Keepers & Searchers & Wolves, Oh My!

I have finally finished the Nightshade trilogy by Andrea Cremer. This trilogy consists of Nightshade, Wolfsbane, and Bloodrose. Unlike my review for The Demon's Lexicon trilogy, I'm just going to do an overall review instead of breaking it down book by book.

First things first: the characters. Every single character in these books were awesome. Calla, the fierce leader, Ren her male counterpart, Shay the boy who messes things up (well, there's more to it than that, but it's still true), Ansel the little brother, Conner- OH CONNER- Conner. The funny new found friend. Ethan, the mopy(but with good reason) new kind-of-friend. There are way more characters, but those are a few. They are all intertwined together in a way that is so endearing.

These books are not just regular werewolf books. To be totally honest, the idea Andrea Cremer constructed in these books is genius. Pure genius. It is just different enough to set it apart from other books like it, but not too different so that the readers will be put off by it. The way this story is construed throughout the three books is absolutely perfect. The ending of each book leaves the reader (ME) wanting more, more, more! The wait for the next book is wholly torture. The way the wolf instincts are combined with human desires is completely balanced and believable. The humor in these books is fantastic and comes at just the right moments; when things are getting too tense, we can always depend on someone (usually Conner) to crack a joke.

Now on to ROMANCE. All three of the books in this trilogy have just enough romance to get the point of the feelings across, but not so much so that the feelings seem unrealistic. (Note: this is not something that really bothers me specifically; I just feel like I should point out that this is not the case in this trilogy.) It is so often in books that the romance is very overplayed and hard to imagine actually happening. These books, though, have a stunningly appropriate amount. If the romance is not needed, it's not there, and when you're hoping for something emotional to happen, well, it usually does. Of course it is back to the "two boys, one girl, who will she choose?" thing. In this book it has perfect reasoning behind it, everything has perfect reasoning backing it. Shay has his regular reasons to love Calla, and Ren- OH REN- has his absolutely real reasons for loving Calla. It actually makes sense that they love her. You will fall in love with someone in these pages, that's for sure. If it's not Ren, it's Shay. If it's not one of them, it's Conner. If it's not Conner, it's Ethan. If it's not Ethan. . . well, you get my point.

So, on a scale from 1-10 I rate this trilogy a 9. I would have rated it a 10, but the ending, though it makes perfect sense, just did not leave me with a good sense of closure. It's probably just me. I mean, I ADORED these books from beginning to the almost end, but then something happened that crushed my heart and the ending just. . . the ending just eats at me. I still recommend this book to anyone who enjoys paranormal romance, or even just fun adventure wolf type things. Seriously, you should give these books a whirl, they are totally magnificent!

Until next time, Friends!

♥Jessica(: