Anyone who listens to the podcasts will know that I (and Sarah Wendell) are huge fans of werewolf books, particularly those that involve a pack dynamic. I was so excited to read this story. The promotional materials refers to the heroine being an Alpha and a “strong leader.”  Apparently being a strong [...]]]> Dear Ms. Reus:

Anyone who listens to the podcasts will know that I (and Sarah Wendell) are huge fans of werewolf books, particularly those that involve a pack dynamic. I was so excited to read this story. The promotional materials refers to the heroine being an Alpha and a “strong leader.”  Apparently being a strong female alpha means finding the right male warrior alpha to take care of yourself and your packmates because you are too weak in all areas to take care of yourself.

Alpha Instinct is about this poor pack of she wolves who are left alone after all the men (and pregnant women) in the pack were poisoned. Connor Armstrong, a shifter from the heroine’s past returns with a new pack of his own, all warrior caste and alpha males to join with the women’s pack because the women can’t protect themselves. Not only can the she wolves not defend themselves, but they CANNOT EVEN PROVIDE FOR THEMSELVES.  Yes, this set the table for the entire book.

“At least we know him and his brother, and if the Councili has officially recognized them it means they have the financial wherewithal to support all of us”

This is said by the “strong” female warrior to her cousin.  *weeps* They can’t even financially support themselves, you guys. Not only can the chicks not protect themselves nor can they provide for themselves, they are also the last to know if they are “mates.”

She was a smart-ass. Absolutely perfect. And he was absolutely screwed, because she was human. Matings between shifters and humans weren’t exactly accepted in all circles. On either side. For all he knew, she hated his kind anyway. His inner wolf didn’t care, though. It recognized her on a primal level. When he’d been barely seven, he’d asked his father how he’d known his mother was his intended mate. His father’s green eyes had sparkled as he’d explained that some shifters knew immediately but most didn’t. And males almost always knew before females did.

The women were so dense, apparently not being able to tell that the males were wanting to have sex with them. I guess this is consistent with the portrayal of the women not being able to even financially care for themselves.

After he’d gotten back from the bank, he’d been putting out fires between his guys and Ana’s packmates. Small, unavoidable spats that were based more on sexual frustration than anything else. The females didn’t seem to realize it, but he could see it clearly. Most of his guys had been lone shifters, roaming the globe for decades or longer until he and his brother had convinced them to settle down. Now that they were on a ranch full of single, beautiful wolves, they wanted to mate in a bad way. Their most primal instincts were kicking in and wanted release.

and

She stared at him, waiting and wanting him to do something to ease the ache she felt inside. She briefly thought about asking him why he’d left, but bit the question back. Maybe there had been someone else. That thought stung impossibly deep and she didn’t want to hear the answer. If she pushed harder and he told her there had been another female . . . that would be worse than not knowing. With his hard length pressing against her abdomen and distracting the hell out of her, it was hard to think of anything other than what he would look like naked. Yes, she wanted to keep some control, but she was also a female and wanted him to want her as much as she did him.

So in sum females don’t know about sexual tension. And because she was female she wants to be wanted. Unlike males.

The basic plot in this book is that  Analena Cordona is the head of her pack, a pack that has had all its male members killed.  Ana and her pack live on a ranch but recently have been subject to increasing vandalism from a male alpha who wants Ana and her girls to assimilate into his pack.  Ana’s solution is to find another alpha male group who is more amenable than her neighbor Taggart.  Ana is an alpha wolf but she isn’t strong enough to defeat Taggart (and apparently she isn’t a good enough fighter to take down someone who has more strength than her).

Taggart plays a classic villain character.  A trill of the keyboard should accompany his every entrance on stage.  He grabs his crotch in the first scene:  ”He shrugged and had the nerve to grab himself. ‘I wanted the exercise. Besides, you should get to see what’s going to be yours soon.’”  He threatens violence even though we are told Pack violence against female wolves was rare.  He calls her a bitch (is that really an insult to a werewolf?) and turns tail and runs when he spots a stronger alpha male.

Connor Armstrong appears with his brother Liam and a whole host of alpha males ready to defend Ana’s pack and mate with them.  When Conor had disappeared from Ana’s life, she wondered why. In keeping with the obvious and unoriginal nature of the story, it was because Ana’s father didn’t think he was a fit mate for Ana and so Connor ran off.  He’s back and with a pack of his own, he has something to offer because while Ana and three of her cousins and sisters are alphas they are not Alphas.

Even the thought of one of her sisters at his mercy made her see red. “We might be alphas,” She gestured to the four of them at the table, “but none of us are Alphas and certainly not of the warrior class.”

All true Alphas were also warriors, though warriors weren’t always Alphas. They were just damn good fighters. Warrior shifters were so different from the rest of the population. Bigger in human and shifted form, they seemed to be born with slightly different DNA, even from their shifter counterparts. They embraced their animal side a lot more than their human one. It’s what made them the protectors of the rest of their kind. Ana might hate it and crave complete independence from outsiders, but she wasn’t an idiot. She wasn’t an Alpha or a warrior, and if it came down to it, it was better to embrace someone like Connor as pack Alpha than an unknown.

I guess in this world only the men are born with a warrior shifter gene? She’s only an alpha, lowercase “a” as are all her fellow she wolves. In sum, the worldbuilding includes alphas, Alphas, Warrior caste Alphas, and betas. There is additional external tension provided by vamps and weres coming out  of hiding about 40 years ago.  They are viewed with suspicion by the human populace. This is supposed to add a layer of external tension by bringing the human police to their doorstep for perceived problems but instead it read like a retread of other paranormal worlds.

I didn’t find the world building to be all that consistent either. Ana complains that the North American Council won’t pay attention to their little tribe of female wolves, but obviously the female wolves were important enough to have two Alphas ready to go to battle over them. If female wolves were important yet viewed as weak and ineffective (which they were), then it made sense that the North American Council would award them to some Pack that they wanted to elevate in power instead of leaving them to flounder and possibly die out.

