Endure ~ Carrie Jones (eARC) review

Endure (Need Pixies #4)
Bloomsbury
May 8, 2012
276 pages
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**Likely contains spoilers for Need, Captivate, and Entice  Books 1-3 of Need Pixies series  [links go to my reviews]**

Picking up just a few days after the end of Entice, Endure is the last book in Carrie Jones' Need Pixie series. The evil pixies that started their all-out attack on Bedford in Entice have not given up. If anything, they've increased their efforts, causing more trouble for Zara.

Not only dose she have to deal with evil pixie kidnapping and torturing teens, Nick is also back from the dead - but without any memory of what happened to him in Valhalla or Zara's rescue of him - and not sure at all how he feels about Zara being pixie. Zara's grandmother is also missing, reeling from their last battle with the pixies and Ms Nix's death.

There's no time for Zara to stop and deal, though, to be properly upset. To be victorious over the evil pixies - and possibly even stop the apocalypse - Zara and her friends are going to need more than they've ever needed before: they're going to need an army.

And Zara's going to have to come to terms with being a pixie queen . . and just how she feels about her king.


Endure starts so close to the end of Entice that it can be hard at first to remember just exactly where the story is - who's doing what, what's just happened, etc - but by the end of the first chapter a lot of refresher notes have been included. Readers might not remember the whole tale, but definitely enough to get back into the story.

How I felt about Endure  is interesting . . . While I never quite clicked with it the way I did with the other books in the series - something kept me from fully engaging with the story, there was a bit of disconnect there for me - I also can't fault the way things wrapped up.

I think most of the time I was waiting for something bigger, some more action (either from the characters in their relationships or interactions with each other) or the typical 'action' action.

I do really appreciate how there was an overall arc from the first book to the last. The story that started with the pixies in the first book got bigger and bigger and was eventually concluded in Endure, the final book. It was also great to see the how the characters grew. Zara especially changed enormously, the obvious being that she was the peace loving, protest-y girl from new to Maine who is now a pixie, but at her core she is still the same person. Yet, we also got to see her struggle with that. That was really fantastic.

So, while I didn't quite click with the book and it's storyline, I did love the characters and their growth. I also appreciated the little things we were reminded of that showed us just how much that had grown (and to tell you now would ruin you discovering them in the end). It makes me want to go back and reread the series all together (and I almost never reread books)!

Also, I still say Issie needs her own book. I adore that girl. (I don't think it's just for her Buffy and Doctor Who-love, either. [Also, kind of loving that Need Pixies has the Norse Gods and now Joss Whedon's Avengers does, too.])


Rating: 7/10



Part of Bloomsbury Blog Tours - thank you to Bridget at Bloomsbury and NetGalley for my egalley for review