Wendy HigginsReviews
Author of Sweet Evil
Reviews
See Me (See Me, #1) by Wendy Higgins
One notable thing about the Sweet series is the main character, Anna. Unlike most other YA books, she has so much faith and does her best to make the world a better place. I can just feel her hurt whenever she sees something sad.
Now, where my hesitations about recommending this series come in: the content. As the description suggests, almost all the main characters have not-good parents to say the least. The parents force characters to work at convincing humans to sin and turn from God. As such, there is a lot of talk of drinking, drugs, s*x, etc. However, there is a massive transformation in certain characters throughout the series that makes the terrible situation hopeful. When it comes down to it, I would say that this series is firmly in the NA category.
One thing I forgot to add earlier, I really like how this series takes place over four years. In a lot of fantasy books, the story is over a couple of months. With a four-year time span, you can really see the characters grow and mature.
Content Note (for the whole series):
Also, the epilogue was the absolute sweetest. I typically don't like epilogues but this one was 100% necessary and so wholesome.
Note: This book is NA as there is a closed-door scene between a married couple.
I loooooove mythology, and while I do prefer the Greek pantheon names over the Roman ones, I still loved it :D
The author really manages to build a very real and captivating world, giving you more than enough details when the story needs it and leaving it nice and vague in other places so you don't get distracted from the story.
Character development was very good. Psyche has never really met a man that wasn't besotted with her the moment he laid his eyes on her, so trusting that his feelings might actually be genuine even when her own are so so conflicted, can indeed be very hard. Trusting that he won't hurt you, trusting your own feelings. When put in a situation like Psyche, I think many of us would have a hard time.
Cupid learns a lot about humans, how to express himself when not relying on his powers, what is right and what feels wrong.
Both characters felt real and believable, with real emotions and real fears, yes, even Cupid. Oh, and I loved Renae, the caring housekeeper slash invisible companion. Though she couldn't say or do much, she was always there for Psyche, trying to offer some kind of comfort.
Pacing and flow were really good. I pretty much read the book in 1 go :) A very good balance between conversation and things happening.
The book itself was well written with no (noticeable) errors. And yes, there is sex described (if that is important to you).
All in all, even without my love for everything mythology, I would highly recommend this book. It just had me enthralled right from the start, very well written! :)
No!
Ew!
I'm not a stranger to this pet peeve of mine. Rewriting the entire book series into one book written exclusively from the POV perspective of the male love interest. Most commonly, of the perspective of the abusive male love interest. This is nothing new, most popularly known for the perspective in Midnight Sun by Stephanie Meyer. I will never be free of Twilight no matter how long I live. But yet to find out that this trash Series has a trash pet peeve of mine on top of everything else really hurts.
Mostly because I have to read it and have to suffer. I wanted to be done with book three but no, we need Kaiden's perspective.
Somehow this is even more sexual, more child trafficking, and involves explicit scenes with an 11-year-old being put in the position to start performing his work job, AKA being traffic, and surrounded by woman. So we're going to have to talk about all of that pedophilia one day, but I don't know if today is that day.
The twelve-year-old sex scene that we heard about in book one is in this book, and much like he said, Kaiden did not have sex with that twelve-year-old child.
His dad did for him.
Yes, his dad had sex with a twelve year old in this book.
At least Midnight Sun didn't harm me like this. I shouldn't compare one awful book to another, but at the end of the day, Midnight Sun made me laugh, it made me roll my eyes in a fun way, and it made me come out with weird dumb jokes to make. This book series has given me nothing but a bad taste in my mouth and concern that all of the children who read this book series have got some kind of psychological damage from it that will never be unearthed by the therapist. I was messed up by series I read growing up, but I think that if I had read this I would be more messed up. There are some books that do do harm, and this one definitely does. It may just be small little things that it affects upon somebody's life, but this is not a book that you come out for the better from.
0.5 stars.
Don't touch the child!
Child pregnancy.
Child pregnancy and labor.
Now she has... One human friend.