Ana and Connor renew their past acquaintance, fight off the bad guys, and prepare for all the girls to be nicely matched up with the boys.   The world building was  uninspired.  There was no tension, either suspenseful, emotional, or sexual, and the depiction of these poor little she wolves who couldn’t even financially care for themselves was depressing.  D

Best regards,

Jane

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I am trying to a) read more self published books in hopes of finding overlooked gems and b) respond positively to more of the authors who take the time to write us and ask for a review.  Part of the review query process requires requesting authors to send in an excerpt, usually [...]]]> Dear Ms. Zane:

I am trying to a) read more self published books in hopes of finding overlooked gems and b) respond positively to more of the authors who take the time to write us and ask for a review.  Part of the review query process requires requesting authors to send in an excerpt, usually around 1,000 words. I read all those excerpts because the title, blurb and cover can be awful but a book is about the story, the writing, and I’ll try to overlook the three things when I have the excerpt. Most of excerpts are pretty bad, but in this case, I found the excerpt cute and entertaining, enough so that I overcame my initial inclination to decline the review request based on the title (bad), coveer (bad), and blurb (bad and confusing).

Unfortunately, the excerpt was the best part of the entire book.  First, and most importantly, this book was boring.  Despite the hijinks, the evil DOM, and the hot fireman love interest, this took six days to read.  Second, the first person narrative of the story was in the voice of a woman I found silly and foolish, the definition of TSTL.  She’s the type to run into a haunted house at night, alone, when there are rumors of a mad serial killer on the lose.   Third, this book sets up a reader for fun sexy times but the sexual tension was thin and forced. There were moments of humor but not enough to overcome the foregoing flaws.

I felt like this was the Bozeman Montana version of Stephanie Plum with the plucky heroine always getting into trouble accidentally and ending up around exploding cars with her supposed love interest being frustrated by the heroine’s propensity for danger.

Jane West is a single mother and widow.  Her dead husband was a philanderer and so while Jane has been too busy raising her two boys alone, she feels much better off.  I understand that her dead husband was a cheat, but the callousness with which his memory was treated by not only Jane but her in-laws as well was amazing particularly since dead husband was the in-laws only child.  Nonetheless, this story isn’t ever going to be known for its subtlety and emotional depth.

Jane works with her mother in law, Goldie, at Goldie’s sex store in Bozeman Montana.  Jane’s father in law and Goldie’s husband is an OB and the joke is that Goldie gets the folks in bed and Paul delivers the results.  Jane’s life takes a turn for the worst after one of her sons buys a garden gnome at a garage sale.  The garden gnome contains something of worth and a robbery turns up at her house.  Instead of allowing the police to investigate, Jane decides to investigate this disturbance on her own.   This leads Jane to be in the vincinity  of a house the blows up, in danger of being run over by a derby car at the fair, and her trailer tampered with while camping with her sons.  Even after her children’s lives are placed in danger, Jane doesn’t stop investigating.  Yes, the children are sent away but I viewed this more as a convenience for Jane to be alone with her new neighbor Ty.  The item stolen is horse semen which Jane throws away.  Given that horse semen is mostly frozen and stored in special containers, I found it hard to believe that Jane would continue to be in danger even the semen is of no use.  Yet, she is.  Because how else will Jane have even the thinnest of excuses to wander around and investigate.

New neighbor Ty is a Bozeman fireman.  He makes the moves on Jane but says he only wants to have sex without strings but then later, without having shared more than a couple conversations with Jane tells her that “he can’t do this” (whatever this is) because Jane is always in danger.

The forced chemistry and then conflict with Ty typifies the problems with this book. There is no organic movement in the relationship (or in the plot itself). In order to evoke a certain emotion from the reader, characters suddenly appear to have feelings where none existed previously.  The machinations of the author were so obvious.  The first night that Jane sees Ty across the back lawn, she is wearing  tank top with no bra. She’s a 34D with two kids but apparently her girls defy gravity (she also has a tiny waist but alas no calves. Hello, Barbie?).  When she sees Ty, two houses away (her mother’s boyfriend lives between them), she can tell he is staring at her breasts (these must be tiny backyards) so she places her arms under her chest only this pushes her boobs up so high that her nipple pops out the top of the cotton tank and Ty’s eyes bug out like a cartoon animal.  Jane is mortified and I am thinking she acts like she’s never had these boobs before, like they were a new addition to her body house and she’s getting bruises on her knees from the knee furniture arrangement.  Dude, how low cut is that tank?

The danger in which Jane was in further exemplifies the feeling of contrivance.  Every time that Jane went out to investigate something, I became more frustrated with her.  She never once was told by the police that they weren’t going to look into it. In fact, Ty informed Jane that the police were investigating, a statement that Jane met with incredulity.  Police? She doesn’t need the police! Not after almost being a victim of robbery, almost being killed three times.  The police doing what they are paid by the citizens of Bozeman, Montana to do is ridiculous!  Only Jane West, manager of a sex store, could possible get to the bottom of this mystery.

Silly and improbably plot aside, the hijinks were interspersed with dozens of explanatory paragraphs about Bozeman (I felt like I was reading a travelogue complete with GPS directions); detailed explanations of what every person wore.  There were quite a few of secondary characters that I knew only by their clothes and their hair; and meandering monologues about the pasts of characters, streets, neighborhoods, businesses, and what not. In sum, mundane and tedious detail of unimportant things.

About the only thing funny (besides the opening) were the unintended malapropisms.  My favorite was “It was like living in demilitarized zone with all the weaponry around.”  Another was “Besides, Ty pushed me out of the way and saved my life.  He deserved a kiss for that. A mulligan.  That’s what it was. A mulligan kiss.”  A mulligan? That’s a “do over” in golf.

