THE ALCHEMY OF FOREVER by Avery Williams

The Alchemy of Forever

Avery Williams

Rating: F

Description from goodreads.com:

Seraphina's first love made her immortal...her second might get her killed. Incarnation is a new series that introduces a fresh mythology perfect for fans of bestselling series like The Immortals by Alyson Noel and Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl.

After spending six hundred years on earth, Seraphina Ames has seen it all. Eternal life provides her with the world's riches, but at a very high price: innocent lives. Centuries ago, her boyfriend, Cyrus, discovered a method of alchemy that allows them to swap bodies with other humans, jumping from one vessel to the next, taking the human's life in the process. No longer able to bear the guilt of what she's done, Sera escapes from Cyrus and vows to never kill again.

Then sixteen-year-old Kailey Morgan gets into a horrific car accident right in front of her, and Sera accidentally takes over her body. For the first time, Sera finds herself enjoying the life of the person she's inhabiting--and falls for the human boy who lives next door. But Cyrus will stop at nothing until she's his again, and every moment she stays, she's putting herself and the people she's grown to care for in great danger. Will Sera have to give up the one thing that's eluded her for centuries: true love?

My thoughts on the book:

I really do not know what is going on in the YA universe lately, but the quality of writing from debut authors is dropping drastically. This book was just ridiculous. It was completely unbelievable in every way, and the underdeveloped characters were all idiots. I should have known not to read this book when it said for fans of the Immortals series, but noooooo I wanted to give a new author a chance. Yea. Big mistake. 

Let's start with the characters. Seraphina is supposed to be this unselfish, caring person, but she's not. She's been killing people for SIX HUNDRED YEARS so that she could stay alive, and she just now started feeling bad enough about it to, oh I don't know, STOP?! Yea, she's real caring. Sure, she waits the full ten years before she switches bodies, but seriously, that's over 60,000 murders she's committed. I just couldn't buy into her being a kind character. 

The rest of the characters are so under-developed, it's laughable. I didn't feel like I knew the characters any better at the end of the book than I did at the beginning. I kept reading, hoping for some big explosion of character development, but none came. 

Now, let's talk about the plot. My consensus of this is W.T.F?!?! It made no sense, unless Sera is a big freaking liar, which she probably is. The prologue indicates that one must suck the life force out of another human before inhabiting the body. Okay, cool, I'll go with it right? Well, she just kisses the first woman to inhabit her body. Unless I've been doing it wrong all these years, you don't suck on someone's face like they're a straw when you're kissing them. Just sayin'. 

THEN, Sera "accidentally" kills Kailey in an effort to save her. Riiiiight. She was giving her mouth to mouth, and then she just accidentally SUCKED the life force out of Kailey instead of BLOWING AIR into her lungs? Sure, that's believable. But still, I kept reading... I hoped it'd start to be more logical, but it got even worse. Then Sera makes about 2349872398 stupid mistakes, constantly blaming Cyrus because he made it to where she had to always depend on him. Well, maybe he realized that she was too stupid to live and kept her on a tight leash. And, of course, no one bothers to question why Kailey's entire personality has changed. Sure, they ask if she's okay, but past that, even her parents don't mention it. They know she had a concussion, yet they ignore the fact that she's acting weird. That's totally believable. AND her parents kept telling her things like, "We always allowed you to do what you want..." um hello?! Who would do that? If that is your child, she was there for her entire life, so she KNOWS what you did and didn't do. The telling her stuff like that was just too convenient. And another thing, why on earth did no one question why Kailey's blood was all over the pavement after the accident, but she had no injuries minus a concussion when she got to the hospital? She totaled a car and would have probably been dead. Looking at the car, one would assume there would be more injuries than just a concussion. Which leads me to yet ANOTHER plot hole... how did she keep the accident a secret from everyone in school? Her brother told one person, yet no one else ever found out. I mean did Williams even GO to high school? People would have known, and people would have talked about it. A lot. 

The ending was a terrible cliffhanger that was about as illogical as the rest of the book. Needless to say, I won't be continuing this series. The writing itself wasn't horrible, but the overly convenient events in the ill-conceived plot with the under-developed characters made me want to gouge my eyes out. Do yourself a favor and avoid this one.