All Noella Snow ever wanted was a normal life. But in her seventeen years, she’s experienced only tragedy—the death of her mother in childbirth, then the murder of her father before her very eyes. Now she spends her days in quiet misery as a lonely outcast, harboring an unrequited crush on her best friend.
Noella’s only happiness comes in her dreams of another world, one where her father still lives and a mysterious stranger with a deadly touch protects her from the monsters of her nightmares.
But then Noella starts seeing those monsters in her waking life—begins hearing voices and witnessing gruesome murders. Fearing she’ll be sent back to the psychiatric hospital, she tries to ignore it.
Until she spots her mysterious protector, watching her from afar as he’s done in her dreams—but she’s awake.
Is Noella losing her mind, or is she linked to a hidden world, destined to be normal ForNevermore?

‘ForNevermore’ is a book about a teenage girl who has been diagnosed as having had a psychotic break that made her dreams seem to reach into her real life. It turns out that her dreams ARE reaching into her real life and not in a benign way. 

It was an entertaining Young Adult novel, written like a TV series. Until I read ‘ForNevermore’ I hadn’t realized how different my expectations of a genre TV series and a genre novel are. For me, a genre novel has to have a beginning, a middle and an end (although these days not necessarily in that order) and needs to take somewhere. A genre TV series just has to hook me with the pilot, entertain me with each episode, tease me with the next one and have the grace to end before it runs out of steam (unlike say, ‘Supernatural‘ which reached my “I don’t care anymore” limit long before it ended).

‘ForNevermore‘ set out to be a genre TV series in print and it mostly succeeded.

Episode One was effectively The Pilot, where I make up my mind if the series is for me or not. It grabbed my attention, opening straight into intense action and then backing up to give a context that raised more questions than it answered. As soon as it had pulled me in, it went back to the action and its consequences, opening a lot of questions of the ‘To Be Continued…’ kind.  That was a pretty good start: clever, fast and not formulaic.

This is very much a Young Adult story but the gritty kind of Young Adult story that doesn’t sugar-coat things. It’s grounded in a realistic, if fraught family life, peppered with bizarre, lethally violent, inexplicable events that speak either to magic or mental illness. Even our heroine isn’t sure which one is plaguing her.

The story is a mix of High School look-how-the-mean-girls-treat-the-weirdo and my-best-friend stole-the-boy-love-before-I-had-a-chance-to-tell-him, a dysfunctional homelife walking on eggshells so as not to provoke the always-ready-to-turn-rage-into-violencenarcissist Sheriff’s Deputy live-in-boyfriend, a serial killer kidnapping and murdering local women and girls and our heroine occaisionally falling through portals into a Narnia that’s been invaded by the Borg.

Personally, I could have done without so much of the High School drama but that’s probably because I’m old.

I loved how the authors almost always managed to end each chapter on a high. It’s the kind of thing that makes you binge-watch a series because you have to know what happens next. Just when I felt the story had veered too far towards high school melodrama, it twisted in midair like a cat and landed somewhere exciting. The last chapter of Part III FINALLY got me into the parallel world (although I still didn’t know the hows or whys of that), pushed up the tension and ended with an unexpected comic moment that changed everything. 

The ending wasn’t a cliffhanger but it wasn’t like the end of a standalone novel either. It has SEASON FINALE – THURSDAY AT 9-00 written all over it. The final scene caught me completely by surprise and made me wonder where Season 2 was headed. Which is exactly what it was designed to do.