Elixir

Oh goodness I don't even know quite where to begin. First off the characters / plot is way too unbelievable. I understand that it is a supernatural teenage thriller but some of the basic elements are simply ridiculous. Clea is a seventeen-year-old, secret photojournalist who is apparently home-schooled while traveling the world. Yet somehow her mother is a senator. That alone is laughable. Can you imagine a woman running for politic office and winning while her daughter is galavanting around who knows where? That simply doesn't happen, even in the more liberal states. That sort of stuff makes news. Secondly, it makes zero sense to me for her father to be considered a world renowned surgeon when he seems to do very little surgery and a show more whole lot of treasure hunting. Maybe having him be an archeologist would be more believable?
The writing is weak enough to make me believe that Hilary probably did contribute to the writing. I found it funny to see such weak sentence structure combined with such a strange word choice. The word of the day appears to be reverie which was used about three times during the novel. Also, who says "I felt my gorge rise." Seriously? Gorge?
I appreciated her reference to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Coleridge however the simile fell slightly flat to me.
"I was furious, imagining a brainless meathead of a bodyguard who'd hang like an albatross around my neck."
The albatross wasn't really weighing the mariner down or cramping his style. The albatross was more bad luck than anything. While I didn't particularly think the simile worked, I appreciate that one of the writers is clearly well read.
Overall, I think Elixir is a silly, rushed story and I will most likely not be reading the second novel. show less

Is there anything Hilary Duff CAN’T do? I mean seriously – she sings, she acts, she’s a producer, she writes… Goodness! I’m getting exhausted just thinking about it all.

This is Duff’s first novel, and while you can tell it’s a first novel, it’s still a VERY GOOD first novel. It makes me excited to think of what she’ll be able to do in the future. (Thankfully, I have the second book in this series already on the TBR pile!)

You can tell that there was a lot of planning put into this novel before Duff started writing – the plot and the characters are both so very well developed.

There’s such a variety of characters too. Even the women that Clea had been in her past life were extremely well put together and thought out show more and are different enough though while they are her past lives, they aren’t exactly her. Clea’s best friend Rayna, however, was by far my favourite of the characters – in the little bit of time that we actually see her in the novel, you can see how well she plays off other characters, especially Clea herself.

I must say, though, as much as I loved most of the characters, Sage really did nothing for me… he didn’t live up to the buildup that was created. Pity. (Ben on the other hand, well, HE was lovely…)

Duff did a really good job of taking the paranormal, (or spiritual, or magical, depending on how you look at it) and tying it into every day life. Even more than the reincarnation, the whole story of the elixir of life, while having been done so many times before, felt fresh and new. She also did a VERY good job with the spooky! I will fully admit that there was a point where I was actually shuddering and really glad that I wasn’t in Clea’s place.

After finishing the book, I have been left with a lot of questions – in particular, does everyone get reincarnated, or just the small group in this book? Does everyone fall in love with the same people over and over again, is everyone always so intertwined? I’m definitely going to need to read more of this series to hopefully answer all of my questions! show less

I have to admit, when I first heard Hilary Duff was writing a book, I thought, “Oh, boy. Another actor turned musician turned writer.” Not that I’ve ever read an actor turned musician turned writer’s book before. But I have listened to an actor turned musician’s music that made my ears bleed. And on top of that, I was still a little peeved at Hilary’s character Olivia on Gossip Girl (I was NOT the only one who thought that!). As soon as I enlisted the help of my old friend, Mr. Google, and read the description of Elixir, my mindset changed completely. It sounded right up my ally (plus the cover looked gorgeous) and I could not wait for its release date. Needless to say, I was presently surprised.

This is the only book, the show more only piece of literature really, that I have read that is able to explore the term “soul mate” without seeming abstract and dumb. Actually, Clea’s relationship with Sage beautifully compliments the mythology of the events surrounding The Elixir of Life.

