Title: Captivate
Author: Carrie Jones
Format: Paperback
Pages: 273
Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult
Published: 1st June 2010 (Bloomsbury)
Zara and her friends knew they hadn't solved the pixie problem for good. Far from it. The king's needs grow deeper every day he's stuck in captivity, while his control over his people gets weaker. It's made him vulnerable. And now there's a new king in town.
A turf war is imminent, since the new pixie king, Astley, is moving in quickly. Nick nearly killed him in the woods on day one, but Zara came to his rescue. Astley swears that he and Zara are destined to be together, that he's one of the good guys. Nick isn't buying it, though Zara isn't as sure -- despite herself, she wants to trust the new king. But it's a lot more than her relationship with Nick that is at stake. It's her life -- and his.
*possible spoilers of the first book in the series*
Captivate continues right from where Need left off. Zara and her friends have contained a bunch of pixies in a house - including her father - and now patrol to keep look out for any others. A turf war is about to start in Bedford, with different groups of pixies wanting to lay claim to the area.
I had a lot of the same issues with this book as I had with the first (my review of Need is here). By the second book I'd have expected the characters, especially Zara to be well defined but at times they appear somewhat disjointed. One moment Zara is telling Nick off for going out patrolling alone and then the next moment she decides to go out for a run on her own. Another thing that irked me was that Bedford is a small town and so I assume the high school isn't massive, yet the library is apparently huge enough that Zara and Nick can text each other a number of times as she walks across it (without either of them being able to see each other) and then they don't get seen while they have a picnic in there (which was a little bit weird that they did that in itself). Continuing from the size of the school, it also hit me as strange that in the same time scale as Zara not knowing the names of all the kids in her PE class (so I assume she has other classes with at least some of the same kids) she and Nick are completely in love with each other, like to the point of "I love you so much, baby".
Which brings me on to Nick and Zara's relationship. OMG. How annoying are they with all the calling each other 'baby' (I actually counted the word being used three times on one page), handholding and other ickiness. Seriously, about half the book was taken up with this and while I guess it was supposed to set up everything for what was going to happen in the second part of the book, it actually just made me dislike both of them even more.
Towards the end of the book, maybe the last hundred pages or so things seemed to pick up a bit as there was some action scenes, although it might have been that I was just glad to get away from reading about the romance of Nick and Zara. There was also a little bit of saving grace in the form of Astley, if only because he actually had some depth of character compared to the others.
From reading other people's reviews of books in this series, I think it's one of those love it or hate it kind of things. Personally, it's not to my taste but as I already had the next book I did continue to read the series and will be reviewing that one shortly.
