Title: The Appeal of Evil
Author: Pembroke Sinclair
Publication Date: January 13, 2014
Publisher: Booktrope Editions
Pages: 210
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Katie wants to invest her heart and soul in love, but she may lose both to Hell.
Katie, a senior in high school, is torn between loving the “good” guy, her childhood friend Wes who makes promises he doesn’t keep and abandons her when she needs him the most, and the “bad” guy, the new kid at school Josh who is also a real demon from Hell. Katie wants someone who pays attention to her and puts her first, but what is she willing to give up to find him?
When I first read the synopsis for The Appeal of Evil I was pretty sure I was going to enjoy it. It’s not often you come across a paranormal romance about demons instead of vampires or werewolves! Unfortunately, it was not all I had hoped it would be (not even close).
The Appeal of Evil begins with Katie and Wes arguing and the reader is immediately made privy to their relationship woes. Honestly, there is no relationship. Katie has a crush on Wes and Wes is an unreliable jerk. The end. But not for Katie. She’s been pining over him for years even though he’s literally never kept a promise and she doesn’t really know anything about him (though that hasn’t stopped her from sharing every detail of her life with him for whatever reason). But suddenly a new guy named Josh shows up and – INSTALOVE – she can’t decide who she cares more about. Even when she finds out he’s a demon who wants to kill Wes (who, by the way, is a demon slayer), she can’t decide who to side with. Did I mention this is like, one day after she meets Josh?
I cannot wrap my head around the relationships in this book. There is literally no reason whatsoever for Katie to have any loyalty whatsoever to Josh. To be honest, there’s no reason she should feel any loyalty towards Wes either since he’s a total ass. But she does. And I can’t handle it.
This book, despite what I read in other reviews, is not written in such a way that I would want to continue reading it. Apart from the annoyingly unbelievable relationships, Katie is irritating. There are literally full pages of her wondering about various scenarios. For example:
Katie’s breath caught in her throat. What was she going to do? In either scenario, someone was going to get hurt. Did she want to alleviate her pain by helping Josh fight against Wes? Josh was right: she did want Wes out of her life, but not permanently. And she didn’t want to watch him die. Sure, he’d been a jerk and broken her heart for eleven years, but that didn’t mean he deserved to be killed. And why would Josh want her to travel around with him? He was a demon; what could he possibly like about her? What could she possibly see in a demon? Did she have any other choices? If she protected Wes, she’d probably be right back to where they started. If he didn’t get close to anyone for fear of them getting hurt, he would totally abandon her after they got out of this alive. Or would he? What if he continued to play the same game, claiming he just wanted to make sure she was safe? Wes popping in and out of her life would drive her insane. It already did. If she helped Josh, she was helping evil, but he’d stayed true to his word and never let her down. Could she count the last day as him keeping his word? She thought so. Wes had never kept his word hours after giving it. What was she going to do?
Please tell me that’s not the most infuriating paragraph you’ve ever read in your life. That’s just one of several I ran across in the 22% of the book that I made it through.
Alas, I cannot say much about the world building. All I can say is the main character is one of the most annoying I’ve ever come across and the plot is ridiculous (so far). It seems that other people enjoyed it and maybe you would too, but I couldn’t make it.
