Review: Once We Were by Kat Zhang

Title: Once We Were (The Hybrid Chronicles #2)
Author: Kat Zhang
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release date: September 17th 2013
Source: Edelweiss
Format: egalley

Rating: 3/5

Buy on: Amazon | B&N | BookDepository

You can read my review of What´s Left of Me - here

"I'm lucky just to be alive."

Eva was never supposed to have survived this long. As the recessive soul, she should have faded away years ago. Instead, she lingers in the body she shares with her sister soul, Addie. When the government discovered the truth, they tried to “cure” the girls, but Eva and Addie escaped before the doctors could strip Eva’s soul away.

Now fugitives, Eva and Addie find shelter with a group of hybrids who run an underground resistance. Surrounded by others like them, the girls learn how to temporarily disappear to give each soul some much-needed privacy. Eva is thrilled at the chance to be alone with Ryan, the boy she’s falling for, but troubled by the growing chasm between her and Addie. Despite clashes over their shared body, both girls are eager to join the rebellion.

Yet as they are drawn deeper into the escalating violence, they start to wonder: How far are they willing to go to fight for hybrid freedom? Faced with uncertainty and incredible danger, their answers may tear them apart forever.

Once I finished reading What's Left of Me, I couldn´t wait to read Once We Were which is the second book in the trilogy The Hybrid Chronicles mainly because I wanted to see how would progressed or if it would progress the romance between Eva and Ryan, since it is obvious that both are falling in love with each other, but there is the small fact that Eva shares her body with Addie and the latter isn´t attracted to Ryan, so it would be difficult if not impossible a romantic relationship between them, because Addie doesn´t like Ryan.

So Eva and Addie begin to practice disappearing for a while to give privacy to one another and meanwhile Eva is starting to grow impatient with the slow pace that the resistance is taking about retrieving the other hybrids from the clinic, as it has been a couple of months since they escaped the clinic and Eva haven´t heard any news of the other hybrids that were hospitalized with her. So Eva decides to make some difference, something that Addie isn´t totally on board, but Eva decides to help another group of young hybrids because she´s tired of waiting to something to happen, so they begin to engage in acts against government, which at first seem harmless, until things get out of control and Eva must decide whether to continue with them or abandon the mission.

In this book, Eva 's character grows as she begins to make decisions about what they do because before Addie was the one making the decisions, Eva is desperate to prove herself, that she can achieve some kind of change and help other hybrids, but she also wants to please everyone so she doesn´t make the best decisions.

Overall, I enjoyed Once We Were, but the pace of the story was a bit slow at times, it has some action scenes but my favorite part was the romance between Eva and Ryan it´s very sweet and cute. What I didn´t liked was that Eva keeps making bad decisions, it felt like a horror movie where you yell to the girl that she musn´t open that door or to not run upstairs or hide in a certain place, since it was obvious in some of her decisions that it wouldn´t end well. And I also felt annoyed that Addie does not impose a little more, if the decisions Eva made was endangering the two of them, I think she should have tried to reason with her. I definitely loved What's left of me so hopefully in the next book the plot will get better. This book suffers of the second book syndrome, it isn't as good as the first.