Review: I wanted to like this one so much!
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 16, 2014
I don't even know how to start this. Did I like Euphoria? Yes and no. Scarlett, as usual, drove me nuts until almost halfway through the book. The first half felt like more of the same from Metamorphosis and Ambrosia, which is to say Scarlett continued to waffle back and forth between Mason and Ash. Cozying up to one, and then dropping him to go to the other, but not dropping him completely…only dangling him by a string. It felt like reading a day-time soap opera. Drama for the sake of drama.The men in Scarlett's life have a lot of growing up to do when the book starts. I have loved Ash from the very beginning. At times in Euphoria he was my favorite man, and others I couldn't believe what he was doing. But I think he was finally starting to get it and growing up. Mason has always been my second choice for Scarlett. He has never really acted like an adult (though I guess, neither has Ash) and his decisions are always selfishly driven. In this book he finally started making decisions that were responsible and adult. Both men always struck me as immature. They were both supposedly older than Scarlett, and Ash was even done with his undergraduate work, which would put him at 23? 24? but I never really felt like that acted their age.So the storyline. That's really where I don't know what to say. I've already said the first half was more of the same from the first two books. That in itself almost made me put the book down before the 50% mark. But then it looked like Scarlett had picked her man, all three characters were making moves to grow up and make better decisions, and then WHAM! out of left field (and nearly at the end of the book) Erin Noelle wrote a plot twist extreme.If you had asked me halfway through the book if I could have predicted the end, there's no way. And honestly I'm not happy about it. It felt like a gratuitous shift that was so unnecessary. Maybe this is where she had the story going from the moment she started writing Metamorphosis, but it couldn't have come as a bigger and more unwelcome shock. I've read comments from the author justifying this plot point, and while she has a point and the way she explains it gives her the leeway to make that choice, it just sent me into a tailspin that I didn't fully recover from before the end of the book.I was all set to change my mind and like this book until that twist at the end. Then it just fell apart for me again. After building a shaky foundation that I was finally ready to say I liked the book, that twist knocked apart any good feelings I had developed. The resolution after that twist happened so quickly for me as a reader, though a long term timeline passed, my brain had yet to reconcile the changes and while I was't finished grieving a 180 degree switch was made.I wanted to like this book. I wanted the closure that I knew would come as the third book in this series. But at what cost? I'm almost wishing I had DNF'd this book at the halfway mark so I could hold on to that little bit of I had developed.