This post first published August 18, 2011.
Author: Trinity Faegen
Published: September 27, 2011
Publisher Egmont USA
Series: The Mephisto Covenant #1
448 pages (galley)
Where do I even begin?
I was originally super excited to read this book when I got it from
NetGalley. There’s many positive reviews of it on Goodreads, and it had a
very intriguing synopsis — Sasha, our main character, wants to know who
murdered her father and thinks joining the cult, the Ravens, will bring
her answers.
What she finds out instead is that she is Anabo, a descendant of
Eve’s daughter (as in, Adam and Eve), and the Ravens try to kill her for
it. The Ravens are working for Eryx, who is worse than Lucifer the
Devil; Eryx is trying to use his recruited souls to power himself into
overtaking Hell and Heaven. Sasha is saved, however, by Jax, who is a
Son of Hell and is looking for his Anabo, his soulmate, who could lead
him to a chance to be in Heaven.
This book is probably going to be popular amongst those who enjoy
romances between super hot paranormal male leads and
she-doesn’t-know-she’s-beautiful-and-special female leads, who, for one
reason or another, are in angst for much of the story because they
cannot be together. If you like that kind of story, you’ll love this —
but The Mephisto Covenant was not my cup of tea at all, was not what I expected.
The story flowed awkwardly, was simply bizarre at times and the bit
about finding out who murdered Sasha’s father was quickly resolved and
thrown out the window after the first dozen pages. A majority of the
scenes and dialogue are question-answer sessions between Sasha and the
other characters, who dump a ton of background information on her (and
the reader). And then there’s the strangeness of this Eyrx character who
is more evil than Lucifer. Seriously, Lucifer and God are actually kind of working together as partners in this book, to bring down Eyrx who is the real kingpin
of evil. I found that really hard to accept. Not that I’m religious or
anything. It’s just the idea that the Devil himself is less evil than Eyrx doesn’t make sense to me.
On a similar note, Eryx isn’t even aware of Sasha’s existence for the
vast majority of the novel, so I didn’t feel like there was much
tension in the story. The stakes didn’t feel that high to me. Most of
the story consisted of the characters worrying that Eyrx would discover
Sasha the Anabo, and trying to keep Sasha safe from the enemy who doesn’t even know she exists yet.
However, the main focus of this story is the angsty romance between
Sasha and Jax, which annoyed me way more than I found romantic. In fact,
I don’t think any part of their relationship was romantic at all. There
was insta-love, creepy-obsessive love and it was kind of shallow that
all they ever talked about was how hot each other was. And there was a
lot of focus on sex. Sex, sex, sex. All the characters, not just Sasha
and Jax, but especially Sasha and Jax. It was drilled into my head how
dangerous it would be if they had sex, and how Jax was so obsessed with
seeing her naked. There was also a cliche ‘I almost got raped but my
soulmate rescued me before it happened’ scene that I’ve read in a dozen
YA novels now.
Then there’s the characters themselves, mainly Sasha and Jax. Jax was
an overly protective, overly jealous, bordering-on-obsessive kind of
boyfriend. Sasha spent most of her time crying in this novel, or feeling
like she’s about to cry — sometimes over the silliest things, like
getting a new laptop. I just wanted to reach into the pages, give the
girl a good shake by the shoulders and exclaim, “Get a grip on
yourself!”
I have an entire page of notes I scribbled down while reading this
book, but I won’t get into them all. I can see this book being quite
popular because I know there is an audience for stories like this, but
this really wasn’t for me at all.
My Rating: 1/5
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