Review: Everneath by Brodi Ashton

This book is part of my 2013 TBR Pile Challenge.

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Everneath
Brodi Ashton
Series: Everneath #1
Publication date: January 24th 2012 by HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray
Rating: ★★★☆☆

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Last spring, Nikki Beckett vanished, sucked into an underworld known as the Everneath. Now she's returned--to her old life, her family, her boyfriend--before she's banished back to the underworld . . . this time forever. She has six months before the Everneath comes to claim her, six months for good-byes she can't find the words for, six months to find redemption, if it exists.

Nikki longs to spend these precious months forgetting the Everneath and trying to reconnect with her boyfriend, Jack, the person most devastated by her disappearance--and the one person she loves more than anything. But there's just one problem: Cole, the smoldering immortal who enticed her to the Everneath in the first place, has followed Nikki home. Cole wants to take over the throne in the underworld and is convinced Nikki is the key to making it happen. And he'll do whatever it takes to bring her back, this time as his queen.
< br/> As Nikki's time on the Surface draws to a close and her relationships begin slipping from her grasp, she is forced to make the hardest decision of her life: find a way to cheat fate and remain on the Surface with Jack or return to the Everneath and become Cole's queen.

Nikki has been away for a hundred years.

She made the choice to leave those she loved behind her when she decided to go to the Everneath. But when the option of coming back to the Surface and see her family and friends and her boyfriend once again was presented to her, she couldn't bring herself to say no.

Time passes differently to those who live in the Surface, and Nikki has been away for only six months when she crawls out of hell and back to earth. To say that reconnecting to the people she loves is hard is an understatement, but Nikki is determined to spend the last six months she has on earth with those she cares about before the Everneath claims her back.

But things aren't as easy as she thought they would be, not when Cole, the Everliving who took her to the Everneath in the first place, does everything in his power to try and convince her to go back with him. He wants to take over the throne and rule the Everneath, and he has no doubt in his mind that Nikki can help him make that happen.

Nikki's time is running out, and she finds herself faced with an impossible task: escape the claws of those trying to suck her back into the Everneath or accept her fate and come back down as Cole's queen and rule the underworld.

Eerneath was quite a fun read. It was heavy on mythology and with a non-linear timeline that gave us glimpses of the past and of how Nikki got herself into this mess as we went along. That also made the beginning a little bit confusing for me, because I had no idea who was supposed to be the bad guy and what the hell was happening (I didn't read the blurb before starting the book).

I got hooked in right from the beginning, trying to make sense of what was happening and how everything fit together. The author did a wonderful job with portraying Nikki's emotions and I really felt for her and what she was going through as I read the story.

Jack and Cole just made everything better, from Cole's manipulative ways to Jack's love for Nikki. They were total opposites of each other, and reading about their interactions with Nikki and with each other really brought something more to the book.

Nikki's resolve to keep things from people was one of the downsides of Everneath for me. It felt unnecessary, and every time she failed to mention something important to someone because she was too scared to do things the hard way I just wanted to shake her.

"I took the easy way out. I begged for the easy way out. Cole took the pain away, and I didn't care it would ruin everything in my life, because I was stupid enough to think I had nothing else to lose."

And that's Nikki's problem. And why it was so hard to relate to her and like her sometimes. Because even though she knows taking the easy way out ruined her life, she kept making the same mistakes because she didn't want to face people's hurts and reactions to what she'd have to tell them.

Everneath was still a good book, and it had an ending that, although predictable, still left me wanting to know more about Nikki, Jack, and Cole's stories. There were a lot of ties left loose, a lot of history to be explored, and I hope it all gets answered in the second installment of the Everneath series: Everbound.