The Essence (The Pledge, #2) by Kimberly Derting

The Essence by Kimberly Derting
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

2 Stars

One word to describe The Essence would be BORING or maybe ANNOYING. Book 2 picks up where book 1, The Pledge left off. Note, if you haven’t read book 1, I would suggest NOT reading this review. I remember liking The Pledge until the ending. When I found out Sabara was stuck in Carlaina (Charlie) in The Pledge I was 100% grossed out, regardless I still liked the characters and decided to continue with book 2, The Essence.

I don’t even know if there is a summary to The Essence, I would just say it’s about Charlie being tormented by Sabara. If all 3 books were out, I would suggest skipping book2 and just go to book 3, in all honestly The Essence was unnecessary and completely a “filler” book. I am shocked by the positive reviews.

I love the Max and Charlie story line, why was there only a few handful of pages of the relationship written? I don’t know. I don’t need the book to be completely relationship related, but the other side plots needed to be more interesting and I felt like nothing really happened.

I can’t get past the fact Sabara is related to Max, how could Charlie kiss Max? This isn’t like “The Host”, where the characters aren’t related, I can’t explain my uneasiness, I mean, towards the end the whole grandmother thing was kind of explained and seemed less creepy, but I still can’t get past it. I need to, but I can’t.

As for side characters, I would say all of them were… meh.
I am debating if I should move to book 3, considering I was mildly satisfied with the ending of The Essense. I think my over all issues were mainly driven by the main plot, Sabara being stuck in Charlie.

I didn’t think the whole book was going to be about Sabara being stuck in Charlie, I thought it was going to be a minor challenge that the characters would work towards fixing, but I was wrong and very upset. There were so many times I wanted to throw the book at the wall because I was just so annoyed with Charlie, I wanted to shake her, I wanted to punch her in the face, I wanted her to fix her problem instead of being in stupid denial.

I don’t like single layer books. This book had a fairly simple problem and it wasn’t enough to be the main focus for the entire book. I wanted more Max and Charlie involvement, I just simply wanted more.

I do not recommend.


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