Review: “Evil,” Tijan

Pros: Semi-interesting plot
Cons: Depiction of powers; confusing; overly hyperbolic style
Rating: 2 out of 5

Shay lives in a family of four high-school-age half-demons. Her brother, Kellan, watches over her obsessively. Shay is supposed to be the most powerful of the four although no one’s seen her do much with her powers. Gus (female, nickname) and Vespar, the other two demon hybrids are barely-controlled and prone to killing people. From there, ahh… I think Shay is supposed to learn about her unusual powers and her odd parentage, with a result of falling into bed with her adoptive brother. There really wasn’t all that much going on that made any real impact.

Tijan’s Evil isn’t that different in structure from the myriad other paranormal romances out there. Unfortunately, that’s the only part that made much sense. The romance is between Shay and Kellan–adoptive sister and brother. The fact that they turn out to be unrelated will make this fine for some; the fact that it has incestuous overtones will cause others to avoid the story. (Although if you really want to see a genuine couple who probably do embody an incestuous relationship, take a look at Gus and Vespar. Perhaps they’re just very close as siblings, but it seemed to me that they were more than that.) We’re seeing a relationship develop between a half-angel (except that angels are called messengers) and a half-demon. Since the whole angel/demon romance thread had already come into use, and this story feels unexceptional, it doesn’t add much to the trend. The setup was kind of confusing. Information on the group’s supposed parents was confusing. How these four people came to believe themselves to be brothers and sisters, despite not entirely being so, is confusing. We’re clearly expected to feel chemistry between Kellan and Shay, but it took quite a while for that to even start building up.

The style is hyperbolic; I think that’s the author’s attempt to pull in emotional teenage audiences. I couldn’t get into the characters; they all felt like they were going crazy due to flimsy reasoning. We were supposed to think they were high-school aged, I think, but they came across as simultaneously childish and yet too old for high school.

From something I saw elsewhere I thought Evil would be more horror-based than paranormal-based; obviously it wasn’t. I was disappointed by that, so make sure you don’t come into this book with that expectation. I found the actual story to be kind of boring.

Somewhere toward the end of the book there was a quote that I thought summed things up perfectly:

This is just becoming ridiculous now.

Yes, yes it was. The book certainly could have been worse, but it could also have been much better.