If you are familiar with my reviews, you’d know that I usually add a little bit of the story of the book. However, Hilary’s book is so complex that even saying a little will give away too much. But I will say that the book is absolutely something you do not want to miss. Somehow Hilary was able to write a story filled with immense amounts of description, back-stories, twists, suspense and love that didn’t come out at all confusing. I would recommend this to anyone thirteen and up, especially fans of Alyson Noel’s Immortals series.
I’ll let you all know that my opinion of Hilary has changed dramatically and I am ashamed to say I ever thought anything badly of her. I had the pleasure of visiting her first book signing (ever!) at Borders in Columbus Circle, NYC on October 11th. Hilary was in such a good mood and just radiating sunshine. She was taking the time to hug the fans and take pictures with each one. She was striking up conversations, smiling, and the hours of signing didn’t phase her at all. show less

In addition to being a talented singer and actress, Hilary Duff is an accomplished author. I was not expecting much in this story, but was pleasantly surprised. A nice story, well plotted and executed. That this was her first is obvious in the simplicity of some plot lines and thin characters, but it was amost enjoyable story.

I have loved Hilary Duff since Lizzie McGuire a kajillion years ago. When I heard she had written a book, I wasn't quite sure how to react; I just knew that I'd read it. Luckily, the synopsis sounded good, too. And I wasn't dissapointed at all. I read this book within a couple hours. As I read it, I wasn't even thinking that Hilary Duff had written it; I just read. The characters were so real, and the plot sucked you right in. I drank it right up. (No pun intended. :)) I was captivated by the story idea, and with all it's crazy turns, it still made sense. Like, that was how it was suppossed to be. Oh, yeah, that makes perfect sense. That's what went through my head. I loved how we got to visualize her time in Rio, and to feel her show more relationship with her father, and how much she missed him. The imagery was so intense, I could feel every single feeling with Clea. It was, actually, well written. I loved it. And I can't wait for the sequel. This is a must read for sure! show less

This review is cross posted at http://skyink.net

I’m usually pretty skeptical about celebrities writing novels, so when I heard that Hilary Duff was releasing a YA book, I didn’t have much interest in reading it, at first. However, I actually like Hilary Duff and I remember being equally skeptical when she announced she was releasing a music album, and that turned out to be okay, so I thought I’ll give her first novel a chance too (and it just so happened to be a new arrival at my local library). It’s by no means an amazing book, far from perfect, but I was surprised that it was pretty decent. I do have some issues with it, but I actually like it. Even though I think I can easily lump this together with other YA paranormal show more romances out in the market, there are aspects of it that are different enough that it feels original at the same time.

The story is about Clea, a seventeen year old girl who is also a photojournalist. Her mother is an influential politician and her father is a world famous surgeon as well as the owner of GloboReach, a humanitarian organization. One year after Clea’s father’s mysterious disappearance, Clea begins noticing a strange man in many of her photos. Shortly after, she starts dreaming about this strange man as well, with herself in the role of various women throughout time.

Her investigation into the strange man leads her to realize he is linked to her father’s disappearance. A trip to Rio unites Clea with this strange man, whose name is Sage. It turns out Sage has some knowledge to what her father was studying before he disappeared — the elixir of life. Sage believes that two separate factions searching for the elixir may have kidnapped Clea’s father, and those same people may now be after Clea and Sage.

The first thing I noticed when I opened the book was the abnormally large font. It’s HUGE. It made me think that they did it on purpose so that they could fill up enough pages to make a decent sized book. So that turned me off a bit right from the start. When I finished the book and realized that there must be a sequel to Elixir, I thought, “Why didn’t they put this book and the upcoming sequel together as one book?” I mean, this first book is really short, and it ends rather abruptly with loose ends everywhere. Even if you plan a sequel, the first book should still have some sense of finality to it, some closure. But instead, I think they just want to sell more books so they took what could have been one book and chopped it in half. That’s just me, though.

