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Imagine a loving, tolerant mother. This mother has a few children, most of whom have a few issues but are otherwise good kids that have bright futures. But one of those kids is more problematic than the rest. He's the cutest little munchkin and anyone would want to love him, but he makes it very difficult. This kid is the one that the schools principal has called his mother about several times. This kid frequently spills stuff, doesn't clean it up, talks to strangers, brings home disease ridden animals to take care of, runs away when you yell at him, gets in trouble for cheating on tests... He is alwyas causing trouble even if he doesn't mean to. He has a good heart but he's just so fucking bad at doing the right thing the right way. His mother knows he has good intentions and loves him with all her heart, even though he irratates her on a regular basis. I am the mother. The Revenants series is my problematic child. I love it so much and wouldn't trade it for the world, but it can be fucking dumb sometimes. Die For Me was one of my favorite books in 2011, so much so that I remembered it four years later in 2015 as a great book and thus reread it. I realized it was a lot worse than I remembered it being. I found so many issues when I read it the second time, but I excused them all in favor of nostalgia. I loved this story the first time around, and I was reunited with the characters I had built up to be much deeper than they really were. And tho it was mediocre, I enjoyed it so much I gave it 3 stars, even though it deserved 2 and I wanted to give it 4. I had the same issue with this sequel. Technically, it sucked. It was flawed. It read very much like a teenager on wattpad. By no means is it great literature, but oh boy does Revenants bring out my girly side. I can't remember the last time I squealed like a 10 year old meeting One Direction. But this book made me do just that. It's a cute book. It's not very clever or original, but it's great for escaping reality. So let me delve into the details of the problems I had. As a gift to Plum for delighting my life with this series, I'm going to give her a mug. A great big coffee mug with the words SHOW NOT TELL in big Impact letters. Plum honestly has no concept of showing, and I can list multiple occasions where it would've come in handy. Firstly, we always hear from the other revenants that Vincent used to be an angry killing machine. If this were true, I would be one happy fangirl. Not only does it add depth and progress to his character, but dark mysterious pasts are hot, okay? In theory, not in reality, anyway. Instead of having the occasiona side character say, Oh, Kate, Vincent is so much happier now that he has you, he used to be so miserable and brooding, Plum could have incorporated some flashbacks, have one of the other characters tell her a story about an event in which Vincent was a heartless killer. Repeatedly telling me Vincent used to be so emo really doesn't give me anything to imagine, because he's so chill and easy-going in present time that it's impossible to imagine. If it's impossible to imagine on my own, you gotta show me. Kate goes a great deal out of her way to stress how unemotional and uncaring Jean-Baptiste is. Except on multiple occasions, all of which she says are rare, he shows compassion and either hugs someone or cries. Plum kind of forces herself to tell and not show because Jean-Baptiste is so rarely in the story that the only times he is, it's because something tragic just happened and he's obligated to show his caring side. But, from the timeline of the books, it seems that all the books occure right after one another, meaning there's really no offscreen time for Kate to be spending getting to know people without the audience present. So, shouldn't Kate only know Jean-Baptiste as well as we do? Because Plum chose 1st person, she needs to resist that pull to the all-knowing narrator and limit herself to only what Kate is aware of. She didn't really do that. Our narrator was too reliable. The character development improves slightly in this book as well. Kate has her own distinct voice at this point, and I guess some form of a personality, all-be-it a not very original one, but Kate does seem to be a person of herself rather than cardboard. Georgia's personality also has a chance to shine in this book, whereas in the first book we were mostly just repeatedly told she was a flirt, told she cared about Kate, etc. In this book Georgia proves all the things that were only said about her in the first book. However, Ambrose is still a carbon-copy of Emmett Cullen, and Jules is still the literature equivalent of eye-candy. I was impressed that Plum resisted the riptide bandwagon that is love-triangles. You could see her swimming out into the ocean, with the whole Jules "I care about you... I can't even tell you..." shit, but she never went out and drowned with it. She came back. Kate seems pretty dedicated to Vincent and Vincent only, thank god. I have to agree with some other reviews I saw: This book has no plot line. It's bunch of loosely connected small events. By the second half of the book I couldnt recall all that happened in the first half, becuase it was so random. You could tell Plum really wanted to be write one of those stories where nothing makes sense until the very end, and then you say OOHHHH, That was so clever!!! But this wasn't exactly that. Everything was more or less predictable. Plum is very bad at hiding who the bad guy is gonna be. (view spoiler) Plum's stories thus far have been very cliche. You could go on TV Tropes and find a long list of tropes she's used within minutes. A lot of plot devices she uses are vey steretypical and almost comical. Some scenes I picture as cartoons in my head, just because they're so ridiculous. (Yes, I'm referring to Lucien's death scene.) It's a shame, because her mythical creatures of choice are so unique, especially to YA, that an original plotline and characters would've made it a truly astounding book. (view spoiler) Anyway, I have the third book sitting next to me as I type this, and I'm the beach right now, my ideal setting for reading. So I will probably finish this series up and cry about it by the end of this week. Stay tuned.