The editing:  ”Any single woman would shoot me dead for not giving in to the obvious want I saw in his gorgeous, blue eyes.  I was a piece of meat and he wanted to eat me up.  That was the look on his face, not Dex’s, That was A-Ok with me.”

What does that even mean? or the term “Um. Hunh”  Was that supposed to be “Um. Huh” or “Um. Hmmh”? I tried to replicate the sound a few times (because I was friggin’ bored out of my mind).  There were other places that commas and periods seemed to be interchangeable. “I slid my hand gently up and down. Once, Twice.”

This took time away from books I could enjoy so while it was free to me, I regret the time spent. I appreciate that you sent it but it was not to my taste.  D

Best regards,

Jane

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This book came to my attention because someone mentioned that you were the same author as Tori St. Claire. I reviewed your erotic romance, Stripped, earlier this month. Immortal Hope’s world building follows in a long line of paranormal romance books that feature the wounded hero who needs to find his mate [...]]]> Dear Ms. Ashgrove:

This book came to my attention because someone mentioned that you were the same author as Tori St. Claire. I reviewed your erotic romance, Stripped, earlier this month. Immortal Hope’s world building follows in a long line of paranormal romance books that feature the wounded hero who needs to find his mate to make him whole again. I’m a big fan of this trope so while this book didn’t work for me, I am hopeful the next one in the series will.

My main problem is the heroine and the flawed worldbuilding and that the conflict, which was based upon her forgetting something very important, made her look like the dumbest heroine in a long time.

The series involves a fight between immortal Knights Templar and fallen angels.  The Knights can only kill so many demons before succumbing to the dark side.  God has created seraphs and if the Knights Templar can find their seraph they will be saved by her goodness.  The story starts out by describing nine cursed Templars, but there seem to be several hundred spread all across the world or at least the white, Christian part of the world like Europe.

The heroine, Anne MacPherson, is a PH.D candidate writing her thesis on Templars.  Let’s just stop for a moment and consider this.  A Ph.D. candidate. Writing a THESIS.  It’s a dissertation in any university in the U.S. except maybe those pay for degrees that you can achieve online.  But then the book goes on and compounds this error with another, even more amazingly incorrect assertion:

But with most of the documentation about the Order’s demise lost to time, her driving theory hinged on discovering what the Order had found—something no one in history had ever been able to discover. As such, her paper was at a dead standstill, unless she could find the evidence through the metaphysical.

If she didn’t manage to prove the statement by Christmas break, Dr. Phillip Knowles would retire, and she could kiss the position as head of the History Department good-bye. As Dr. Knowles’ protégée, and the foremost expert on medieval France despite her relative youth, it had been conditionally promised to her.

A non PhD, non published, non tenured, not even a professor is promised to be the HEAD of a history department?  Heads have exploded.  The entire conflict of Anne’s is built on this flimsy and inaccurate premise.  In sum, she cannot do whatever it is that is asked of her because she wants to be the head of her history department in which she is some kind of teaching assistant. I feel like a fool even typing this description out because it is ridiculous. And to become the head of her history department she needs to prove the objects found by the Templars.  How does she plan to do this? Well, she gets kidnapped by Templars and when she realizes that the actual artifact might be in the compound, she resolves to seduce the location out of one of the Templars and thereby prove her theory.  How this proves her theory, I know not. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Anne does find the artifact. How does she intend to prove its existence in a paper?  What are her sources?  Shall we read in the footnotes of her thesis that she found an artifact held by immortal Templars in some compound in Kansas?  Because that’s believable, right?  Is she going to steal the artifact? What kind of provenance would it have? How would she pass this off?

Why do I care? Because, as I said previously, this need to prove her thesis position is the crux of her emotional conflict.

So Anne gets kidnapped and taken away to some compound in Kansas that houses the North American Templars. Or something. It’s not really clear because even though we started out with nine, we now meet hundreds of poor warrior Templars looking for a seraph.  Anne is found to be a seraph and warrior Merrick is assigned to find her mate.  The warrior and the seraph is known as a pair by their matching markings. It’s like the tattoo version of memory games only it is played with body markings instead of faces or objects on a flip card.   Anne sees immediately that Merrick is her match but refuses to tell him.  Instead, she allows him to take her around to meet the other men, all of whom hope that she is their match.  I found this to be incredibly cruel. It would be one thing if Anne thought these were all crazy men and she was just humoring them.  But she had studied the Templars. She bought into their magic and immortality almost immediately.  She actually uses the matching game to incite jealousy in Merrick because he is not quick enough to her bed:

Pretending interest in these strangers lost its appeal after she’d witnessed the hope in the second man’s eyes dim, then flicker into nothingness. Though maintaining the charade came easily enough, now on the tenth potential knight, she felt more like a betrayer than any preordained savior. Her heart broke a little more with every grim expression, every brusque nod.

But as she snuck a glance at Merrick from the corner of her eye, the agitated way his jaw worked when she took a few moments to delay her verdict, said her efforts were working as she’d hoped. He’d paced all the way through her initial conversation with this man, only stopping to lean against the table’s edge when this knight presented his hand. Every once in a while, when she caught him looking, his eyes sparked with the same unmistakable fire of a man who couldn’t chain his jealousy.

This is disturbing.  Even though she recognizes she is giving the men false hope, her need to incite jealousy trumps.  And then she engages in some nice little slut shaming. To set the table for this quote, Anne is trying seduce all the secrets out of Merrick in order to prove her paper:

A blush crept into her cheeks, Ranulf’s insinuation about her intimacy with Merrick too fresh to dismiss. Even if she was doing something unethical—not to mention dangerous to her heart—by seducing Merrick, she wasn’t a whore, and the fact even one man might think of her that way, left her mortified.

…How her sister managed to go through life without feeling this kind of humiliation, she’d never understand. Always a flirt, always accustomed to men’s attention, Sophie flaunted her affairs without regard. Somehow, she never suffered for it either. In some weird way, it seemed to boost her reputation with the elite.

