"Entice" by Carrie Jones

From Goodreads: "Zara and Nick are soul mates, meant to be together forever.  

But that's not quite how things have worked out.

For starters, well, Nick is dead. 

Supposedly, he's been taken to a mythic place for warriors known as Valhalla, so Zara and her friends might be able to get him back. But it's taking time, and meanwhile a group of evil pixies is devastating Bedford, with more teens going missing every day. An all-out war seems imminent, and the good guys need all the warriors they can find. But how to get to Valhalla?

And even if Zara and her friends discover the way, there's that other small problem: Zara's been pixie kissed. When she finds Nick, will he even want to go with her? Especially since she hasn't just turned...she's Astley's queen."

Almost 100% of the time I am glad when my favourite book becomes a series because who doesn't love to see more of their favourite characters and learn of all of the crazy adventures they get into since the last time you saw them? As such, stand-alone books typically frustrate me. For days after finishing a stand-alone book I will try to think of everything that could happen to the characters and then I get all depressed since whatever I am thinking is clearly not going to happen. However, that is not the case for this series at all. I wish that "Need" had been a stand-alone book. I really, really, REALLY liked it (I rated it 10/10 HERE) and I feel like "Captivate" (which I rated 6.5/10 HERE) and "Entice" are such let-downs and in all honesty they kinda wreck the entire series for me. 

There is just such a mishmash of stuff going on in this later books, almost like the author thought "Let's have pixies, and shifters! And let the shifters shift into whatever animal they feel like! And Good pixies and bad pixies! And queen pixies and king pixies! And sparkles- lots and lots of sparkles! Then let's have some Norse gods, FBI agents, paramedics, and terrorist attacks- The more the merrier right?" Wrong. I feel like all of these recent additions are really retracting from the original storyline, which is a shame because it was really great and had the potential to become even better. I feel like more than a bit of editing was needed. 

And I know that stories where everything works out in favour or the hero/ heroine are kinda boring and predictable, but I kinda wish that this story was a bit more like those. I mean, can Zara not catch a break (I rambled about this a bit in my review of "Mockingjay" by Suzanne Collins when Katniss was forever being hurt)? She was constantly being beat up, threatened, or on death's door in this book.

I think that the only saving grace of this book for me was Astley (which I found somewhat surprising since in the last book I didn't really know how I felt about him at all). Though he wasn't the most honest person (Er.... pixie) ever and kept some pretty monumental stuff from Zora, I couldn't help but feel sorry for him (cue Avery's love of the underdog character). I mean, the girl that he wants to be with wants to be with another boy and he just wants to see her be happy and is willing to make her happy by saving the other boy, his competition. I just thought that it was really nice to get to know more about him.  

Though I also did think that Valhalla, the land of the gods, was really intriguing. I want to know more about it and I think it would be interesting if there was a separate story/ series told about it.

Rating: 6.5/10  

PS. Don’t forget to enter my giveaway of Sean Beaudoin’s “Going Nowhere Faster”!  (today is the last day to enter!)