The Essence (Pledge #2) by Kimberly Derting

Overall Rating: 1 star

Date finished: 8/11/16

 

So, I have put off reading this book for a while now. I’ve picked it up a few times and was always horribly bored and I felt bad so I put it away hoping that maybe it would be better the next time I picked it up. Maybe the other books that I read recently were just more exciting and it was biasing my read of this book. I kind of enjoyed the first book and I was really hoping for a good second book but I was disappointed every time I picked it up so I just kept delaying.

And now I’ve finally bit the bullet and I’m afraid I was just as disappointed this time as I was all of the other times. Charlie was really not a strong character throughout this book. She doesn’t do well at anything she does; the fighting, riding horses, even the speeches, the learning, the memorizing. She is distracted, unfocused and despite wanting to make a difference she just didn’t feel strong. She felt more like she spent all her time relying on other people to do her job for her. With all the protests she doesn’t take a strong hand as a leader to stop them. And even after the opposition starts killing innocent people, they don’t do anything. In fact, they have evidence implicating Brook’s father, he even admits to orchestrating the killings, and yet all they do is say they’re going to find the people who did this. Hello! You already know who did this. Why isn’t her father immediately arrested and punished. Yes, there are other people he’s working with but offering freedom doesn’t mean letting people get away with anything. It’s possible to be a strong, fair leader without being a tyrant. And yet, she was a weak leader with heroic ideas and no action to follow it up.

There are a couple assassination attempts and yet she keeps naively trusting everyone around her and only wanting to see the best in them.

And on top of that, most of the book was pretty much boring. First she’s in the palace studying or obsessing over losing her sanity. Then she’s traveling by train; then by horse. And nothing really happens. Just talking and planning and traveling.

And then they get to summit where she is going to do so much to help her people and she freezes up. And not just once. She pretty much spends the entire summit without saying anything significant to anyone, complaining about how weird the other queens are, and not building a single diplomatic relationship.  And then all of the sudden the summit was over and it all ended up being a complete waste of time because she accomplished absolutely nothing.

And there are so many unexplained things. For example, Max comes rushing down, riding day and night, but says that it wasn’t because of the previous attacks and he’ll explain after his super-secret meeting with the guards. And then he never explains. He just says hey, so we haven’t found the bad guys so we’re going to take you to be with your family. Why does that warrant riding at break neck speed to get there. What was the urgency? He could have sent a message. Or just waited until they got back to the palace, because hey they went back to the palace before enacting their super-secret plan anyways.

The whole thing was just a bit ridiculous. And then after spending the entire book being weak and useless, in a moment of strength she draws on Sabara’s powers to save her sister and all of the sudden all of her friends are accusing her of being a monster. She finally stood up for herself. I could understand their horror at finding out Sabara is still inside, or that she killed the other queen, but being horrified because she used that same power to protect herself and her sister is just ridiculous.

Overall, unfortunately I just did not like this book much at all. Despite my frustration at least I finally made it all the way through to the end. I was just really hoping that it would redeem itself at some point and it never did. A disappointing second book to what was a promising series.