Who cares that Sophie didn’t hide that she slept with men. Heaven forfend! At least she isn’t parading herself in front of a bunch of lonely desperate men pretending that she might save them in order to make another man jealous.

I was further made  uncomfortable by the reference to the  people in the Holy Lands as heathens

Twas 1119, and I was but a young knight desperate to prove himself worthy. I grew up in the shadow of the first victory in Jerusalem and longed for the respect the returning knights received. The cause presented, and I rode to it with Hugues. ’Twas a noble endeavor, a fight worth spilling blood. Protect the pilgrims on the road to the holy places we claimed from the heathens, defend what rightfully belonged to Christians.”

I could excuse this thinking if it was indeed 1119 but it was the 21st Century in this book and one would think that the Templar would recognize that all the good people aren’t just Christians.

My dislike for Anne grew steadily.  Merrick believes that Anne is someone else’s seraph and is beset with guilt over the face that he is attracted to her.  Worse, he actually has sex with her, betraying one of his brothers.  Rightfully Merrick is beset with guilt. He feels terrible and he expresses this to Anne. She just laughs

“What amuses you so? You do not mind that the entire Order will know I have taken you to my bed?”

Still chuckling, Anne shook her head. “Did you forget I’ve studied your Order all my life? I know the Code. I’ve seen the surcoats in the hall. I just wanted to watch you squirm a bit.”

and

There was something fantastically erotic about having the entire Order know she’d given herself to Merrick. Merrick led these men.

She knows the Code. She knows the Order. She believes in demons. She has the second sight. She believes in mysticism and magic. She also knows she is sent to be paired with one of these men yet she doesn’t appreciate the anguish that Merrick is going through and instead thinks it is fantastically erotic? I was just dumbfounded.

Worse (and I know, how can it get worse, right) and I don’t think this is a spoiler because it occurs early on in the book, but I’ll put it behind a spoiler tag:

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

I weep for the stupidity of Merrick yet he is probably a perfect match for Anne because the ending results in something so incredible stupid that if I wrote reviews with gifs, it would be appropriate to insert one with Homer Simpson saying “Doh!”

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

Yet, I’m totally on board for book 2 and hoping that the portrayal of the characters will win me over in the next book.  What can I say? I am a total sucker for the wounded warrior trope and given that I really did like Stripped, I am hoping that this book is simply an aberration.

Best regards,

Jane

I have been a fan of your books since the first in the series. Yes, I do kind of make fun of the books but I’m really making fun of myself for being in thrall to the world that you are building and the idea of these world weary warriors that go [...]]]> Dear Ms. Roane:

I have been a fan of your books since the first in the series. Yes, I do kind of make fun of the books but I’m really making fun of myself for being in thrall to the world that you are building and the idea of these world weary warriors that go out every night and battle demons and long for their breh hidden, their mate. Unfortunately, the world building based on a mate bond has its limitations and repetition is one of them. Born of Ashes is book four in the series and I wished for a greater advancement in the plot line, more focus on fleshing out the world, and perhaps just a little less on the maaate boohhhhnd (or the breh hedden as it is known in the Ascension series)

Fiona was a human slave who was used as a blood donor for death vampires. She would be brought to the point of death repeatedly in order to capture her blood at the most potent and then revived. In the last book Fiona was freed. In this book, she’s intent on seeking vengeance. I was incredibly disappointed that I didn’t get to experience Fiona’s healing from being a blood slave to a free woman. Instead, we are presented with a fully healed, both physically and mentally from her decades of torture and she is intent on wreaking vengeance on her oppressors. Fiona’s vengeance, however, is primarily conducted in some kind of command center.    The hero is Jean Pierre, a French guy who wears bows in his hair.  I could not tell you one specific, memorable trait of Jean Pierre’s other than he wears bows.

Whether it was obvious in other books in the series and I missed it, the portrayal of women and men was marked. This is a paranormal world and the idea is that the bond between two angels makes them stronger. Yet, there is not one female that battles the demons with the swords. The most that they do is logistical work from a control room. Sometimes they do clean up work. From the control room. There were only two angels that actually leave the compound. One was Parisia whose role is to fly over regions with her mate and spread peace. The other was the former commander, a female, and her job was given over to Marcus, in book two. Let me repeat. The only female in charge had her position taken away and given to a man because he was better at it.

So the female angels work as the support staff and in Born of Ashes plan a special public celebration. Basically its a group think tank of wedding planners.  And all the men are uncomfortable and worried about their ladies being outside and subject to danger. I don’t know, how about training them to handle a sword so they can kick ass and still be able to walk outside?

What made me so uncomfortable is that I think I was supposed to read this series as some great elevation of the feminine; how integral they are to the future victory of the “good” side. Instead, it highlighted this idea that men are only capable warriors and that the women’s power comes through emotional strength only. But in a paranormal, why? When you can create any kind of world and you want to create one with equality in the sexes, why make the men so much more physically capable than women?  Why make them better managers?  Why make them better able to handle their emotions?  Why show the one female leader as an unstable bitch who can’t handle her job?

The romantic conflict seemed about how well the warrior angels could protect their women (not terribly well as it turns out) which was really a retread of the conflict in the previous books to some extent. The most compelling part of the story was between Thorne, the leader of the warriors of the blood, and the heroine of the next book. Her family put Marguerite in a convent against her will because she was the lover of many men. She’s been in the convent for the last 100 years and is rooming with Thorne’s sister. He can trace into the convent, but because of an ankle bracelet she wears, he can’t get her out not to mention if he tried to, it would cause a great scandal and place their war in jeopardy.  She’s been getting schtupped by Thorne regularly for the last 100 years and he loves her. She enjoys having sex with him and she cares for him, but she wants to be free, more than anything, to live and to have as many men as she wants.

