No passion for Passion, but it does get a page

Well, I read Passion by Lauren Kate.  And what an utter disappointment.  If you read the pages on Fallen and Torment, you will see that I liked Fallen but didn’t really like Torment.  Yet, I managed to still have hopes for Passion.  What was I thinking?  

Pages are up for the series – because I am sure I will read #4 – but my hopes are that Lauren Kate doesn’t pull an Alyson Noel and say that it’s the final book and then all of a sudden have a cliff hanger that will lead to 3 more (I have the hard-copy first edition of Evermore which stated that it was the first of the “trilogy” – you know, as in 3 books!!) awful books.  Feel free to debate the merits of the series, but this book sucked all desire to read more by this author out of me.  It’s a shame too – the series had such promise.

Why create pages for this series then, if I harbor so much disdain for it?  Because I will read #4 – it’s like watching a bad movie – so much time already invested, I need to see how it ends even though it’s terrible…  and I am going to do all that I can to purge the memory of this book from my brain between now and reading #4, so I will definitely need the page on Passion to remind me of all the awful and ridiculous happenings so far that will be needed to understand Rapture.

Anywho… the review is below – and on the page.

I loved Fallen.  I mean I really thought it was great.  I wanted more info so I didn’t feel so very lost about certain things, but I still really thought it was a great book.  It pained me to read the second (Torment).  It was not a great follow-up.  Despite the epic failure that I thought Torment was, I still had high hopes for Passion.  Shame on me.  Don’t get me wrong, I will read Rapture – if for no other reason than the text on the page facing the last page states:  “Rapture – The Final Book in the Fallen Series – Spring 2012” and I can close the book on a series that had so much potential but fell flat fast.

Here, virtually all the characters we got to know in the first two books were non-existant.  The promise of a “team Cam vs team Daniel” – shattered.  Primarily by the fact that Cam was in all of like 3 chapters and he was peripheral.  And expendable.  And he didn’t really influence the plot or the characters in any way.  The only characters that really mattered in this installment were Daniel, Luce (both, in all their incarnations) and the new Bill character.  And while this is a petty, nit-pickey, tiny little annoyance – was it really necessary for every version of Luce to be named some version of Luce?  Really?  Before we get to the Mayan civilization or Chinese one, we couldn’t get a different name?  With Bill as the guide, it wasn’t really necessary for that to happen.  But anyway… onto bigger complaints.

First, the entire plot annoyed me.  Luce needed proof that their love was real?  This book felt like an unnecessary detour through time just so the author could try writing about time travel.  Bill could have gone all “3D” Luce with the first step back and Luce would have felt it right away.  But that would have cut out at least half the book.  Because Luce gets a hint that “choice” is important, but there really isn’t any context to help the reader guess why and the time traveling got old.  Fast.  And there were still all these rules around the curse, but even after learning what the curse was and where it came from, where’d the rules come from?  The little we learn about the characters all happens in the last 30 pages.  And there isn’t enough meat to the rest of the pages before that to keep a reader really engaged.  I constantly felt like “get on with it, where’d the curse come from?” and was relieved when a chapter was over because it meant I was getting closer to the end to figuring out what the end game of this installment was.

The characters were flat.  Everything about them came from the first two books and the prose, which was decent in the first book, was just as bad as it was in the last.  There are plot holes, unnecessary time traveling, changes to time lines with out any consequences (even though they are all about making sure nothing too drastic changes, but they need to create the loophole in the first place – so, it’s like an oxymoron in a way), and the descriptions of the scenery and setting are bloated and felt like a way for the author just to show off some historical research.  The time frames really didn’t do anything other then play window dressing and after a little while, it got annoying having to read 3 or 4 pages of setting description before really having any clue why those particular lifetimes were chosen.

I am ready for this series to end.  All the romance has been sucked out of the series for me, the way Luce’s doubt came about in Torment and the way it was “resolved” here didn’t do anything to bring that romance back.  And, I don’t even really want to think about the theology that must be coming in the last book….  This book was really more of a transition from love story in the first two books to what ever battle of good vs evil is coming in the last one (at least that’s what it seems to be setting up for).  The first books weren’t really ever about saving the world, but about Luce and Daniel’s love story.  Now, all of a sudden we are shifting to the need to save the world.  I don’t know why it took that (mis)direction, but it spoiled the story.  We had to get through the anti-climax of where the curse came from so we can get to the angels battling satan so we can get to the end of the series.  We learn nothing about the annoying Announcers.  We get introduced to “the Scale” but what a waste of words that was.  There was no real action here.  No real depth to the plot.  No real romance between the characters.  No real elegance to the dialogue.  That leaves no real hope for the last, except for the fact that it will be the last!