I want to start by saying I've never been a big Hilary Duff fan. In fact, when I first saw this book, I was interested in the jacket description, but when I realized who the author was, I was a little wary about purchasing a book by an actor/singer/whatever that I didn't think too highly of. My boyfriend convinced me to give it a chance -- partly out of his being a fan of her music and partly out of his push to get me out of my comfort zone. It turned out to be a mostly good idea.
Elixir features a pseudo-famous teenager who has a love of photography and anonymity. Clea is the daughter of a high profile politician, and she has recently lost her father. The difficulty is that no one can tell her if he's dead or just missing, and if he's dead, no one knows how or why. Still, this isn't the point of the novel, although it plays a strong role in determining Clea's frame of mind. She starts finding one person over and over again in the photos that she takes, without remembering that she saw him anywhere when she was traveling. This leads her on a chase to track down this mystery man and find out what he knows about her father's death/disappearance. I won't say much more than this about the plot, because I don't want to spoil anything, and I think that my opinions would be more biased than I care to admit.
I can't really decide whether I liked this book or not. It's one in which I liked the idea of the plot, but the way it was written and the way it turned out didn't exactly live up to my expectations. It's very similar to the way I feel about J.R.R. Tolkien's novels: awesome story idea, but the execution leaves something to be desired in my reading mind. Point one that I had trouble dealing with is the dreamland time travel that Clea experiences. While I think that Duff's usage of reincarnation is very clever in this novel, I don't really agree with her putting into Clea's dreams; it seems too forced. There's also a problem with this because up until the dreams start, Clea has a sleeping problem. I find it hard to believe that a girl can go from having nightmares if she sleeps to having amazingly life-like fantastic dreams. Clea suffers from some type of trauma disorder; ever since her father went missing, she can't fall asleep without having a nightmare about what may have happened to him. Then, all of a sudden, seeing this man Sage in her photos changes her unconscious? I don't like it.
I won't go into details about my dislike of the name Sage. I will go into my general apathy towards Clea. I felt no sympathy for her, no empathy; I felt nothing for her. This was a strange sensation because I usually have some type of strong feeling for the main character. In this novel, though, I was more interested in her friend Ben. I was a little disturbed by her treatment of him, and his own decisions regarding his relationship with Clea and her family. He seemed to make bizarre choices, and those choices were never really explained. Not to sound cliché, but this was a very Edward-Bella-Jacob triangle, but without the major supernatural turn.
I did enjoy all of the traveling that Duff put into the novel. I'm assuming, though I can't be sure, that Duff has been to all of these places, so that depictions in the novel of Rio, Tokyo, Paris, and the other locations are hopefully true to life. Even if they aren't, Duff has a very good mind for locational details, and I really could see the picture she was painting, even if the plot didn't keep my attention. I really wanted to go to the mall in Tokyo, and go to Carnival in Rio someday. I think that if Duff could work with another author, and maybe a different editor, she could possibly make a fairly decent novel. At the very least, she has really good cover art.
By the way, Elixir is "Elixir of Life", and I think that may be where Duff lost me...
I gave this novel 5 stars, and those five came from the psychological reasons behind Clea's issues, the setting details, and the overall plot idea. The missing five stars happened because I wasn't impressed with the characters, and the execution of the plot left something to be desired. However, I have hopes that Duff could be a better author if she tried something without the occult involved. She could probably write a really good mystery novel if she put her mind to it; she's excellent when it comes to details. If you like Hilary Duff, this is probably a good read, but if you weren't a fan before this, Elixir won't make you one overnight.
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