Endlessly by Kiersten White

So, this one (book 3) is definitely my favorite cover in the series, but my least favorite book. I want my own purple, flowing dress, please! I didn’t dislike the book; I just don’t think it was quite up to par with the first two.

Poor Evie just can never truly be left alone. It seems as though every living creature needs something from her. The supernatual creatures (which now include a dragon) that live near her and go to her boyfriend’s dad’s diner want Evie to create a portal for them to go home. Evie’s new teen friends (of the human variety) want her attention all the time, especially in regards to helping plan a dance. The dark fairy queen, and the dark fairies want to take Evie to their realm, to prevent Evie from opening up any portals. Soon, the other fairy queen and Evie’s ex fairy boyfriend enter the scene to explain how they want Evie to go along with the supernatural creatures at the diner, and make the portal.

It turns out that many, many, many years ago, the two queens opened up the portals, and forced all the supernatural creatures to come to this world, with no choice. Now, the Seelie (“good”) fairy queen wants to take everyone back, and the only way to do this is with Evie’s abilities. Meanwhile, the dark queen is kidnapping humans to either dance themselves to death in the fairy realms, do hard labor, or to give birth to more empty ones (like Evie). Also, IPCA, the organization Evie used to work for, is under new management. The new management is backing the dark fairy and is imprisoning Evie’s past boss/mother figure and hopes to get their hands on Evie too.

Evie has a lot on her plate in this one. Between rescuing her “mom” from trial, to forgiving Jack for abandoning her in the last book, to resucing her boyfriend from the dark queen, to sort of learning to trust her ex fairy boyfriend, to saving all the humans who have been kidnapped (including one of her new teen friends), to fixing things with her once evil twin sister (who she sees in her dreams), to escaping IPCA again, there just always seems to be something in the way of Evie sitting down, relaxing and enjoying herself with her shape-shifting boyfriend.

There’s a lot of action in the one! Evie has to make a lot of plans as she goes along with one bad thing after another getting in her way. There’s plenty of fairy manipulation, sabotage of IPCA, and supernatural creatures! I was never bored with this book. And overall, I really did enjoy the final ending for the series as a whole.

There were three things I was not a fan of: 1) the romance, 2) the overall rushing feeling I had, and 3) how easy certain things were (though this could be related to number 2).  I loved the romance in book 1, and how Evie sort of learned what it felt like to really fall for someone (it was gradual and realistic as it could be with her crush kind of being a prisoner). Book 2 wasn’t quite as exciting as the first one because a major theme was Evie trying to live a normal life, and well “normal” isn’t as interesting as working for a organization that bags and tags werewolves and the like. But, the romance again was pretty believable for me –it had all the makings of a great, first love. This book seemed to fastforward decade or so in the romance.

She and her boyfriend were just talking about love all the time. They were constantly needing to be together. While I get that things are different for them, I don’t really feel like they were adequately at the stage of their relationship where it was okay to sacrifice themselves for the other. Also, I feel like the final decision made at the end was a little bogus. I don’t think Lend knew Evie well enough to make the decision he did for her.

I felt like a lot of things were rushed. So much happens in this one. I feel like what happens with IPCA alone could be one book, and what happens with the dark fairies could be another. It kind of felt like the author had made the decision really early on that there could absolutely be no more books in this series and it doesn’t matter how long this third book will be or how rushed certain scenes will seem.

A lot of resolutions to problems happened too quickly. In the space of a few sentences, Evie decided what to do with the woken up Vivian (aka: evil twin).  Also, Evie just happened to remember fairies disliking the taste of bread right at the perfect moment. Or another character just happened to rescue another one when it was really convenient for Evie.While part of Evie’s charm is her ability to think on her feet and do things (like randomly stab a certain bad character in the neck, unexpectedly), sometimes the book just felt overall way too convenient. I think a large part of this is because of all of the things thrown in here. Perhaps, if it were two books, there’d be less rushing through interesting scenes, and more time to allow Evie to come to solutions to things a little bit more slowly.

I still loved Evie! I love how girly she is. I love how stubborn and loyal she is too. She’s selfish sometimes and not afraid to say no to people, which can be annoying, but also makes her seem more realistic. I loved the idea for everything that happened with the portals and all the creatures returning home. I just wish there was more room to go into things better. My favorite book in the series was definitely the first book. I still give this one a 8/10 because it still was so much fun to read. It’s easy, fast, fluffy, and often times hilarious. It just wasn’t as good as the books before it.

I have to include my favorite sentence:

“We linked hands –my ex-boyfriend, my boyfriend, and my former friend-then-enemy-then-friend and I– and walked through a door to see if maybe empty carbs were good for something after all." (291)