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~ ARC was kindly provided to me by the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review ~

“The bullies never remember, but the bullied never forget.��

2.2 stars

Spoilers for this book as well as the whole Mara Dyer Trilogy

You guys have no idea how much I wanted this book, the happiness I had when I learned about its existence, because even The Mara Dyer Trilogy had its weaknesses, Noah Shaw was carrying the story, and reading from his POV could only announce on of the best books of the year (and that cover is just perfect). You can’t imagine how thrilled I was when my ARC request was finally accepted, I literally exploded from joy, talked about it to everyone I met. But I guess that if you see my rating, you can at least imagine my disappointment and sadness today. I think I’ve never been that let down by a book in my reading life.



As you might have guessed, this book is a spin-off of The Mara Dyer Trilogy and it takes place a few weeks after the end of The Retribution of Mara Dyer, but now we follow our little group through Noah’s eyes. And this is basically everything I can tell you, as I found the plot so empty, literally NOTHING happened for 95% of this book, and the 20 last pages or so weren’t enough to save the book for me. I felt like I was playing a boring Cluedo game, where everyone was lying but nothing happened related to those lies (or to anything else). We meet many new characters, and oh-so-surprisingly, all of them end up to be Gifted (btw, the Gifted thing is still so confusing to me, is it something rare or common? Why everyone they meet seems to have powers to one extend? Is someone Gifted will be attracted to other Gifted?).

“Just because you believe something doesn’t make it true.��

The writing felt so clumsy, I felt like sometimes words, sometimes entire sentences were missing to make sense (I hope that would get fixed in the final version). The plot was so boring, I can’t even count how many time I fell asleep while reading it, and the lack of originality on the things that actually happened was painful. In the end, this book is lining up to the Mara Dyer Trilogy, as my rating went from 4,2 for The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer, to 3,8 for The Evolution of Mara Dyer and finally 3,5 for The Retribution of Mara Dyer, and this book was even worse. Basically, I can direct you to my The Retribution of Mara Dyer review and most of it would still be true for this book.



The thing that disturbed me the most in this book that it was, as the previous ones, full romance with tiny bit paranormal and those two themes weren’t functioning well together. Noah and Mara’s relationship is not working anymore, because of all the lies and all the deception. Slowly they stopped trusting one another, hiding more, lying more. And yes, those are sign of an unhealthy relationship, but to me their relationship never was healthy to begin with. I don’t see any change, so I don’t see how their behaviour was okay in the previous book but not okay in this one.

“To die will be an awfully big adventure.��

It saddens me to say so, but I’m not even sure at this pont that I’ll read the next book. This series gradually lost everything, and now even the spooky side is gone.

“The scars you can’t see are the one that hurt the most.��