Poudelivre

There have been moments when I’ve finished a novel in a series and have decided not to continue it only to pick up the next installment a year or so later. The same thing happened here, when I read Kimberly Derting’s The Pledge during fall last year and decided not continue the series only to change my mind a year later. My hopes for The Essence was not high but I still wanted it to be better than its predecessor. I simply loved the idea for The Pledge and was disappointed with how it turned out. Unfortunately, The Essence would turn out to be something bad getting even worse.

At the end of The Pledge, Charlie defeats the old, evil queen, Sabara, who’s ruling their country, Ludania, with an iron fist. Charlie, of royal descent herself, takes Sabara’s place as queen and is now to be called Queen Charlaina of Ludania. But while everyone else is happy that Sabara finally is gone, Charlie carries a heavy secret. Sabara’s body may be dead and there might not be a visible trace of her, but her soul, her essence, is still around. More accurately, it’s inside Charlie herself. On the outside, everything is perfect, but on the inside Charlie is fighting a monster. All this happens while Charlie tries to find her footing as queen, when she battles terrorists who are unhappy about the changes she’s making in Ludania and while assassins are hidden in every corner trying to take her off the board game all together.

I’m not really sure were to start with this because the entire novel was 380 pages of nothing much interesting happening. Without spoiling anything I’ll say that Charlie wants upgrades for her queendom, both in the form of transportation and technology. She intends to visit an annual gathering of queens in a queendom some ways from her own to get what she needs, which means that she has to go out on a long trip while at the same time leaving her queendom in a time of need. Charlie has made a lot of changes since she took the throne, the most notable that she erased the way her people were divided by class – through language. Now everyone speaks the same language and everyone has the same rights. For some this is a good change but others liked the way it used to be and are violently voicing their disagreement. Terrorist are at work and innocent lives are taken but Charlie is certain she wants to go to the summit and meet the queens. To try and keep her country calm, Charlie therefore leaves her adviser, former prince and boyfriend, Max in charge.

This is what created the lack of interest in the story. Charlie leaves to go on this long trip, were some people try to kill her but fails, were she meets some queens and people try to kill her again and then she leaves and then people try to kill her again. She spends the bigger part of the story traveling and nothing much happens, except that people try to kill her and keep failing. Her love story with Max is nonexistent for the bigger part of the novel since they’re apart and because of these two reasons the book falls flat. The times Charlie and Max are together are fleeting and feels hollow. The constant traveling was boring and the lack of actual action was even more so. Don’t get me wrong – things do happen. Charlie is almost killed about five times but it’s not very exciting and there wasn’t a single moment when I actually feared for her life. But the entire book is basically about getting from point A to point B to point C and it’s boring. The Essence is definitely a novel suffering from second-book syndrome, just a transportation between the first novel, where everything is new and exciting, and the third, where everything is resolved.

The storyline is boring, but something that bothered me even more was the characters. There wasn’t one that I loved and few I even liked. The biggest characters are Charlie, her friends Brooklynn and Aron, her boyfriend Max, her sister Angelina, Sabara, her guard Zafir, a girl that appears later on in the novel and a foreign ambassador named Niko.

First off, Charlie is seventeen and crowned queen. This is nothing unusual in the fantastic world of YA. But Charlie is too childish to be a queen and even less a good queen. She dislikes her “queen lessons” and does what she can to either avoid them or just simply not listen during them. She thinks it’s a good idea to change her entire country in one move directly as she takes the throne, which a child could figure out would be an awful idea. She appoints Brooklynn, eighteen, as the commander of her army. Her only adviser is her twenty year old boyfriend, who was a prince just a few months ago, before his grandmother was killed, it’s true, but he’s still only twenty. On top of this, Charlie gets so very annoyed when her guard won’t just call her by her nickname, when he’s always by her side and refuses to leave her alone at times, despite the fact that he saves her from numerous assassination attempts. She doesn't quite seem to know what a guard is for and despite the attempts to kill her she seems oblivious to the fact that Zafir is actually protecting her and that he certainly has a reason to.

There is not one part of Charlie that I liked. She was naïve in everything and tried too hard to get the reader to like her which only made me dislike her even more. An important member of the terrorist group is Brooklynn’s father and Charlie can’t even deal with that. He gets to roam around and do whatever he wants, which often consists of killing a lot of innocent people. That neither Charlie nor Brooklynn tries to stop him speaks volume. Brooklynn, who used to go to school with Charlie, something they both still should do, is now the commander of an entire army without having any experience and little training. I want to make it clear that I’m not bothered by the fact that the commander is a girl but rather that she so clearly is not prepared for the job. It was obvious that Derting wanted Brooklynn to be a badass, but she too fell flat. Like Charlie she tried too hard without really accomplishing anything.

The only other character that takes up space is Zafir and that’s only because his job is to trail behind Charlie and protect her. Angelina is not there for most part of the story and neither is Max. Aron is there the entire time but is not mentioned very much. The only time he’s around is when the weak and extremely obvious love story between him and Brooklynn appears. To the contrary, Sabara is a constant presences inside Charlie and Charlie is very afraid of losing herself and letting the old queen take her over. It doesn’t help when Niko appear and it turns out that he and Sabara not only knew each other when she still had a body – he also recognize her inside Charlie now.

This is something of a spoiler, so if you don’t want that, skip to the next paragraph. At the end of the novel, Charlie has a fall-out with Max and I thought it could be something really great. There is a third novel and to keep their relationship a question would’ve been perfect to get readers to keep reading the next installment. But instead, after a not-really fight it’s all resolved in about a half page and then the novel ends. So much more could’ve been done here to keep a momentum going into the last part of the trilogy, but no. It’s just another thing to throw on the ever-growing pile of things I didn’t like with this novel.

As if all this wasn’t enough, the character development is nonexistent and the writing is nothing out of the ordinary. The cover was not that pretty and the title wasn’t alluring at all. I have a hard time even finding something I liked about this story and I certainly won’t recommend it to anyone. However, there is a slight possibility that I will pick up the last installment to see how it finishes, but my hopes aren’t high so I'm not sure. The Essence, however, won’t get a reread from me.