Blue Moon

Blue Moon is the second book in The Immortals series, and it picks up shortly after Evermore ends. Ever Bloom is sixteen, immortal, and still learning what that means. She can hear thoughts, see auras, and read a person's life story by touching them. She lives with her aunt Sabine in Laguna Beach. Her parents and younger sister, Riley, died in the car accident that should have killed Ever too. Damen Auguste saved her by making her immortal, and he has been teaching her how to use her powers ever since. The problem is that Damen is six hundred years old, and Ever is still a teenager. That gap is the source of most of the tension in the series, and it is the source of most of the tension in this book.

The novel was published by St. Martin's Griffin in 2009. It is 304 pages, and it moves fast. The plot is built around a simple question: what would you give up to save the person you love? Ever has to answer that question in several different ways before the book is over. She also has to decide whether she would rather save Damen or save her family, which is a much harder choice than it sounds.

The trouble starts with a new student. His name is Roman, and he is charming, confident, and immediately popular. He wins over Ever's friends Miles and Haven without much effort. He gets the whole school to rearrange the lunch tables so that everyone sits together. He makes the cliques dissolve, which sounds nice until you realize that he is doing it to isolate Ever. Ever does not trust him. She cannot explain why, but something about him feels wrong. She is right.

At the same time, Damen starts to change. He gets headaches. He sweats. His eyes go blank, and he does not recognize Ever. He cannot create a portal to Summerland, the dimension where immortals go to study and train. He cannot manifest a simple bouquet of flowers. For a man who has been able to do these things for centuries, the loss is terrifying. Ever tries to help him, but he pushes her away. Then he disappears.

When Damen comes back to school, he is cruel. He calls Ever a stalker. He flirts with Stacia Miller, the queen bee of Bay View High. He sits with the popular kids and acts as if Ever means nothing to him. Ever can read his thoughts for the first time, which is a sign that his psychic defenses are gone. What she hears is worse than his words. He thinks she is pathetic. He does not remember their love. He does not remember her at all.

Ever's friends drift away. Miles and Haven are under Roman's spell, literally and figuratively. The school turns against her. A video of her falling into a lingerie rack goes viral, and she becomes a joke. She is alone, scared, and desperate. That is when she goes to Ava, the psychic who helped her contact Riley's spirit in the first book.

Ava is not a reliable mentor. She is selfish, dramatic, and more interested in the perks of psychic power than in the responsibility. But she is the only person who can help Ever reach Summerland. The two of them travel there together, and Ava immediately gets distracted by the ability to manifest luxury goods. She disappears, leaving Ever alone in a strange dimension. Ever is found by Romy and Rayne, twin guides who lead her to the Great Halls of Learning.

The Halls are one of the best inventions in the series. They contain the akashic records, a record of everything that has ever been said, thought, or done. Ever uses them to look into Damen's past. She sees his father, an alchemist in Renaissance Florence, working on an elixir of immortality. She sees the men who murdered Damen's parents while Damen hid and survived. She sees Damen in a church orphanage, meeting Drina. She sees the plague, and Damen recreating his father's elixir to save Drina and the other orphans. That is how Roman became immortal. He was one of the orphans. He has been carrying a grudge for centuries.

Ever also sees a vision of Roman standing over an aged, dead Damen. The image cuts off before she can see how Damen dies. That vision is the engine of the second half of the book. Ever knows that Roman is going to kill Damen, and she knows that she has to stop it. She also learns that there is an antidote to the poison Roman is using, and that the antidote has to be prepared during a blue moon. The next blue moon is tomorrow.

The blue moon is also a doorway through time. Ever sees herself pressing a finger to a crystal during a blue moon and traveling back to her old life. That means she could go back to the night of the accident and save her family. She could prevent her parents and Riley from dying. She could have her old life back. The cost is that she would lose Damen. The book frames this as a genuine choice, and for a while Ever genuinely considers it. She misses her family so much that she is willing to give up the boy she loves to get them back.

That is the emotional core of Blue Moon. Ever has been given a second chance at life, but the second chance came at the expense of her first life. She feels guilty for surviving. She feels guilty for being happy with Damen. She feels guilty for wanting things for herself. The blue moon offers her a way to undo the guilt. It also asks her to choose between the past and the present, which is the choice every grieving person eventually has to make.

