Review: The Forever Girl

The Forever Girl:    Sophia’s Journey (Forever Girl Series #1)

Publisher:                Immortal Ink Publishing
Released Date:       May 2012
Format:                    Ebook, 350 pages
Genre:                      Paranormal Romance

The Forever Girl by Rebecca Hamilton is the first book in the Forever Girl series. I have to say that I’m not crazy about this book. I really had to struggle to get through it. I kept hoping that as I continued to read that it would pull me into its story. It didn’t. I will say that this book had an interesting take on vampires, witches and shape shifters. It is a very unique perspective of the supernatural world.

The story begins with Sophia trying to find your place in her community and life. She is a practicing Wiccan and is constantly harassed by the local fundamental Christians, which includes her mother. On top of the harassment, she constantly is hearing a buzz. To get rid of the buzz, she performs a positive energy ritual to dispel the noise. Instead of helping, the noises change into voices and get worse Sophia’s calls it her “curse.” The importance of her “curse” slowly (and I mean slowly) unveils itself in the story. I’m still unclear about the source of the voices. . My first issue was that it was not explained why the ritual unleashed more power. I had a hard time connecting the dots on why the ritual set certain things into motion. Sometimes I felt that some explanations were dumped on me in a haphazard way and it was difficult to understand how it relates to the overall series story.

There are several characters introduced in this book.  Sophia’s romantic interest is Charles. I found their relationship very uninteresting. I was not able to experience the buildup of their relationship. All of a sudden they were in love with really no development.  Sophia’s close friend is Ivory. I have to say Ivory is a bizarre character. Her relationship with Sophia was really unexpected and, to me, didn’t really fit with the story. It wasn’t uncomfortable; I just felt it was out-of-place. I had a very hard time connecting with these characters. To me, there was a real lack of character depth and development. Sophia’s attachment to these characters wasn’t really fleshed out enough. There was many times where I was scratching my head wondering why?

Sophia’s family issues were only, I felt, marginally touched upon. You don’t actually meet her father who Sophia seems to have a good relationship. It took me almost the entire book to figure out that her parents were still married. The way it was described I thought Sophia came from a broken home. It was really hard to grasp the family dynamic. Why did Sophia turn to the Wiccan practices? Was it due to her family pain or due to otherworldly reasons? More explanation of how the Wiccan religion actually affected Sophia’s life would have been appreciated. I didn’t really get that she was a devoted practicing Wiccan.

I really wanted to like this book, but in the end, I just couldn’t. My main overall problem was that I found the relationships to be under-developed and difficult to relate to. I hope that the next book in the series has more character development and depth.

Rating: 2 out of 5 Stars