Also, there are huge worldbuilding holes like the bad guy is able to stop time (stasis) and then steal one of the warriors of the blood and try to kill him. The bad guy is not allowed to kill anyone directly but apparently can put bonds on the WOB so that with every breath, the bonds get tighter, until he has suffocated himself. Why hasn’t the bad guy done this before? Like he can put a stadium of 20,000 people in stasis. So why wouldn’t he, during a front lines battle, put everyone in stasis and then wrap the WOBs in these special ties and kill them all?

The Thorne scenes were very poignant. He totally loves her. He’s been fighting for 2000 years and being able to go to her has kept him sane these last 100 years. He knows that when she is free, she will run away from him. He knows she doesn’t love him like he loves her so while he is helping set her free and he is begging her to stay and she is promising she will stay they both know she is lying.  While I didn’t like this book, I’m reading Thorne’s book which is out this spring.  I might be able to cut the cord then.  (I hope)

For those keeping track, the smells of Fiona and Jean-Pierre of these two is coffee and donuts. D

Best regards,

Jane

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I feel like I’ve been neglecting the fantasy genre. This is a terrible thing in my opinion because I love the genre. So I thought to rectify the decided lack of non-YA fantasy in recent reading. I thought your latest novel, the first in a new series, would be a good way [...]]]> Dear Ms. Snyder,

I feel like I’ve been neglecting the fantasy genre. This is a terrible thing in my opinion because I love the genre. So I thought to rectify the decided lack of non-YA fantasy in recent reading. I thought your latest novel, the first in a new series, would be a good way to jump back in. It wasn’t a doorstopper and from what I recall of your previous books, your writing is light enough to suit my preoccupied brain during the holidays.

Avry is a healer. Once she considered this a badge of pride. But ever since a deadly plague hit the populace and healers blamed as being the cause, it’s become something she must hide or face execution.

Unfortunately, Avry suffers that particular flaw that afflicts many heroines in fantasy novels: she cares too much for her own good. Here, this manifests as the inability to turn away from a sick child, even though using her abilities means revealing her true nature to people who 1) are hostile to healers in general and 2) receive a sizeable reward for turning in healers. Avry’s been able to elude capture until now but her luck has finally run out.

Or so she thinks. Avry is rescued from certain death but it comes with a price. In exchange for being set free, she must agree to heal a prince who’s contracted the plague and is currently in magical stasis to keep the symptoms at bay. The problem? While healers can cure the plague, they don’t survive the process and die. (In this world, healing works by the healer taking on the damage/illness of the afflicted person and letting their super-immune system do its thing. The problem with the plague is that their immune system doesn’t work fast enough to counter the effects.)

I honestly believed a light fantasy would be right up my alley. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe light fantasies aren’t for me and I’m doomed to keep reading perpetual downers like George R.R. Martin. But this book just didn’t work for me on any level.

First of all, I knew right away that a romantic subplot would develop between Avry and Kerrick, the man who frees her in order to heal his best friend, the prince. I could see that a mile away, but my beef has nothing to do with the predictability. No, my issue has to do with the fact that he treats her like shit for most of the book and since I knew they would eventually fall in love, I spent most of the novel actively repulsed by this endgame.

I understand their relationship is initially meant to be a coercive one. Avry is given an ultimatum and when she didn’t immediately agree, Kerrick spends chapters trying to convince her to change her mind. Desperate people can do horrible things. I understand this. But I cannot root for a romance in which the hero does things like expose the heroine to the elements so that hypothermia will make her capitulate, starve her, tie her to a tree like an animal, and most spectacularly hit her in the face. I don’t care what the circumstances are. I don’t care that the supporting cast chastises him for the abuse. You’ve lost me. Especially when the hero justifies his actions with, “I’m sorry. I was mad.” I can’t get behind this romance at all.

There’s also the minor detail of Avry making an assumption about Kerrick that I’m not certain would or should have been made. In fact, I felt that the only reason this assumption existed was to give the plot artificial tension. Why would she not tell him? Even if she made the erroneous assumption, I feel like she should have tossed this little fact in his face at least once. It was unbelievable that it never came up in conversation at all. This also only compounded my disgust with the romance because if Avry honestly thought Kerrick knew this specific detail, why in the world would she fall in love with him? I’d be pretty pissed that this guy was asking me to die for someone I owed nothing to and who did bad things to my family. It’s not romantic at all and makes me seriously question Avry’s taste in men.

And as so often happens, because I was growing increasingly annoyed by the storyline, I began to notice other flaws. For example, the worldbuilding was shoddy at best. Now I can certainly enjoy fantasy novels in which the worldbuilding is left deliberately vague. But I didn’t get the impression that was the case here. Now I realize that one of the reasons some authors choose to set their novels in the generic faux-medieval European milieu is because that’s the basis for many a fantasy novel. Fantasy readers well-versed in the genre are familiar with it and thus the writer can just spend less time on creating the world and move onto the story. But there’s relying on pre-existing knowledge and then there’s just being plain lazy.

We have healers. We have several other types of mages. Some of which are elemental (bonus points for including traditional Asian elements though) and some of which are not. Other than healers, I had no idea about the power structure or hierarchy of the mages? Do they form gangs? Do they have guilds? Are mages only born to nobility?

Then we have the Death Lilies and Peace Lilies. It took me a couple chapters before I realized the lilies were actually giant man-eating plants and not human peacekeepers with funny names. I hate infodumps but I really don’t think I should have reached such a ridiculous conclusion. On the other hand, maybe I’ve been reading fantasy too long and just assumed that there was no way a Death Lily could actually refer to a lily that causes death. It’s far too obvious. My bad.

On top of this, there were some attempts at political intrigue but due to my distaste with the romance, I actually spent several chapters rooting for the bad guy despite knowing he was the bad guy. Not a good sign in a fantasy novel. Thankfully, we resorted to the age-old cliche of “The villain experiments on children and that’s how you know he’s evil” so I was able to regain my bearings.

