Shadowland - Alyson Noel

Shadowland is the third book in the Immortals series by Alyson Noel. It was released in the UK on 1st July 2010 by Macmillan Children's Books and it is 368 pages long.

Plot

Ever and Damen have lived many lives together but Damen is the only one who has lived through them all. In each life, Ever has always died, leaving Damen waiting around until she is born again, believing that they are destined to be together. Now, Ever is an Immortal just like Damen and they finally have the chance of being together forever. Just when they think they are going to get their happily ever after, Damen is cursed and unable to touch Ever in any way…or he will die.

Shadowland sees Ever and Damen struggle with past choices and what the future could hold for them. When forced to get a job by her Aunt, Ever finds herself working in Mystics and Moonbeams with Jude, a seriously hot surfer. As they spend more time together, Ever has the strange feeling that she has met Jude before, but where? As they spend more time together, Ever realises that she and Jude share a lot of similarities. Jude may be the one who can help her find what she needs to save her relationship with Damen but also the one who could break it. Is Damen really her destiny?

What I thought
In the previous two book in this series, I quite liked Ever but now I’m not so sure. I felt quite disappointed with her for many reasons this time around and unfortunately, she has turned into one of those female protagonists that I just want to slap. I understood that she’s under a lot of pressure to fix her relationship with Damen and un-do the damage that was caused in Blue Moon but why doesn’t she listen to anyone? Damen has been around a long time and knows what he is talking about and then there is Romy and Rayne. They were witches and if Ever was going to listen to anyone about using magyck then it was going to be them, but she didn’t. She chose to ignore everything that they told her and did what she wanted to, not really thinking about the consequences. I think maybe I’m putting myself into her situation a little too much here and thinking about what I would do but if she really wanted to save her relationship then I would have thought that she would pay attention to the people with more experience.

I really, really hope that we get to see a lot more of Jude in the next book. I can see why the girls (and Miles) were so interested in him. Shadowland ended with a huge mystery surrounding Jude and I cant wait to find out what he is really all about. I feel as though Shadowland only barely scraped the surface of what is going on with him and the connection he has with Ever and I hope to see this expanded on. It was nice to see Ever have someone that she could talk to about her abilities, apart from Damen, even if she was cautious to begin with.

A big part of the story that I did really like though was Damen realising his mistakes for the past 600 years. A big theme in this book is people realising the consequences for the actions and decisions they make through life and this hits Damen like a brick to the head. After what happened with Roman, he realises that he has been far from a Saint and needs to do something to fix his Karma. I don’t know if I completely agree with the way that he did things but at least he tried. In this respect, I liked Damen in this book but there were also things that he did that annoyed the hell out of me. I didn’t agree with the way that he dealt with Jude being around. With all of the problems going on with him and Ever, he decides to leave her to fend for herself and knowing that there is a good chance that she will make some awful decisions. You aren’t the completely good guy that I thought you were Damen!

I really enjoyed the involvement of magyck in Shadowland. It was clear that Roman wasn’t going to help Ever and Damen at all so there had to be another way around the problem and this was the perfect solution. Although it may seem like the obvious choice, I thought it was a great way to bring the story back to some of the characters we have met previously. Two of these were Romy and Rayne who I loved from Blue Moon. These teenage twins added comedy to a quite serious story which broke it up nicely.

My main problem with Shadowland is that I didn’t get any closure concerning anything that had happened in the previous two books. Nothing was resolved in any way. Instead of working through some of the things that are already happening in the story, more mystery and drama was added. I think I would have been happy if just one thing had been solved. I will be sticking this series out as I think it has real potential to be everything that I want it to be in the next book. I hope that the characters go through some personal development in the next instalment and Ever finally realises that she doesn’t know everything and that she isn’t always wise in her choices. I far from hated this book but I didn’t love it as much as I did Evermore and Blue Moon.