Ever decides to save Damen. She and Ava break into Damen's house to switch his poisoned elixir with untainted bottles. Damen catches them and pours the remaining elixir down the drain. The plan fails. Ever has to find another way. She goes back to Summerland and learns more about the antidote. She also learns that Roman has been controlling the school through mass hypnosis. That is why everyone turned on her. That is why her friends abandoned her. The spell is broken when Ever shouts and claps in the cafeteria, which is a ridiculous scene, but it works.

Damen gets worse. He shows up at school gaunt and silver-haired. The students turn on him. Ever takes him to Ava's house and feeds him her last elixir. He murmurs, "You left me," which Ever recognizes as a prophecy. She is planning to go back in time. He knows it, even if he does not know how he knows it. That line is one of the few moments in the book that lands with real emotional force.

Ever goes to Roman's empty house and pours his elixir down the drain. She writes herself a note with warnings: do not go back for the sweatshirt, do not trust Drina, and Damen, with a heart. Then she goes to Summerland, manifests Damen for one final dance, and presses her finger to the crystal that shows her old life. Everything goes black.

She wakes up in Eugene, Oregon, back in her old life. She is at Hillcrest High. Her boyfriend is a boy named Brandon, and his kisses leave her cold. There is a crumpled note in her pocket with names she does not recognize. She is confused, but she is also home. Her family is alive. Riley is alive. That should be enough. It is not.

The past cannot be changed. Riley appears to Ever during a family camping trip and tells her that their father already retrieved the sweatshirt, which prevents Ever from going back for it. Then time freezes. Riley tells Ever that the accident is the family's destiny, and that she has to find Damen before it is too late. Time resumes, and a logging truck crashes into the car. Ever wakes up in her present-day room. Her family is dead again. The attempt to change the past has failed.

That failure is the point. Blue Moon is not a time-travel story. It is a story about accepting that grief cannot be undone. Ever has to stop trying to fix the past and start living in the present. The book makes that lesson a little too explicit, but it earns it through the loss. Ever has to lose her family a second time to understand that she cannot save them. That is brutal, and the book does not soften it.

The ending is a race against time. Ever goes to Ava's house and finds Roman blocking the door. Rayne is inside, protecting Damen. Ava has betrayed them and fled with the elixir. Romy is on the way with a properly prepared antidote, but Roman says his antidote will work if Ever adds a drop of her blood. Damen is dying. Ever has no time to wait. She cuts her wrist, gives Roman her blood, breaks the salt circle, and forces the liquid down Damen's throat. He stops breathing, then revives.

Roman reveals the cost. By adding her blood, Ever has created a permanent biological trap. Any exchange of DNA between her and Damen, through kissing, sharing elixir, or physical intimacy, will reactivate the poison and kill him. Roman also reveals that he was the youngest orphan Damen saved from the plague, and that he loved Drina for his entire immortal life. When Ever killed Drina, Roman came for revenge. He hints that there may be a way to reverse the curse, but only he knows the formula. Killing him would eliminate any hope of a cure.

Damen wakes up restored, with no memory of anything since Miles's play. Ever tells him only that he was very sick and is now better. She does not tell him about the curse. She does not tell him that they can never touch again. The book ends with them driving away, with Ever carrying a secret that will define the next several books.

What works in Blue Moon is the atmosphere. Noël is good at writing longing. The Laguna Beach setting is sunny and glamorous, but the book is full of shadows. Ever's grief is palpable. Her loneliness is believable. The Summerland sections are strange and beautiful, and the Halls of Learning are a clever way to deliver backstory without a long expository dump. The romance between Ever and Damen is intense, even when Damen is being awful. The book understands that first love feels like the only thing in the world, and it writes that feeling with conviction.

The weaknesses are harder to ignore. Ever spends a lot of time reacting to things instead of acting. She makes several decisions that seem obviously bad, and the book sometimes lets her off the hook too easily. Roman is a fun villain, but his plan is convoluted. The mass hypnosis subplot is silly, and the scene where Ever breaks the spell by clapping is almost embarrassing. The love triangle with Brandon in the alternate timeline is underdeveloped. And the ending relies on a magical loophole that feels designed to keep the series going rather than to resolve the story.

Still, Blue Moon is an entertaining second book. It raises the stakes, deepens Damen's backstory, and gives Ever a real dilemma. It is not a standalone. You need to read Evermore first, and you need to be willing to accept the melodrama. If you are, it is a fast, atmospheric read with a genuinely sad ending. It is also a good example of how a series can use a magical problem to explore an emotional one. The poison is not just a poison. It is a physical manifestation of the fear that love is not enough.