Overall, this obviously wasn’t a good choice for jumping back into the fantasy genre. Disappointment doesn’t even begin to cover it. The romance was distasteful and the shoddy worldbuilding was just more icing on the fail. D

My regards,
Jia

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The Trophy Wife by Janette Kenny is the [...]]]> I haven’t had much luck with Harlequin Presents subscriptions of late. In December, I enjoyed three of my eight books. The problem is that I’m never sure what books I’m going to enjoy and thus the subscription seems worth it. I guess I’ll reevaluate mid year 2012.

The Trophy Wife by Janette Kenny is the next to last addition in the Notorious Wolfe series (or Bad Blood series as it was originally labeled by Mills & Boon). It featured a model with an eating disorder and computer billionaire. While I appreciated that the story attempted to tackle the issue of anorexia and societal concepts of beauty which prizes thinness over everything, I felt that the story was overloaded with sex and dealt very little with the conflict between the characters. I wasn’t even convinced that they knew each other by the end of the book. They had been married for nearly two years but spent so little time together, wrapped up in their own jobs, that they hadn’t even seen their partner’s homes which may have been okay if the first time that they actually went to the other’s homes wasn’t by the 70% mark of the book. C-

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The Power and The Glory by Kimberly Lang. I bailed on this one after the second chapter. The hero is the campaign manager for his father, a Senator, who sounds like a dickwad and the heroine is a protestor for some environmental lobbying group. I am so sick of politics and politicians that I could not stomach reading more than about 20 pages of this book. Maybe in another era I would find this more palatable but, alas, could not. DNF

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The Man Every Woman Wants by Miranda Lee. The heroine is a lawyer who does contract work for a sports agent. She confesses that she has been weaving a tale about their faux engagement to her dying grandmother and now her dyying grandmother wants to meet him. The hero agrees to do this favor for her and has a bit of fun with it. The heroine’s family is sports mad and the heroine showing up with a former star athlete and current sports agent increases her cachet. B-

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A Christmas Night to Remember by Helen Brooks. My main complaint about this story is that it takes place over two days and the couple has serious issues. The heroine is involved in a terrible car wreck. She’s maimed and scarred and has never felt secure in her husband’s love. He’s so beautiful and so rich and there are always dozens of women casting lures for him, all of which he has steadfastly ignored. The heroine was beautiful prior to the car wreck and she prided herself in being able to fit in with the fast and fashionable but now that her legs are less than perfect, she doesn’t know what will become of her and she’s sure that her husband will leave her. In order to prevent him from leaving her, she’ll leave him. He refuses to leave and in the space of two days (right before Christmas) convinces her anew of his steadfast devotion. I should love this story. It is the kind of Brooks’ story I usually enjoy but I wasn’t convinced that the heroine’s deepseated emotional fear could be assauged in just a couple of days. C

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On the First Night of Christmas by Heidi Rice. Cassie gets splashed by a car careening around the corner while she is looking at holiday windows at Selfridges in London. Rather than be a doormat, she marches over to the vehicle, stopped at a signal and bangs on the window. She tells him off and when he fails to provide an appropriate response to her, she jumps in the car only to realize that the driver is a former high school classmate of hers, one she’s always had a crush on. Just off a broken engagement, Cassie’s confidence is at an all time low and when Jace Ryan comes on to her, it’s like a balm to her wounded ego. They embark on an affair, destined to only last until the New Year when Jace returns to New York. In that time period, Cassie falls hard for Jace but Jace is confused by his feelings. He doesn’t really believe in love and just wants to enjoy the moments as they come. I really enjoyed the ending because I felt like it didn’t force the issue. It does have a traditional HEA (provided by the epilogue). B

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On the First Night of Christmas actually had a similar conflict to Once Touched, Never Forgotten by Natasha Tate, a book that I didn’t like much. Once Touched, Never Forgotten is a secret baby story. The heroine decides that the hero won’t be a good father and more importantly, doesn’t want to be a father so when she finds out she is pregnant she leaves him. Five years later he rediscovers her and her secret baby. She had a terrible childhood and was abandoned by her own father. She projects her fears onto the hero that he too will abandon their child. Of course, she never gives him the opportunity to choose. The hero isn’t sure he knows how to love but he promises that he will be a good father. The heroine is relentless in her accusations that he will be a terrible father based on nothing more than her own fears. She was a bitch but then he later uses sexual blackmail to get her to marry him so I figure that they belonged together. And unlike the Rice book, the hero in this one belabored his inability to love over and over again. I got it. She was abandoned. He had crappy relatives. The melodrama was over the top. D

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This book is one of Riptide Publishing’s initial releases as it opens its doors for business. I had high hopes for it: contemporary m/m about a member of our Armed Forces kicked out under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and his hero, a writer of m/m romance. Unfortunately, this is one of the [...]]]> Dear Ms. Grant.

This book is one of Riptide Publishing’s initial releases as it opens its doors for business. I had high hopes for it: contemporary m/m about a member of our Armed Forces kicked out under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and his hero, a writer of m/m romance. Unfortunately, this is one of the most boring books I’ve ever read. Not actively infuriating — I never yelled at the book, I never rolled my eyes — but just unutterably boring, with cardboard characters, speedbump conflicts, ordinary sex, and no tension whatsoever.

Cole is a former Marine major kicked out under DADT. He has (relatively mild?) PTSD and the first semester of law school is very very hard (cue tiny violins.) Marc is a waiter at a local diner who writes m/m romance on the side. He’s hoping eventually to be able to earn enough from his writing to make it a full-time job, so he’s very committed to it. Cole has breakfast at the diner, Marc’s hot for Cole because he has a fetish for military men,  Cole leaves his cheap pay-as-you-go cell phone in the diner, Marc takes it back to him, Cole invites him in, Marc gives Cole a blowjob, Cole throws Marc out.

And really, the emotional depth of the actions are just about reflected in that summary.

