Not Your Villain

As a sequel, this book is awkward; as a stand alone, it is abrupt.

This book actually starts before the previous one and, for the first hundred pages - up until chapter six - we are pretty much rehashing the events from the previous book. Which, I might add, was totally unnecessary. We get to see certain things from Bells perspective, but they were already aptly explained in the first book, and in here it just felt like padding or filler.

After chapter six, the story picks up from the end of the previous book - but it feels like it lost some of its verve. The superhero-ing takes a backseat to Bells' love life. Which, strangely, is both good and bad. It's good because the superhero-ing feels a bit lifeless, where Bells' love life doesn't. (Like the author wanted to write a romance and the superpowers kept getting in the way.) It's bad because I totally do not support Bells and Emma as a couple - and he's still totally hung up on her. (I could have supported it, did support it in the first book because I thought it was cute. Then in this book I had to deal with ‘I think I've loved you since we were five' and strong feelings of ‘I have a boyfriend but I'm being totally jealous that you have a girlfriend.')

All that being said, I was also in a bad mood because I had to slog through the first hundred pages to actually get to anything truly new and the book would have had to be absolutely amazing to come back from that. (It wasn't.) Also, there is still some really great, natural feeling representation in the story - though that doesn't make up for the problems I had.