When I first read the blurb for Grasping at Eternity I was really, really excited. I love reading stories that include reincarnation and this one seemed to be all about reincarnation. Also, I really like the cover and it’s rare that I really like the cover of an indie book.
Leave it to Maryah Woodsen to break the one rule that will screw up eternity: Never erase your memories.
Before entering this life, Maryah did the unthinkable—she erased. Now, at seventeen years old, she’s clueless that her new adoptive family has known her for centuries, that they are perpetually reincarnated souls, and that they have supernatural abilities. Oh, and she’s supposed to love (not despise) Nathan, the green-eyed daredevil who saved her life.
Nathan is convinced his family’s plan to spark Maryah’s memory is hopeless, but his love for her is undying. After spending (and remembering) so many lifetimes together, being around an empty version of his soulmate is heart shattering. He hates acting like a stalker, but has no choice because the evil outcast who murdered Maryah in their last lifetime is still after her.
While Maryah’s hunter inches closer, she and Nathan make assumptions and hide secrets that rip them further apart. Maryah has to believe in the magic within her, Nathan must have faith in the power of their love, and both need to grasp onto the truth before they lose each other forever—and discover just how lonely eternity can be.
The book did not live up to my excitement. There were a lot of things I enjoyed about this book, which I’ll get to in a minute, but too many things that bothered me for me to love the book as much as I wanted to.
Nathan really bugged me. I get that he was upset but the entire book I just wanted to YELL at him to get over it and DO SOMETHING about it. Mary was still alive, so the situation wasn’t hopeless. But He just mopped around and despaired for most of the book. I wanted to slap him.
He got slightly better in Taking back Forever. No mopping or despair. There were sometimes when he made it very clear that Maryah as she was would never be enough for him. Which I thought was really crappy of him. Like he would never love her as much as he could unless she remembered.
Maryah I mostly liked. There were sometimes when I wanted to shake her and yell at her to ask more questions but as her whole family had just been murdered in front of her I could forgive her for some absent mindedness.
In book two I mostly wanted to strangle her. She really, really needed to take a more active role in things. At one point she is given a message to go talk to someone who they know, knows things about the bad guys…and she just ignores it. She doesn’t even consider going to talk to him. She doesn’t tell anyone that she received this message. She just mopes about how she can’t control her powers.
And then, during the big climatic fight scene at the end…Maryah and and Nathan aren’t even there. They are literally making out while most of the other characters are fighting for their lives. The scene was told from someone else’s point of view but I didn’t care about her as much as I did about Maryah and Nathan and therefore I didn’t care about the outcome of the battle.
All the hints about some super mystical ability that Maryah may or may not have better pay off in the third book or I’m going to be upset.
Things I did like was the reincarnation system, the world building. It was interesting and I liked how it worked and how they could adopt people into their eternal family, their Kindrily. I liked that each character had their own special ability so that there was some fantasy elements but it wasn’t like they were invincible or anything.
I liked the large cast of characters and how everyone didn’t always get along. And how family relationships were…so arbitrary to them as they had all been everyone else’s mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter, etc, at some point through out all their years together. I was a little sad that the author made it so they are always the same gender when they reincarnate. It would’ve been fascinating to see a story with a group of characters that…like gender didn’t matter to them.
I am very eager to read the third book and find out why Maryah erased in the first place and what is going on with the bad guys and such. So, the books definitely hooked me.
Have you read the Kindrily series? What did you think?