Review: "Passion"

So now the time has come to review "Passion", the third book in the series about the eternal love of Daniel and Luce which is written by Lauren Kate (btw. such a cool name for an author!). The first books "Fallen" and "Torment" had something. I loved the black school uniform in book one and the graveyard and the firsts meetings between Cam and Luce. "Torment" was good as well, it had something. The last scenes were powerful and that leads me nicely to "Passion" which starts where "Torment" began. However, the plot of this one is quite different and if you are a huge Lauren Kate fan, then please forgive me for this review. I am going to be honest (because otherwise what's the point?) and it is not really going to be nice...

The plot is ridiculous. At best. The idea is actually good but the actual story is not only unimpressive, it is downright awful. In order to understand the eternal love of Daniel and Luce and the curse that means that Luce dies whenever their love becomes to passionate, Luce travels through time. Literally. She uses the announcers to travel through her past lives and observe or even take part in her past lives and what lives, she has led... And boy has she led some interesting lives. She seems to have been in all the right places on the right times, at least in a historical context. Thinking about this in a reasonable way, one would assume that she had had maybe one exciting life and a lot of normal lives outside of the main historical events. Not so Luce. She was lady of the manor in Victorian England, a friend of Shakespeare and the reason for the fire of the Globe Theater, a slave at the court of Pharaoh, a Chinese king's fiancee, a Princess of Savoy at the court of the Sun King... She has experienced quite a bit! And I can see why otherwise this plot may have become boring quite fast because Kate doesn't take the time to really explore any of these lives, instead she seems to try to fit as many past lives into one book as possible. And feature the devil as well plus a strange dialogue featuring God... Have to say I don't like it. At all.

If you loved "Fallen" and "Torment" please don't get your expectations up... If you loved films such as "Shakespeare in Love", "Mulan" and "The English Patient" then you might like it because the author seems to have borrowed a bit from these and other movies. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, except that she has not done it in a very elegant way and that rather annoys me. Honestly, this book seemed to me as if it had been written in a hurry and that's really too bad. I hope that the next book, "Rapture", will be better because even though I was less than impressed with "Passion", I still have to find out what happens to Luce and Daniel.