precisely because nobody told her such things. The reader, therefore, is way ahead of the game and is forced to endure her stumbling and bumbling and denying and standing in shocked, silent disbelief and/or denial, coming to the exact wrong conclusion and doing the exact wrong thing at any given time. Much of her story is tied up in the tale of the Alchemist and the Sorceress, which forms the apparent backbone of Sempera's society, but I never felt the weight of the myths in the greater world, if that makes any sense. After far too much dithering and delaying and meandering, the story finally comes to a conclusion that reveals things that the reader likely figured out long before... a conclusion that doesn't actually resolve anything, instead setting up a second volume that I'd need to read if I cared enough to find out what happened. I couldn't help feeling that the whole arc could've been resolved in one book if Jules hadn't been deliberately kept in the dark or had been a little more self-aware. I mostly kept listening because I was too lazy to switch audiobooks at work. Again, there was lots of potential going into it, and it had moments and glimmers that held my interest and kept me hoping it would rise up to that potential. Ultimately, though, I just never connected with it and grew too irritated by the heroine to enjoy the story.

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