Book #90: Serpent's Kiss

Title: Serpent's Kiss (Book #2 in Witches of East End series)

Author: Melissa de la Cruz

Date started reading: June 27, 2012
Date finished reading: July 1, 2012

Publish date: June 2012
ISBN: 978-1401323967
Number of pages: 336

Official summary: "Joanna and her daughters, bookish Ingrid and wild-child Freya, are just settling into the newfound peace that has been cast over their small, off-the map town of North Hampton. With the centuries-old restriction against practicing magic lifted, casting spells, mixing potions, and curing troubled souls has never felt so good for the three witches. That is, until everything gets turned upside down -- from Joanna's organized kitchen to Ingrid's previously nonexistent love life to Freya's once unshakeable faith in her sexy soul mate, Killian Gardiner. When Freya's twin brother, Freddie, suddenly returns, escaped from Limbo and professing innocence on a long-ago crime, Freya should be ecstatic. The golden boy can do no wrong. Or can he? Freddie blames no other than her fiancee Killian for his downfall, and enlists Freya's help to prove it. Now Freya doesn't know who to believe or trust. And for the first time in -- well, forever, really -- Ingrid is also busy in love. Matt Noble, the handsome and charming police detective, has won her heart. But can romance work between a virgin witch and a mortal who doesn't believe in magic? Things get even more complicated when it appears Ingrid is harboring the prime suspects in Matt's police investigation. To add to the chaos, a dead spirit is attempting to make contact with Joanna -- but does it mean to bring harm or help? Joanna asks her sort-of ex-husband Norman to help figure it out, only to accidentally invite him to a Thanksgiving dinner with a dapper gentleman she's recently begun dating. As the witches pull together to discover the serpent within their midst and the culprit behind Freddie's imprisonment, everything is thrown into peril. Will the discovery come too late to save those they love most?" (http://melissa-delacruz.com)

Official book trailer:

How I obtained the book: Checked out of library. (Why the hell does this book have a retail price of $23.99? That's insane)

My commentary:

• I wasn't totally in love with the first book in this series, but I thought it was okay. This one bothered me quite a bit, mainly because it kept jumping back and forth between the characters way too much. I don't mind each chapter focusing on one character, but when some chapters are only 2 or 3 pages long, it just jumps around way too much. Who does 2 page chapters anyway??? 
• Ultimately I'm very disappointed with this book. I think overall there were just way too many different storylines going on at once, and having four different perspectives (Joanna, Freya, Ingrid, and Freddie) was just too much. In the first book it just followed the three women and that was bad enough, but adding Freddie into it with this book just made things too crazy. Each of the four characters had love life issues on top of all the magical stuff going on. Joanna was in a love triangle and trying to track down a ghost. Freya has relationship issues, has to deal with Freddie's return, goes traveling through time, and is trying to prove her boyfriend isn't evil. Ingrid is trying to overcome her oldest-virgin-on-the-planet issues in order to date a man and has to deal with a group of pixies (yes, pixies) that are introduced in this book. Freddie is sleeping around with every college girl he can find until he falls in love with a mysterious girl over the internet, is trying to prove Freya's boyfriend is evil, and is trying to prove his own innocence. It was just all too much.
• Something occurred to me about half way through this book. This is a spin-off series from de la Cruz's "Blue Bloods" series, and the witches are supposed to live in the same fictitious world as the "Blue Bloods" vampires/fallen angels. In "Blue Bloods," it's basically implied that there is one God, Lucifier, and the other fallen angels that are typical in most stories. But in the "Witches of the East End" series, the witches are all former gods and goddesses who were banished to earth for eternity. I have no issue with the idea of gods and goddesses in paranormal books, but if you've already established a world and the rules of its world, you can't just go changing things up like this. If the author hadn't included some of the "Blue Bloods" characters in this series, and had Freya show up in a "Blue Bloods" book, there wouldn't be an issue at all. I think she should've just kept the two series separate if she wanted to go off in another direction. 
• Normally when I check a book out of the library, I end up buying it later on so I can have it on my bookshelf. I don't think this will end up being one I ever buy. I may even sell off the first book in the series. I'd say I won't read any books in this series in the future, but I'm sure I'll read them, but I won't be buying them unless the series gets drastically better somehow

Memorable quotes:

• "It was hard to imagine that someone who had lived so long had so little experience with romance, but Ingrid had always preferred reading about love to getting involved in messy dramas herself. Love stories never ended well."
• "True love was the very essence of magic." ~ Ingrid
• "Magical passageways were so much more useful than commuting." ~ Ingrid
• "I'm your Old Faithful. Here to spout wisdom and truth." ~ Hudson to Ingrid
• "Feelings, which aren't always rational, have their own life span and sometimes, for whatever reason, need to be lived out." ~ Joanna
• "I haven't become a crazy witch yet." ~ Joanna
• "This was the thing about the Beauchamp women, the common thread that ran through all of them, hubris: they were each stubborn in their own way and sometimes too confident for their own good."  
• "(Ingrid) was a girl, and (Matt) was a man, a grown-up, while she still lived, embarrassingly enough with her mother. She was immortal, but she was the child. ... She felt somewhat ridiculous, like a thirty-two-year-old teenager." 
• "If it weren't the goddess of love and beauty herself calling, I would have much rather snoozed." ~ Jean to Freya
• "Norman was not fond of conflict -- or he simply didn't like it when his ladies got prickly with one another."

Buy on Amazon.com: Serpent's Kiss: A Witches of East End Novel