Okay, so Cole gets mad at himself for being an asshole, goes back to the diner to apologize, Marc agrees to go out with him again, and they both agree to take things slowly. But then Cole gets spooked when they touch in public, so Marc gets mad at the closet case. But then Cole realizes he’s being an asshole and it’s all solved! And then they quickly get together to the point that they’re almost living together. Then they ARE living together. Then Cole’s asshole father calls to say his mother fell down, can he come visit, so Cole goes home to North Carolina, and is shocked at what he finds, because his mother has early-onset Alzheimers that no one told him about. So he stays and casually asks Marc to join him. Marc refuses, Cole breaks up with him. Marc changes his mind, goes out to NC to be with Cole, who tells him maybe not. Cole still wants them to be together, but he can’t ask Marc to give up his life. He sends Marc home, eventually goes back himself, and…oh who cares?

Honestly, every barrier is treated like a speedbump. Cole has PTSD! Marc whines him into going to see a psychologist, so that’s all taken care of. ::dusts hands:: Cole’s parents are falling apart and Cole has to be with them, even though his father hates that he’s gay and refuses to get help for his wife. Cole asks Marc to move to NC because he has no idea how long he’ll be there, Marc says no, Cole breaks up with him, Marc changes his mind, Cole changes his mind. Each one of these steps is maybe a conversation. That’s it. Seriously! For example: Marc chucks it all, goes to NC, meets Cole’s father, who throws him out, which Marc just accepts. Marc tells Cole his dad will just have to get used to him:

“Marc, you don’t get it,” Cole said slowly. “He’s an old-school Marine with a very set way of looking at the world. Everything’s either black or white to him. Right or wrong. If he won’t even accept his own son, what makes you think he’ll accept you?” [Oh, okay, so rolling over and letting him live with his own hate is the way to go? Check!]

Marc stared at him, swallowing another sip of wine. He couldn’t have looked more stunned if Cole had hauled off and slapped him. [Yeah, no shit.]

“Look, as much as I appreciate your offer, I think moving here would be a big mistake.” Scratch that — now Marc couldn’t have looked more stunned. [Uh, yeah, me too. What the hell happened to getting so mad he wouldn't come out that you broke up with him. Over the phone?!] Cole scooped up his hand, cradling it between both of his. “Sooner or later you’ll start resenting me for making you leave your friends and your job and your mom behind. [You couldn't have thought of this BEFORE asking him to move? And then breaking up with him because he said no for all of these perfectly valid reasons you're now quoting back to him as if you thought of them first?] I love you, Marc, and I want you to be happy. But believe me, you’ll be miserable here. I don’t even want to be here. I’d give my left nut to get on a plane back to California with you tomorrow.” [So...why'd you ask in the first place? Why no apology for asking?]

“Why don’t we leave your left nut where it is, okay?” [Oh, har har. Humor!] There was that crooked smile he loved so much, and Marc’s comforting arms wrapped around him, pulling him back down beside him. “I like knowing where I can find it. And all your other parts, too.”

He carded his fingers through Marc’s dark curls [wow, I got REALLY tired of this image -- find another way to say "ran his fingers through his hair" please], inhaling the faint piney scent of his shampoo. “Go home and take care of Thomas. I’ll be back to see you when I can.”

“Still think it’ll be a few months?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. But I’ve got a feeling we should get ready for the long haul.”

“All right.” Marc sighed.

They lay there in silence for a while.

And that’s it! That’s the sum total of their conversation. REALLY? Marc came all the way across the country because Cole asked on a whim and then broke up with him when Marc said no, and then Cole completely changes his mind, and Marc says “all right” and that’s it! Can we have a little more emotional affect between these two men?

No, apparently not.

This book could have been amazing. Cole could have been deep and fascinating. He’s never had a boyfriend before, doesn’t know how to treat one, doesn’t know how to believe that he himself deserves a relationship. He misses the Marines, hates law school. Except…nothing’s dealt with beyond mentioning it, let alone examining it. Marc actually writes a story that matches their story, as they’re living it, but again, it’s just mentioned. There’s no THERE there, nothing insightful, nothing interesting, nothing beyond, “ooh, a writer and a Marine! Nifty!” Nothing about a writer having insights about what’s happening to him, or meta-commentary about his own story, or…anything.

(And that’s leaving aside the ridiculousness about how Cole’s parents could not have been living in the same house in Raleigh NC his whole life if his father had actually spent 30 years in the Marines, because there are no Marine bases in Raleigh and they would have moved around more than that anyway. But whatever…)

Anyway, it didn’t take long to read this story because plot points was all it was. But I can’t imagine myself ever reading anything else you write if this is the level of your story-telling ability.

Grade: D

Best regards,

-Sarah

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Though I’ve been back to reading romance for over 15 years now, there are still way too many authors I’ve yet to try. In one of the latest big ol’ boxes of books that Jane sent me was a copy of your newest book “A Catered Affair.” For some reason I don’t [...]]]> Dear Ms. Margolis,

Though I’ve been back to reading romance for over 15 years now, there are still way too many authors I’ve yet to try. In one of the latest big ol’ boxes of books that Jane sent me was a copy of your newest book “A Catered Affair.” For some reason I don’t examine too closely, a blurb about a Big Event gone Horribly Wrong will always snag my attention and the featured one here promised to be a doozy. With a public meltdown to look forward to, I settled down to enjoy the show.

London lawyer Tally and her doctor fiance Josh have finally set the date which propels her mother and Nana Ida into a frenzy of Jewish wedding planning. Tally’s been aware of Josh’s long issues with commitment due to his father walking out on the family when Josh was a teen but everything seems to be “Go” and “Full Steam Ahead.” The dress is beautiful, the flowers look fabulous, the food promises to be divine and the reception for 200 ought to be the culmination of a wonderful day. Except that Josh is a no show.