At one point her adoptive mom is just tortured in front of her and she prays to heaven and heaven actively ignores her prayers. I feel like my reviews are a little bit slurred and I should have drank while doing this because this scene alone is so bizarre. We know there are angels, we know there are demons, and thus there would be god. So we have an angel praying to God as their stepmother is tortured in front of them and nobody does anything. Not the other angels, nobody. What is the point?
After Anna marries Kaiden, her father-in-law starts groping her and grinding against her and being very sexually attracted to her. Weird. But at this point I'm three books into child trafficking and once you're eighteen you can be paired off with old demons and used like a sock. So I think Wendy just has a really messed up mind and writes it out into children fantasy books.
At one point Kaiden's dad asks him if he can have a threesome with Kaiden and Anna. I wasn't prepared for incest to somehow pop into this. Which means that my thoughts in the first review where I said 'I wonder if they're related' have now become even worse. Much worse.
I know this is supposed to be a Christian romance, with all sorts of Christian messages, but at this point I have had sex trafficking, child sex trafficking, genitalia mutilation, and now step dad's wanting to have sex with their barely legal step-daughter in law. I don't know what religion I'm supposed to take away from this. Usually a religious book is so offensive and the other way of telling me that there is no way beyond their religion and so on. This one is offensive in the way that everybody's an awful person and there's also so much child sex. What faith is this?
If this is what religious teaching is, we need to redo all of it.
Kaiden marries her and thus is reborn and... Good again. All is forgiven and all of his flaws are cleansed off his body via magic pussy.
What?
I don't know how they can be dukes of hell and also suddenly wiped clean, and not just me cleansed and turned into angels. Very weird. Aren't demons nothing but fallen angels, he should be an angel now.
At the end everyone is paired off into heterosexual relationships, the straightness has cured everyone of their problems for example the racial discrimination, etc. It's extremely generic romance ending and I cringed at it. The fact that some of these characters did not want relationships and were deep in the pit of needing recovery and therapy, and they were cured by a magic pussy or a magic cock makes me feel disgusted. It's not a good ending with how broken most of these characters are.
0.5 stars. How is it not over yet?
We've hit middle book slump again, which is fine, I feel like every book from around this time had that problem with figuring out what the middle book was going to be. I just guess I expected them to do some lower building here or maybe establish more of the cast, but they don't.
So this book series decided book two should be a short story collection. That's what I'm going to call it because it's a bunch of small stories intertwined with each other and it reminds me of like when a show is on its last season and it brings in cameo characters to resolve their conflict and sort of have all these little moments that go "yeah, look, we didn't forget about this character". But this is literary book two. Book: the second. The second book. Book number two. You can't do that to me on the second book right after the first one.
There is this plot where Anna gets told that she's a very special girl and has a special prophecy. As if the first book didn't emphasize that she was special enough. I don't know, I really felt force fed this. It might be that the first book did absolutely nothing with this besides imply that it existed, and now this one is telling me I have to believe. You can't make me believe in this, book.
The contradiction that is in this sentence is not lost upon me. Despite being a bunch of short stories with little tiny plots and all those little character moments, there is no subplot in this book, and there is almost no character development outside of the main two characters. I don't know how Wendy managed to do both.
At several points they have to turn off their super hearing because otherwise they will hear their parents having sex. Or each other having sex. And while I don't understand why this is an issue because one of them is literary of being of lust, and the others are used to this sexual stuff. Apparently parent sex is awkward and weird to them. Even though they've been hearing other people having sex for a long long time. I don't know, it just seemed like a way to involve the parents having sex being a plot point, but they've been having so many times of hearing everyone have sex in their lifetime that to turn it off just cuz their parent is having sex feels weird.
They could have said that the parents will hurt them if they find out they've been eavesdropping, that would have made it more logical.
Female genitalia mutilation is introduced...
We have this bitter angry woman character who has genitalia mutilation and is implied to have been raped a bunch and this is talking about hatred in the Middle East. Gee I can't imagine what this is about. I almost forgot about this, even though I read it and experienced it, it just escaped my mind like it did not want to be there. And honestly, I didn't want to be there either. So we've got commentary about the Middle East and genital mutilation in a young adult romance book. I... My brain threw out everything it had.
Um.
Well.
