Review: Black Widow: Forever Red by Margareth Stohl

Hi guys,

some of you know that I had this book for a while on my Amazon wishlist and I finally got to read it! But personally, the hype was just a hype. I love Margareth Stohl’s work, but this story has been a little too cliché for me. Read why!

Book Information
Pages: 416
Published in: May 2nd 2016
Originally published in: October 13th 2015
Publisher: Marvel Press
Price: 7,85 € (Paperback)

Storyline

After having seen a bunch of Marvel Avengers movies, a lot of you should be familiar with Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow. The story takes off at a haven in the Ukraine where Natasha has to face her ultimate enemy: Ivan Somodorov who has taughet her at Red Room, the cruelest school to teach to become a Russian super spy. Ian holds a little girl captive and basically wants to brain-fry her for some yet unknown reason, when Natasha manages to rescue the girl, Ava. Yet a final explosion rattles them good but at least the enemy is dead. Ten years later the reader gets to read about how Ava’s life changed a lot since that unfaithful day. She has been taken under the wings of American Organisation S.H.I.E.L.D, yet fled from it since she couldn’t bare living there. While in the meantime she dreams about a boy called Alex, who seems so real yet not. At a fencing tournament she finds him by accident and falls into the arms of long not seen spy Natasha Romanoff who tells Ava that her worst nightmare Ian had escaped and is in fact still kidnapping kids for his experiments. Of course Ava and Natasha can’t let this stand as it is and follow Ian’s even so small traces.

Characters

I liked Natasha Romanoff, as always. She’s a badass, yet a little cold thanks to her childhood. Stohl has managed though to make a character transformation happen, which I frowned upon at the beginning, yet I think was a good one. The second main character, Ava Orlova, has been a little bit too cold and dramatic for me to be honest. I didn’t take it that well with her although Natasha seems to be very similar to her. Then there’s Alex, the boy who seems to be caught between two worlds, yet sees his place with Ava and Natasha as the story evolves. Plus Ava and Alex get to be soulmates and such, which I frowned up a lot because yeah. Too fast for Ava in my opinion.

Last but not least I need to mention Iron Man aka fabulous Tony Stark, who has made an appearance in one to two chapters. He’s been glorious and just as he had to be, Tony Stark. Other Avengers as Steve Rogers and Bruce Banner has been mentioned. I loved it, it almost felt like a little new Avengers movie.

My opinion

The writing has been good, no doubt about that. I loved the Beautiful Creatures series by her and her author partner Kami Garcia. There have been little interlude chapters, written as protocols between Natasha Romanoff and Agent Coulson. They made the transitions between chapters happen so it wouldn’t bee too harsh for the reader when time and place jumps happened. Maybe it’s because of that but the story seemed too rushed and that bothered me a lot. Too much happened in too little time that made not enough sense to me. Ava and Alex being best buds all of a sudden (yeah, traumatic events and such, yet weird. Ava has been cold and distant all her life and suddenly she can change that from one point to another?). Same with Natasha, from one moment she’s Black Widow as ever and the next she seems to be a little bit off. After all, the whole story seemed to be too cold, too distant for me to really get into it. I couldn’t really feel for the characters and that bothered me. Oh and the end was all “????” and “!!!!” and “why did it end so sudden?”. The reader got teased for a big showoff with the main enemy and all we got was “bleh”. I can’t even express myself properly to elaborate on that.

But since it had Black Widow in it and a few other Avengers has been mentioned in it, I am that biased to give it 2 out of 5 stars.

xo Annina

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The cover is from goodreads.com