Elixir

This post first published June 26, 2011.

Author: Hilary Duff (with Elise Allen)
Published: October 2010
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing
Series: Elixir #1
327 pages (hardcover)
 
I’m usually pretty skeptical about celebrities writing novels, so when I heard that Hilary Duff was releasing a YA book, I didn’t have much interest in reading it, at first. However, I actually like Hilary Duff and I remember being equally skeptical when she announced she was releasing a music album, and that turned out to be okay, so I thought I’ll give her first novel a chance too (and it just so happened to be a new arrival at my local library). It’s by no means an amazing book, far from perfect, but I was surprised that it was pretty decent. I do have some issues with it, but I actually like it. Even though I think I can easily lump this together with other YA paranormal romances out in the market, there are aspects of it that are different enough that it feels original at the same time.

The story is about Clea, a seventeen year old girl who is also a photojournalist. Her mother is an influential politician and her father is a world famous surgeon as well as the owner of GloboReach, a humanitarian organization. One year after Clea’s father’s mysterious disappearance, Clea begins noticing a strange man in many of her photos. Shortly after, she starts dreaming about this strange man as well, with herself in the role of various women throughout time.

Her investigation into the strange man leads her to realize he is linked to her father’s disappearance. A trip to Rio unites Clea with this strange man, whose name is Sage. It turns out Sage has some knowledge to what her father was studying before he disappeared — the elixir of life. Sage believes that two separate factions searching for the elixir may have kidnapped Clea’s father, and those same people may now be after Clea and Sage.

The first thing I noticed when I opened the book was the abnormally large font. It’s HUGE. It made me think that they did it on purpose so that they could fill up enough pages to make a decent sized book. So that turned me off a bit right from the start. When I finished the book and realized that there must be a sequel to Elixir, I thought, “Why didn’t they put this book and the upcoming sequel together as one book?” I mean, this first book is really short, and it ends rather abruptly with loose ends everywhere. Even if you plan a sequel, the first book should still have some sense of finality to it, some closure. But instead, I think they just want to sell more books so they took what could have been one book and chopped it in half. That’s just me, though.

Apparently, from other reviews I’ve read, the plot of Elixir is eerily similar to the Evermore series. I’ve never read the Evermore series, so I can’t say anything about that. I only thought it was extremely coincidental that I read two books in a row (My Name is Memory) that deal with reincarnation in one way or another, haha. So, as someone who has never read that other series, I actually liked the general plot. I do think it could have been thought out a tad better — there were some scenes that seemed really inconsequential to the overall story and made me wonder what it was doing in the story — but plot-wise, it was interesting to me. I wanted to keep reading to find out more about the elixir of life and what happened to Clea’s dad and who the mysterious stranger in the photos are. So plot wise, I’ll give a thumbs up. Execution-wise, Hilary Duff’s writing is surprisingly not that bad. I got through the entire book without cringing at the writing once, so that’s a good sign, though the writing is nothing special. Are there flaws? Yeah. But I can give her a break for it … guess I’m feeling generous? Haha.

There is one aspect of the plot I was not crazy about though, and that’s the romance part. I don’t know what it is, but YA novels, at least the ones I’ve read so far, just can’t seem to put in a natural-feeling romance to it. Clea’s love with Sage is pretty standard YA paranormal romance stuff, nothing really special there. If anything, it’s … weird. Clea is at first freaked out by Sage and at one point even thinks he might be a serial killer, chasing her through her lives to kill her over and over again. So I REALLY don’t get how she can go from thinking that to being totally and desperately in love with him in the span of a week. Actually it might be even less days than that. Yes, yes, she was in love with him in her past lives, but she doesn’t remember her past lives in this life, so I don’t buy the idea of her believing she can’t live without him all of a sudden. Just because you write it in the book doesn’t mean the reader is going to buy it.

Clea as a protagonist is alright, to my relief. She’s not terribly interesting, but at least her background is refreshing from the “I’m-the-new-kid-at-school” thing other YA paranormal romance novels have. Usually I find the female protagonists of YA paranormal romances really annoying or stupid, but I was happy that Clea seemed like a pretty grounded, ordinary kid. The only thing that bothered me was that Clea is hard to relate to sometimes. She’s very wealthy, and famous because of her parents (unnaturally famous, actually; people treat her like she’s an actress or singer), and has a bodyguard. She’s only seventeen but has a job as a photojournalist and flies around the world to do her job (a thing I found unrealistic to be honest; I don’t care if you’re famous and rich, you don’t get professional photojournalism jobs at seventeen, especially when you have no certification or anything like that to show you’re above an amateur). 99% of  people reading Elixir don’t live lives like that, so I don’t find Clea a relateable character at all. Still, as a person, she is generally likeable, I think.
The romance aspect and Clea’s background may have rubbed me wrong, but I just downright hated the ending. Absolutely nothing gets resolved, it feels as if it ended mid-action, in the middle of what should be the climax of the story. Now, I get Hilary Duff wants to write a sequel or two for the book, but that doesn’t mean each individual book in the series can get away without any sort of resolution. At the end of Elixir, I still don’t know what the heck happened to Clea’s dad, Sage gets held hostage somewhere and Clea doesn’t know what happened to him, Clea’s relationship with her friend Ben is left kind of hanging and unexplained, I don’t know what happened to the elixirs of life, and I’m not 100% sure what the whole deal is with Sage appearing in Clea’s photos in the first place. I think it was explained in passing at one point that the camera captures people’s souls, and since Sage is Clea’s soulmate, he shows up … but by that logic, he should only show up when Clea is also in the picture, not when Clea takes a random picture of her closet, for example. Yet he does. Elixir doesn’t have an ending. It has the world’s most unsatisfying to-be-continued.

I ended up deciding on a middle-of-the-road kind of rating for Elixir. There are a lot of things I disliked about it, but I also surprisingly found myself liking the overall story, enough that I would pursue the second book to read when it gets published. This isn’t the kind of book I’d go around recommending people to read it. I think if you love the YA paranormal romance genre, you’ll like this. Or if you really like Hilary Duff, I’m sure you’ll give this a go too. But for all the rest of the bookworms out there: if you can’t find a copy, don’t worry about it.

My Rating: 3/5