Welcome to the second instalment of The Mara Dyer Trilogy, where things are even more confusing than the first book, but unlike the first book…not in a good way.
The Evolution of Mara Dyer is a 527 page book half full of awesomeness and the other half full of what the fuckery. It isn’t even split down the middle, like the first half was good and the ending bad. No, the bad parts were scattered throughout the entire book in the form of flash backs, and then the ending just rightly sucked stale cake balls.
Still trying to prove her sanity, Mara is still being tormented by her ‘dead’ ex-boyfriend. As the reader, we are still left in the dark on if Jude really exists or if he is just a figment of Mara’s imagination. With the ending of the last book, everyone around Mara thinks she has lost her mind and she is forced into a type of lunatic’s anonymous group. There she meets back up with her old friend Jamie who was kicked out of school in the previous book. She is doing well in proving she is sane to her family until she is kidnaped by Jude and the whole incident is made to look like she tried to kill herself, thus landing her on a retreat that all the other ‘Lunatic Anonymous’ kids went on. Determined to keep Mara safe, Noah gets himself landed in in the same situation and then what should have been a brilliant ending fell flat.
Like with the first book, I really did enjoy the psychological aspect of this book. Still not knowing if Jude was alive of dead but seeing him harass Mara was trilling. If he was real, how did he live? If he was truly dead, just how mad was Mara? It was that aspect that I really enjoyed. I enjoyed that Michelle Hodkin didn’t shy away from things and that she didn’t drastically change or downgrade any characters. They were all relatively the same, which to an extent is a shame (there should have been some growth) but it is better than having a character downgraded.
Now onto the bad.
The Flashbacks: 
What in the actual fuck? The flashbacks of a little girl in India, who clearly has some special power, like Mara, were confusing as hell. I found myself skimming them because after the first few I just started to find them annoying and pointless. Sure, they serve a purpose later on in the story but majority of them were just random and left me with a confused, annoyed face. The confusion didn’t sit with WHO the flashbacks were about, I figured that out pretty early on, it was about the time frame. Dates don’t add up in the end.
’I love you…but: I stated in my review of The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer that I wasn’t a fan of the romance. It wasn’t forced on the reader as much as other books and it still stands at that but…there is the Twilight Syndrome going on. ‘I love you, but I am too dangerous to touch/kiss/sleep with you’. *rolls eyes* Mara is afraid of her power, I get that. She has nightmares of killing Noah, I get that too. What I don’t get, is why the entire book is spent with Mara doing the dramatic ‘NO! I can’t kiss you, I’ll kill you!’ and Noah arguing with her.
It gets old really fast. Just snog and shut up.
Coincidences: Things are starting to be revealed and frankly, majority of them are annoying coincidences. Mara’s grandmother had the same power as Mara. Mara’s grandmother knew Noah’s mom. A handful of the ‘Lunatic’s Anonymous’ all have some form of a power. Jude has a special power. These are the ones off the top of my head. It just seemed like things were to perfectly placed and in the end took away from the psychological thriller this book was supposed to be.
That ending: No, not the cliffhanger that left a thousand of tween girls in tears, the big climax. As I already said in my point above about everything being a coincidence, this ending just fell flat.
spoiler
At the retreat, Jude shows up and begins killing people, demanding that Mara bring his sister back. The psychologist is the bad guy and set it all up, told Jude that Mara could bring his sister back. You find out that most of the kids there have some special power. Apart from the fact that everything was too much of a coincidence for my taste there are other parts about the climax that I hated. Mara is one. She does absolutely nothing until the very end when she is pushed to actually do something. She can see that people around her are being killed and that she is the only one who can stop it all, instead she just stands there and watches. She even states that she could have helped them but chose not to.
This was the first time in the entire series I really disliked Mara as a character. She chose to stand there and not do anything. When she finally does act, she tries to be all sacrificing, as if that was supposed to make me forget that she just stood there watching people die.
This wasn’t a horrible second book, and you can feel it building up to the third one, but so much had been revealed in this book it is a wonder if the final book will live up to what I want it to be. It feels like we are drifting away from the psychological thrilled and into a teen ‘paranormal’ romance.
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