Yzabel / October 30, 2012

Duplicity by Nikki Jefford

My rating: [rating=4]

Summary:

If Graylee Perez thought sharing a body with her twin sister was bad, dealing with a duplicate of herself is two times worse. Gray the second doesn’t seem to get that Lee’s boyfriend, Raj McKenna, is off limits. Then there’s the problem of Adrian Montez. He expects one of the Grays to be his.

Nearly a year later, the council is onto them for past misdeeds; Lee, along with the rest of the coven, has lost control of her powers; and Gray is being stalked by what looks like the Grim Reaper. 

If they work together, they may stand a chance of setting things right and making it out alive.

Review:

I found this second installment as good as the first one, although in different ways, and due to different reasons. As is normal in second books in a series, there was no need to introduce the reader to the world and characters, so the whole story started fast. What was at stake felt more important this time, more serious, and better justified (I must admit that the reason to Gray’s death in the first book was kind of… cheesy in my opinion). And there was no Charlene. I’m not fond of Charlene, that is.

Seeing Lee and Gray interact and progress through the plot was interesting, because of both being basically the same person, yet with diverging personalities and conflicting interests; Gray’s situation was the more problematic from the start, arriving as she was in a world that had gone on spinning without her, and I could quite understand her feelings of being the extra wheel. Also, I really enjoyed seeing more of Adrian in this novel; I had already taken a liking to him in “Entangled”, and here I found his character fascinating. He’s got the markings of someone with a serious potential to do evil, yet it seems to me that there’s much more to him, and that he didn’t start being ‘the Avenger’ just for show; I seriously hope we get to learn about his past in the third book.

On the other hand, I found Gray’s behaviour somewhat odd at times; she was supposed to be the one who hadn’t changed, who came back just as she was one year ago, without having evolved in the meantime, but she all of a sudden seemed muchmore manipulative. Perhaps because she didn’t have much left to lose? I don’t know. The other character that somewhat annoyed me (or whom I felt sorry for) was Raj. He had such a diminished presence compared to what was his in “Entangled”–not in terms of ‘screen time’, but of charisma–and I couldn’t find back the Raj I had learnt to enjoy.

Despite those flaws, I’m still givine 4 stars to this book. It was a light, entertaining read, it made me spend a fairly good time, and this was precisely what I wanted out of it.