Book 3 of a Series on a Steep Downward Slide
This is the 3rd in a 5 book series about a post-apocolyptic world in which vampires have overrun everything & humans are confined to a heavily fortified compound. The series so far has been... well, honestly, it's kind of a mess. The plot is riddled throughout with huge gaping holes. There's no good reason why the assets had to travel at all, especially since their interactions with the different time periods contribute literally nothing to the overall plot. I think the author just wanted to write about the chosen times & simply never learned that when writing a book, literally every aspect should have a point, a role to play in the grand scheme of things. The love story is the absolute worse part. I can't stand instalove. And this particular example is really bad. These two have encountered one another for a handful of days 3 times over the course of like 400 years. Pretty sure they've only spent a few weeks together TOPS in all 3 books so far. But clearly that's no problem because mere moments after officially meeting in book 1 they are basically obsessed with each other. Which I find particularly unbelievable considering protagonist Eve had been exclusively trained to kill Enoch back in 2157 when he was her sworn enemy & indirectly responsible for her mother's death. Even 3 books in I am baffled by their inexplicable inability to live without one another despite the fact that they still barely know each other. The entire thing is even harder to believe due to the absolute lack of character development. All of the characters use the exact same voice, no matter how many unnecessary P.O.V.s pop up. No growth arcs AT ALL, with Eve & Enoch the dryest & weakest of the bunch! I'm not even done yet. Perhaps worst of all is the pitifully poor editing. I see where in the acknowledgements the author thanks her 2 beta readers (Pro tip: You should have as MANY people read your book as possible to catch as many errors as possible... Pretty sure 2 was not enough), but I wonder if anyone actually edited this thing at all. The previous two books were okay in this respect, but for some reason High Society is an editor's nightmare. There is punctuation in the middle of words, along with multiple instances of line breaks in the middle of sentences or even splitting a word in two. But the greatest editing oversight award goes to the parts where the author seems to have forgotten which P.O.V. she was writing at the time, resulting in a full paragraph during which Eve refers to herself in 3rd person, as well as several incorrect pronoun switches (unless maybe all of the characters are gender fluid & she forgot to mention it? That would at least make them a bit more interesting, I guess...). So at this point you are probably wondering what, if anything I actually liked about this book. Well, there is one thing, which is literally the only reason I have continued to read this far, & that is that I found the initial concept very intreaguing. I hadn't heard of anything similar before & the beginning of the first book (before instalove takes over the entirety of the action) held some promise. I think if the author had taken her time with this & actually crafted out a plot, perhaps one with some plot twists, instead of characters continuously doing exactly what you thought they would (Yawn!), added a growth arc for AT LEAST the protagonist, heated the romance up with a bit of slow burn (or any burn, really), that these books had the potential to be good. Unfortunately she didn't do any of that & thus an interesting concept is once again wasted due to poor execution. Regardless, I intend to at least skim the remaining 2 books, just to see how it all plays out (cause right now nothing seems to fit quite right). Call me an optimist, but I've got my fingers crossed that she'll miraculously manage to pull out an acceptable ending. I won't hold my breath, though, & frankly, neither should you.