Deja Blue by Julie Cassar (Spoiler-free review)

Man, Deja Blue really stepped it up compared to the first book in this series! I liked this book a lot more than the previous book, Ruby Blue, even if this book still had some problems. For this review, I’m going to make a list of things I liked and things I disliked.

What I Liked:

• This book was a lot more complex plot-wise than the first book in this series.
• I like how Ruby talks about real books in this series. In Ruby Blue, she talked about the House of Night novels. In Deja Blue, she talks about Twilight.
• The author included a mention of a kelpie, which is a basically a black horse that lives near water and tries to lure you into the water to drown you. I don’t know why, but kelpies intrigue me (maybe because they’re not well-known?) so it was cool to read about them.
• I like how the challenges Ruby had to win were symbols of challenges lovers face.
• This book gripped me a lot faster and a lot harder than the first book did.
• The spacing between paragraphs that bugged me in the last book was completely fixed in Deja Blue.
• The ending of this book was a lot less abrupt than the one in Ruby Blue.

Things that bugged me:

• Brennan was infuriatingly vague in this book. I can completely see why Ruby got so frustrated.
• There was a glossary of Northern Michigan slang, even though there was only one conversation that had this slang in it. It was weird to me to have a glossary for one conversation.
• Ruby complains about not seeing her boyfriend for four days. I found this to be completely ridiculous, but maybe that’s because I’m not the target age for this book.
• There was a flashback in the beginning of this book that lasted 16 chapters! And on top of that, there was a flashback within a flashback. Maybe it would’ve been better if the author had started where the flashback began, rather than having a super long flashback.
• This doesn’t bug me personally, but there does seem to be the makings of a love triangle coming up.
• There are still some errors in this book, such as missing quotation marks.

For me, the good outweighs the bad in this book, so I give this book 4 stars. Plus the author really stepped up her writing skills in this book, so I think Deja Blue deserves more than the 3 stars I gave Ruby Blue.