Infinity by Sherrilyn Kenyon
I didn’t like Infinity. There were parts that I quite enjoyed, but the majority I found tedious and vaguely confusing.
By far the strongest part of the book is the character of Nick. His dialogue, both internal and towards other characters, is sarcastic and funny. He cares deeply about his mother. Like most teenage boys he wants to date girls, but doesn’t know where to start. He’s pretty realistic in the way he’s written, and I enjoyed the way Sherrilyn Kenyon represented him.
His mother hesitated before she continued grilling him. “Is he a good boy?”
“No, Mom, he’s Satan incarnate. In fact, once it’s over, we’re going to get liquored up and tattooed, then find some cheap hos and have a good time with his trust fund.”
However, I found Nick’s attitude towards his situation baffling. He accepts Acheron without batting an eye, and yet thinks Bubba and Mark are freaks for believing in werewolves and zombies despite the evidence of his own eyes.
Speaking of zombies, the plot involving zombies being created from a videogame might have been intriguing if that had been the central plot in a zombie novel. Here it became a complete mess that went on for far too long, around which Kenyon tried to shoehorn in hints about Nick’s future.
I was of the belief that the Chronicles of Nick series would lead handily into Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter adult series, and that you didn’t need to have read any of the Dark-Hunter novels to understand what was going on here. Either I was wrong or I am pretty dense, because I had no real idea what kind of demon Caleb was and whether he was good or bad. I didn’t know what the hell was going on with Simi, and the BBQ sauce humour went very awry for me. Maybe it makes more sense having read some of the Dark-Hunter novels, but here Simi was just an unexplained oddity that came out of left-field.
I also don’t understand if Nick is going to be a Dark-Hunter or if he is a whole other type of mystical being. The way the gods interact with the immortals was never handily explained. In fact, I spent half of the novel going ‘huh?’ which I don’t believe is the desired effect.
Curse words such as ‘Oh Dusseldorf’ seem very quaint and unrealistic. As though teenagers would say something like that as a curse! Certainly the teenagers I know have real potty mouths…
I just want to make mention of a small extract towards the end of the novel:
“To infinity then.”
Nick frowned at Bubba’s words. “What’s that mean?”
“It’s something my dad used to say when I was a kid. To infinity, meaning you’d see something through to the end.”
Seriously, is it just me who now has Buzz Lightyear in their head? *grin*
Ultimately, Infinity is a disappointing mess of different themes and subplots that required a stronger hand to sort it into a fun book. I doubt I’ll be following any more of Nick’s adventures. What is sadder is that I probably won’t try the Dark-Hunter series either, thanks to this poorly-written novel.
Chronicles of Nick — (2010- ) Young adult. Publisher: At fourteen, Nick Gautier thinks he knows everything about the world around him, until the night when his best friends try to kill him. Saved by a mysterious warrior who has more fighting skills than Chuck Norris, Nick is sucked into the realm of the Dark-Hunters: immortal vampire slayers who risk everything to save humanity. Nick quickly learns that the human world is only a veil for a much larger and more dangerous one. A world where the captain of the football team is a werewolf and the girl he has a crush on goes out at night to stake the undead. But before he can even learn the rules of this new world, his fellow students are turning into flesh eating zombies. And he’s next on the menu. Like starting high school isn’t hard enough. Now Nick has to hide his new friends from his mom, hide his chainsaw from the principal, and keep the zombies and the demon Simi from eating his brains, all without getting grounded or suspended! How in the world is he supposed to do that?
Hm – I received and read the novel, too, and had a pretty similar reaction. I think the main problem was that the premise wasn’t funny enough to be a comedy and too ridiculous to be a suspense and she kept throwing in characters without giving us a reason to care about them and without explaining how this world was believable. I too kept getting sucked in, though, I’m not sure why I finished it. I haven’t decided on Dark Hunter, though it sounds a bit heavy on romance for my personal taste.
S