AmyM

After Wicked Lovely and Ink Exchange I was pretty excited to return to Marr's richly woven world. In Wicked Lovely I found Aislinn to be a refreshing YA teenager in that she wasn't too overtly stupid, clueless, or boy obsessed and her descent into the Faerie world was fairly believable. While Ink Exchange was a great departure from its predecessor and so much darker; I actually couldn't even describe how I felt about it and I don’t think I could now either. I just knew that I hadn't expected it and I didn't really want to go back there again anytime soon. However, Marr introduced some truly dynamic characters with IE and the series was better for it.So I really didn't know what to expect from this book. Fragile Eternity was to be the more direct sequel as it followed Aislinn once more, but the events of IE still held their weight. The characters and their relationships are continuously inter-related and that's a major feature of the series. After IE's departure, I couldn’t wait to know what would happen next with Aislinn, Seth, and Keenan. I think I got too much of that dynamic in this book. Most of it was filler, there was next to no action or progression in the story; it was mostly exposition. By the end of it I could care less what happened with the aforementioned characters and was no longer as engrossed in the series. I would've thought that Seth would've made a better protagonist than he did. He was supposed to be this older, interesting guy with his tattoos and train car but he came off as a depressed beatnik who lost his beloved beret. He was like a lost little puppy that put many YA females to shame with his love addled brain. Thankfully the series gets much better from this point on and I'm actually a big fan of books #4 and #5.