In Nevermore, Isobel Lanley sounds like your typical ‘popular girl’. She’s blond, a cheerleader, and is dating one of the jock’s at school.

Her normal world spins out of control when she is paired up with Varen, the school goth and mystery boy, in English class. The pair are presenting on Edgar Allan Poe, and soon enough, Isobel is caught in Poe’s stories and poems, and the confusion behind his mysterious disappearance.

At the same time, Varen continues to entrance Isobel with his depth and the darkness that seems to surround him, so that Isobel feels a pull towards him that she can’t explain. Before she knows it, Isobel is enthralled by Varen and his secrets, as her world starts to unravel at the seams.

So my initial thought after reading the description of Nevermore was, “So the love story is blossoming in an English class, instead of a Biology one. Yippee!”

Twilight similarities aside (which are mentioned in the description, but actually aren’t that prevalent in the book), I’m having a really hard time writing a review about this book. Its been a few days since I finished Nevermore and I still can’t decide how I felt about it.

Parts of it were definitely enjoyable, like the mystery behind Varen and the darkness around him, which soon starts to creep into Isobel’s life. I definitely flipped through it pretty quickly in my desire to get to the bottom of the mystery, but I soon became bored when more creepy things just kept happening without any explanation.

From the very beginning, Isobel felt extremely flat to me. I didn’t really understand her or care for her, since she was so whiny and so bent on maintaining her perfect world. Even after the creepy stuff starts happening and she gets shaken up, I still wasn’t able to relate to her. And throughout the story, I just didn’t care about her or what happened to her.

The same thing happened with Varen. There’s so much darkness and mystery around him, I was expecting some sort of depth from him, but when Isobel starts to learn more about him, I didn’t feel interested or curious to learn more. The mystery of the darkness and the curious things was drawn out so long that it was another reason I stopped caring. I wanted to shake Isobel at times and demand she be more assertive about getting answers.

And that brings me to my biggest problem with this book: I just didn’t get it. After the whole ‘mystery’ around Varen and the mystery around what is happening to Isobel is cleared up, I lost interest because all these big, mysterious happenings earlier on were left hanging, and there was some strange explanation given for the whole thing. So many things weren’t explained or were just brushed off.

I get that there is a sequel for this book (not sure if its a trilogy), so some things will be revealed later on, but I didn’t feel satisfied with the story in this book to care enough to keep reading the next. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with my not having read any Poe, since the book was laden with Poe allusions and poems. But the climax/ending just sort of teetered off and didn’t really explain anything at all.

So for that 2.5/5.

Thanks for reading.

‘Till next time,

Ikhlas