There's racism, nothing surprising there. The above is telling you it's coming. The ""new love interest"". New is subjective because he was in the last book but there was absolutely no chemistry. But in this book he begins chemistry and becomes a rival. For no reason other than we need him to suddenly climb those ranks because become arrival. Also he's the only African American person in this book(I think there's one more). And he's an angry raffle African-American with double sins on him. Religiously I know exactly what this is going for because the color of the skin represents the amount of sin according to the churches that I've been to as a kid. So I see exactly where they're going with this character and I don't like it.
And then to top it all off, he starts talking about how he wants to help the people back home who have an AIDS epidemic. Which feels like it's just another jab at him being African-American. Ew. Aaaaand it's never mentioned again.
1 star.
Gross. Honestly it says something when the first book is better than the second book and both of them are absolute rubbish that shouldn't be out there for kids to read.
So the back story is basically all these horny characters that live in hell are that way because as children they were made to be horny and do sex stuff with people of any age. And once they were legal adults they were still forced into these awful relationships. At one point Kaiden implies that when he's thirteen, he works with his peers, which when you are talking about sex you can't say "work with your peers" and me not scream. But seen as adults so it's perfectly fine to have them have sex with anything and that's in the book: anything.
I really hate when virginity is a huge focus of a book, but you got to know that to make it the worst book experience, have characters that can smell her virginity and actively sniff her and talk about how her virginity is tasty or delicious smelling.
In a book that is extremely horny and constantly talking about sex, there's also supposed to be a Christian message. More on this at 6 tonight on my reviews.
Things I remember most from this series off the top of my head: the book trailer where she sounds like a southern character straight out of Honey Boo Boo. And how I actually read it vs the voice given to us and I don't think of her as that kind of voice. But the trailer came first for me so now that I've seen the trailer and know the trailer is about this book... if you watch the book trailer you permanently alter how you hear the character and it can really make the rest of the book bad. For me, the book trailer is what I found first so automatically I thought she was just a dumb person and talked like she didn't know english.
It's not a surprise that a fallen angel / angel hybrid book is about religion. And force is religion. There are many Angel books out there who have angels in demons without going full religion. I know that sounds weird, but I've read several weird Angels and demons exist but they don't start quoting the Bible or talking about God and Jesus and shoving it on people they just exist and that's it. I miss those books right now.
I don't care about our main character. I can already say I cannot care about her.
Our main character has the superpowers of hyper empathy whenever she chooses to will it, and seeing auras, all eight super senses, cannot get ill catch diseases etc, can see both great good and great evil, and can all but mind control them. I'm so terribly used to Mary Sue overpowered angel hybrids that I honestly wanted to have something to say here, but the problem was is that it felt like all I wanted to say was "another one?".
But then she barely ever uses these Powers so they just exist to exist and be there.
Not a great sign.
We break a free of the seven deadly sins aspect at least, there are thirteen different things that are being encouraged. Thirteen different sinful traits.
When you're a child of one of these elements you basically are born with that feeling set on max. So like say your dad is the duke of gluttony, you will inherit an urge for gluttony at a young age. Of course, we couldn't have something that makes sense like that, we had to have a child born with the element of lust. Which means we have a baby born with those feelings. I can't unsee that. So we have Kaiden, a teenager who is constantly feeling lust and horniness and it's explicitly said that it's because of his father... I need a shower.
Kaiden is surprised when our main character, Anna doesn't immediately fall for him because he is irresistible and so hot that no matter what they are drawn to him. My eyes rolled into my head but not in the fun way, in the groaning and hating it way.
Don't fall for me. I don't do relationships.
It's just that bad.
My brain stuttered up this point because I realized if there are thirteen dukes of hell, what is the relationship between them? Like. Genetically. Are they all related, or what?. So, when Anna sees her dad is completely reformed and a good guy even though he's an ex duke of hell my brain went does she have any relation to Kaiden. Would a relationship to Kaiden actually matter?
Weird little things catch my brain, and the relationship between Anna and Kaiden on a genetic level is what got stuck there. Probably better off contemplating the genetics in this book than the child sex trafficking.
2 stars.
It just... Exists.
