Evermore by Sara Holland

Title: Evermore

Author: Sara Holland

# of Pages: 368

Jules Ember was raised hearing legends of the ancient magic of the wicked Alchemist and the good Sorceress. But she has just learned the truth: She is the Alchemist, and Caro—a woman who single-handedly murdered the Queen and Jules’s first love, Roan, in cold blood—is the Sorceress.

The whole kingdom believes that Jules is responsible for the murders, and a hefty bounty has been placed on her head. And Caro is intent on destroying Jules, who stole her heart twelve lifetimes ago. Now Jules must piece together the stories of her past lives to save the person who has captured her heart in this one.

BEWARE: This book review contains spoilers. You have been warned. 

I was very disappointed in my reread of Everless in preparation for finishing this series. The two substantial issues I had were the lack of character development and the overabundance of literary tropes. See my review of Everless here. I found Everfound to not be any better. There were a few reasons why the story fell short with me.

A major part of this sequel is Jules discovering, technically rediscovering, who she is as the Alchemist. She needs to learn the history between Caro and herself so she can be better adept at taking her down. However, the plot here felt rushed. Like the author removed parts of the story in order to fit it into an overall shorter book. The plot felt like it was set up in stages. Here’s stage A where Jules learns her history, straight to stage B where she repeats the process. I didn’t feel like the story had any fluidity to it.

Secondly, Jules tended to act naive throughout the course of the book. Finding herself in predictable circumstances that ended herself caught by Caro. Predicaments where she had to rely on Liam multiple times in order to escape.

Despite the rant above in which I listed quite a few issues I had with the story, it wasn’t an overall bad reading experience. Like with Everless, I found it to be an easy read. Another positive I found was the way Liam developed as a character. He became a caring, genuine sort of character that became one of my favorites.