Apparently, from other reviews I’ve read, the plot of Elixir is eerily similar to the Evermore series. I’ve never read the Evermore series, so I can’t say anything about that. I only thought it was extremely coincidental that I read two books in a row (My Name is Memory) that deal with reincarnation in one way or another, haha. So, as someone who has never read that other series, I actually liked the general plot. I do think it could have been thought out a tad better — there were some scenes that seemed really inconsequential to the overall story and made me wonder what it was doing in the story — but plot-wise, it was interesting to me. I wanted to keep reading to find out more about the elixir of life and what happened to Clea’s dad and who the mysterious stranger in the photos are. So plot wise, I’ll give a thumbs up. Execution-wise, Hilary Duff’s writing is surprisingly not that bad. I got through the entire book without cringing at the writing once, so that’s a good sign, though the writing is nothing special. Are there flaws? Yeah. But I can give her a break for it … guess I’m feeling generous? Haha.

There is one aspect of the plot I was not crazy about though, and that’s the romance part. I don’t know what it is, but YA novels, at least the ones I’ve read so far, just can’t seem to put in a natural-feeling romance to it. Clea’s love with Sage is pretty standard YA paranormal romance stuff, nothing really special there. If anything, it’s … weird. Clea is at first freaked out by Sage and at one point even thinks he might be a serial killer, chasing her through her lives to kill her over and over again. So I REALLY don’t get how she can go from thinking that to being totally and desperately in love with him in the span of a week. Actually it might be even less days than that. Yes, yes, she was in love with him in her past lives, but she doesn’t remember her past lives in this life, so I don’t buy the idea of her believing she can’t live without him all of a sudden. Just because you write it in the book doesn’t mean the reader is going to buy it.

Clea as a protagonist is alright, to my relief. She’s not terribly interesting, but at least her background is refreshing from the “I’m-the-new-kid-at-school” thing other YA paranormal romance novels have. Usually I find the female protagonists of YA paranormal romances really annoying or stupid, but I was happy that Clea seemed like a pretty grounded, ordinary kid. The only thing that bothered me was that Clea is hard to relate to sometimes. She’s very wealthy, and famous because of her parents (unnaturally famous, actually; people treat her like she’s an actress or singer), and has a bodyguard. She’s only seventeen but has a job as a photojournalist and flies around the world to do her job (a thing I found unrealistic to be honest; I don’t care if you’re famous and rich, you don’t get professional photojournalism jobs at seventeen, especially when you have no certification or anything like that to show you’re above an amateur). 99% of people reading Elixir don’t live lives like that, so I don’t find Clea a relateable character at all. Still, as a person, she is generally likeable, I think.

The romance aspect and Clea’s background may have rubbed me wrong, but I just downright hated the ending. Absolutely nothing gets resolved, it feels as if it ended mid-action, in the middle of what should be the climax of the story. Now, I get Hilary Duff wants to write a sequel or two for the book, but that doesn’t mean each individual book in the series can get away without any sort of resolution. At the end of Elixir, I still don’t know what the heck happened to Clea’s dad, Sage gets held hostage somewhere and Clea doesn’t know what happened to him, Clea’s relationship with her friend Ben is left kind of hanging and unexplained, I don’t know what happened to the elixirs of life, and I’m not 100% sure what the whole deal is with Sage appearing in Clea’s photos in the first place. I think it was explained in passing at one point that the camera captures people’s souls, and since Sage is Clea’s soulmate, he shows up … but by that logic, he should only show up when Clea is also in the picture, not when Clea takes a random picture of her closet, for example. Yet he does. Elixir doesn’t have an ending. It has the world’s most unsatisfying to-be-continued.

I ended up deciding on a middle-of-the-road kind of rating for Elixir. There are a lot of things I disliked about it, but I also surprisingly found myself liking the overall story, enough that I would pursue the second book to read when it gets published. This isn’t the kind of book I’d go around recommending people to read it. I think if you love the YA paranormal romance genre, you’ll like this. Or if you really like Hilary Duff, I’m sure you’ll give this a go too. But for all the rest of the bookworms out there: if you can’t find a copy, don’t worry about it. show less

As someone who's never been super into YA paranormal or fantasy and seeing all of the terrible reviews of this my expectations were very low. However I found this book to have an interesting story and while it wasn't above average writing it did hold my attention much better than a lot of hyped up fantasy YA books. I read it quickly and will be picking up the sequel. It's not reinventing the literary wheel but it was a fun and a fast read and I can't help but wonder if some of these bad reviews would have gone a little easier if the name on the cover wasn't familiar.