The kingdom of Lochlanach has been terrorized by an enormous beast for months. It’s unnatural, seemingly invulnerable, attacks randomly, and can never be found during the day. Countless soldiers and common men have been killed, and the king is desperate to find a way to protect his people. His last recourse is to invite the best hunters from all the realms to a great hunt; the one who kills the beast will be rewarded with the only thing of value he has left to give: his eldest daughter’s hand in marriage.
The second book, The Great Pursuit, tells of the aftermath of the beast’s death and the war that’s brewing between the oppressed Lashed ones (people with magic) and those who fear their power.
The kingdom of Lochlanach has been terrorized by an enormous beast for months. It’s unnatural, seemingly invulnerable, attacks randomly, and can never be found during the day. Countless soldiers and common men have been killed, and the king is desperate to find a way to protect his people. His last recourse is to invite the best hunters from all the realms to a great hunt; the one who kills the beast will be rewarded with the only thing of value he has left to give: his eldest daughter’s hand in marriage.
Book 1, The Great Hunt, focuses on the hunt itself and the notable contenders for Princess Aerity’s hand — particularly one Paxton Seabolt and his younger brother.
I was very curious about how this particular fairy tale would be adapted. The author only took the starting premise and discarded the later plot points (understandable) and it turned out to be a pretty interesting fantasy world.
The Great Pursuit is the second novel to the Great Hunt, and follows the story of Aerity and her kingdom in their hunt for the Lashed.
While the overall pacing of the novel was a bit slow, it did have a few plot twists that kept me engaged. I'm usually not a fan of multiple POVs, but I liked the use of them in the Great Pursuit because it made the plot more interesting since it let the reader see what the other characters were involved in. I especially enjoyed reading about Paxton and his undercover adventures.
The characters were well developed, and I liked the different relationships between them. The romance between each of the characters was cute and the family dynamics between Aerity, Wyn, and the others was nicely done.
Overall, the Great Pursuit is a solid conclusion to the duology and another good read by Wendy Higgins. I highly recommend it for fans of fantasy and retellings with some romance.
2nd book and conclusion to the Eurona Duology. YA/NA Fantasy romance. Should be read after The Great Hunt.
Terror worst than the conquered beast has hit the kingdom of Lochlanach. People are fighting against each other and Princess Aerity must lead since her parents, the King and Queen are missing. Paxton seems to be on the wrong side of the war so Aerity and her sisters must be brave and use their knowledge of the kingdom to win against the odds.
It’s a great adventure with each of the three sisters being strong in their own way.
I don’t want to spoil the story with too much detail. I will say I admired Aerity and her decisions as difficult as they must have been. I’m extremely happy with the way it all turned out.
Eurona Duology book 1. YA fantasy. Retelling. Cliffhanger.
The kingdom of Lochlanach is being terrorized by a wild beast. It’s huge, strong and hungry. Arrows are repelled by its hide and the kingdom hunters are decimated. In an effort to defeat the beast, an award is promised: whoever can successfully defeat the beast will win the hand of the princess.
Aerity knows her duty to the kingdom and doesn’t complain that she will be the prize to the winner. I admired her strength and fortitude. And even though she is attracted to Paxton, she knows it’s ultimately not her choice.
I won’t spoil it but found it a bit sad in the end for multiple characters. But then the cliffhanger hits and suddenly I’m listening to the second book immediately which is highly unusual for me.
🎧 I listened to an audiobook version narrated by Saskia Maarleveld. The performance was excellent with many different clear voices for characters. The timing and emotions were spot on and electrifying. I listened to this mostly at my usual 1.2 with a small bit at 1.4.
Book three may be my favorite so far which is not surprising since it has the most romance in the series. If you have a younger child reading this, this one does have a sex scenes and more sex talk than the others.
I also loved the build up of the relationships and also the anticipation of the upcoming fight. I had adrenaline at times waiting to see what was going to happen.
The big moment arrived and it was very anti-climactic. I wanted and needed more. There was a very emotional scene right before everything happened, but after that it was pretty underwhelming. This was the only part of the book that I just did not love.
Again, like the others, I love all of the characters. We get even more romance in this one as every couple pretty much is paired up.
Overall, this book had me swoon, laugh, and cry. I really enjoyed this series much more than I was expecting.
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