Review: Sweet Evil by Wendy Higgins

Book: Sweet Evil 

Author: Wendy Higgins
Series: Sweet Trilogy
Publication Date: May 1st, 2012
Publisher: HarperTeen
Rating: 1 Star

Embrace the Forbidden

What if there were teens whose lives literally depended on being bad influences?

This is the reality for sons and daughters of fallen angels.

Tenderhearted Southern girl Anna Whitt was born with the sixth sense to see and feel emotions of other people. She’s aware of a struggle within herself, an inexplicable pull toward danger, but Anna, the ultimate good girl, has always had the advantage of her angel side to balance the darkness within. It isn’t until she turns sixteen and meets the alluring Kaidan Rowe that she discovers her terrifying heritage and her willpower is put to the test. He’s the boy your daddy warned you about. If only someone had warned Anna.

Forced to face her destiny, will Anna embrace her halo or her horns?

This book has everything I hate. I'm not kidding.

1. An idiotic, annoying heroine.
2. A love triangle.
3. More telling than showing.
4. Info dumps.
5. Douchebag love interest.
6. Things that happen that make no logical sense at all. 

The things I could say about this book... If you saw my comments as I read, well, you'd understand. I'm surprised this has such a high rating. Because of it, I had high expectations, and they all came crashing down the moment Anna opened her mouth and started talking about her appearance, how she was soooo plain. But I kept going, hoping that maybe Kaidan, the love interest, would redeem the story. I mean, if you're going to throw good and evil together, there should be some serious chemistry, right?

WRONG.

All Kaidan turns out to be is a knife-wielding, wannabe bad boy who lays every girl in a ten mile radius under the pretense of "working." I found his need to have sex with at least one girl every night extremely distasteful, since he wasn't being forced into it, as shown by his later ability to just drop his work whenever he chooses.

But Anna still chooses to follow him like a simpering puppy.

You know why this book is 1 star? I'll tell you why. The main character.

People expect stuff from young adult books nowadays. They expect a girl who can kick asses and take names as well as she can pull off a ballgown, who's as smart as she's pretty.

I don't expect that. Sure, it's nice, but it's becoming the norm, and I want something different. Anna could have been that, but she failed completely. Here are some quotes that show just how insufferable she is:

A vibrant energy rushed through my body as the pieces slammed into place. Oh, dear Lord. I was in love with him. And there wasn’t a thing on earth, in heaven, or in hell that could have stopped me.

Spare me. She barely knows the guy. He's the first guy she's been attracted to, and she's ready to face heaven and hell? Bella Stewart, come on down! I think we've found you a buddy.

We couldn’t just stand there loitering. I made a quick decision to trust them and hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be one of my naive moments.

So. She decides to go into the company of potentially dangerous people to avoid LOITERING? Priorities, girl. Sort them.

“Look, Jay, I’m going to be honest with you, even though it’s embarrassing. I’m one step away from stalking him.” My voice shook. “All I do is think of him. If there were no such thing as caller ID, I would call him all day just to listen to him talking on his voice mail. I’m having an extremely difficult time getting over him. If I see him again...”

DOES SHE HAVE ANY COMMON SENSE? DON'T SAY SOMETHING LIKE THAT.

What's probably even worse is Jay's reply, which is: "'Sorry, man... It's cool.'"

But it doesn't stop there...

I dealt with the pain by shutting down. The more time asleep, the better. I missed school a few times, just to lie in bed. Failed a major test. Lost weight. But I knew time would heal the ache, and everything would be okay. I could move on. I would come back to life. Eventually. But not yet.

Remind you of anyone yet? Take the vampires and replace them with angels, and voila! You get Sweet Evil. There is nothing about this book that's interesting in the least. Not crybaby Anna and her pathetic obsession with Kaidan, who basically strings her around and gets laid every night anyway. Oh, and he also makes "masculine growing sounds" and gives her "crushing stares," not that I have any idea what any of those mean.

Not her best friend, Jay, who acts like a wannabe gangster and cheats on his somewhat-girlfriend. And not her friends, who represent sins and don't really give a crap about the chaos they induce.

There was also too much drinking and substance abuse in this for me to be okay with it. If Higgins was trying to teach us anything, it was that it's easy to get fake IDs and that drinking is totally okay as long as we know when to stop. Also, you can apparently dump illegal drugs out of your car window...

I'm pretty sure the people who know when to stop wouldn't be drinking in the first place.

The idea with the Dukes and their children was an interesting one, but Higgins has botched it in a way that's so annoyingly stereotypical that I was begging for the book to end and put me out of my misery. The writing is subpar, with words that don't really mean anything and illogical sentences that make no sense. I wouldn't have read on, but Higgins pulled a dirty trick. The relationship between Anna and Kaidan reaches no closure, and if there's one thing I can't deal with, it's unclosed relationships. So I'll be reading on. Hopefully, Anna will get over herself (not likely), and Kaidan will stop being a douche (even more unlikely).
View all my reviews