Blindsided Tally decides to let the reception go on, after all the food is already there and paid for, and with the help of more than one bottle of wine, she makes it through. When the evening winds down though, all she wants to do is be alone and lick her wounds. Until she spies the caterer, Kenny. Drunk enough not to care, she snags him for one last dance, propositions him, passes out on him and wakes up the next morning to discover he spent the night with her in the wedding suite holding her hair back and the champagne bucket under her head as she hurled – repeatedly.

Despite their rocky start, the two find common ground in both having just been dumped by their S.O.s and begin to spend mate-y evenings together. But they’re Just Friends as Tally tells everyone ad nauseam who senses the vibes they produce when together. Tally knows from her parent’s experience that two people need to be well matched for a HEA future and Kenny just doesn’t fit her preconceived plans for a hubby. But could Tally be wrong about who her Mr. Right is and will she wise up in time to keep him?

From my experience reading lots of other Chick Lit-ish books, I expected that the set up for the story would take roughly 30-40 pages then it would settle into the post-bolting-groom stage for the majority of the book. After all, from the blurb we know that Josh is not going to be the hero. Yet, in a move that some might find refreshing and others dislike, you give us 100+ pages of Tally and Josh’s relationship plus wedding arranging. I find myself in the “dislike” camp and wondered why the need for that amount of space devoted to a we-know-to-be-doomed couple. I mean it just went on and on before the kablooey scene.

After Tally’s reception implosion leading to the getting-to-know-you night with Kenny, the book progresses more like I’m used to reading. Only I discovered that there are major aspects of Tally I didn’t like. I don’t mind a flawed heroine but Tally takes the wedding cake as far as her romance with Kenny. Tally, for lack of a better way to put it, is a snob. And she’s a snob for the last 250 pages of the book. Tally is amusing in that underplayed English sarcastic humor way, she’s a hard working lawyer who deeply cares about her clients, she loves her family and is a great friend but…she’s a snob. And her seemingly overnight change (see more of this below) doesn’t work for me. Kenny is sweet, a hard worker, a good friend, seems to be a great lover who takes pride in his cunnilingual (is that a word?) talent and, in my opinion even at the end of the book, far too good for Tally. That’s bad in a romance book.

The book and its characters are chock full of issues. Issues are good as they make the people seem more well rounded to me but! those issues need careful resolving for me to keep that realistic feeling. That doesn’t happen here. It’s full on problems/dilemmas both professional and personal for most of the characters up to about the last 20 pages of the novel. Then, with a wave of the authorial wand, everything is suddenly Happy Days and resolved too neatly and too perfectly. It’s almost Mary Sue in its perfection. Too easy, too pat and too unrealistic. No one’s life smooths out this way. And this goes double for the Big Mis final confrontation scene which rears its ugly head complete with protestations that the relationship is over for all time only for Twue Love to hang a 180 degree turn the very next day!

My disappointment in the opening third of the book, coupled with not truly liking the heroine’s treatment of the hero for the next – almost – two thirds of the book finished up with a rush to solve all the conflicts/issues so that sunshine can beam from everyone’s ass leads me to an unhappy grade for “A Catered Affair.” Sorry but D for this one.

~Jayne

I felt like that there was a kernel of a really great story here but the story I wanted to read and the story I read were at such odds with each other. The story that I felt was trying to be told was of a man who had an enduring love [...]]]> Dear Ms. Day:

I felt like that there was a kernel of a really great story here but the story I wanted to read and the story I read were at such odds with each other. The story that I felt was trying to be told was of a man who had an enduring love which he pursued despite all of the rules of his world and despite the fact that it might bring about his ruin. Unfortunately, the story I read was about a man who had strong feelings for someone for which he broke all the rules while he ruined the lives of others around him for breaking those same rules he refused to live by. The story I wanted to read was about a man who was struggling with the edicts that had formed the basis of all his actions in the past, the rules which demanded he hunt down his fellow angels, rip off their wings, and strip them of their souls. The story I read was about a man who shrugged off the hypocrisy of his actions and enforced a cruel rule upon his fellow angels without any real thought to why.  My take away was that this story was about a raging hypocrite who was more villain than hero.  But, unfortunately, that was only the beginning of my challenges with this book.

“Touch of Crimson” has confusing world building.  There is a huge cast of paranormal beings.  This is epitome of the “No Paranormal Left Behind.”  The book opens with a glossary and contains these two definitions (among others):

FALLEN—the Watchers after the fall from grace. They have been stripped of their wings and their souls, leaving them as immortal blood drinkers who cannot procreate.

WATCHERS—two hundred seraphim angels sent to earth at the beginning of time to observe mortals. They violated the laws by taking mortals as mates and were punished with an eternity on earth as vampires with no possibility of forgiveness.

The Fallen and Watchers are the same group of people but it took me 8 chapters to figure this out because in this book you have good angels, bad angels, vampires (which are angels), human vampires, lycans, reincarnated humans, demons, and dragons, werewolves that are demons but different than lycans although both were made from demon blood, and zombies.

The “hero” is Adrian, the head of the Sentinels who are angels sent to Earth to watch the Fallen/Watcher group and ensure that they …. don’t do anything? And to make sure that the other Sentinels who are sent to watch also don’t fall in love with humans and mate with them.  The punishment, meted out by Adrian, is to hunt down the fallen Sentinels (who are a different bunch of angels than the Watchers but who then become the Fallen) and rip off their wings and strip them of their souls.  These angels then become the Fallen, vampires who cannot procreate and have no souls.  What the “no soul” means is not articulated in the text. It sounds ominous but the Fallen seemed like a group no different than the Sentinels other than the fact that they drank blood and liked to  have sex with mortals.   They could still feel and they didn’t act amoral.  If there was any villain in the story, it was Adrian.

Adrian falls in love with the daughter of the head dude of the Fallen, soulless vampires. Adrian has sex with her which should mean Adrian is hunted down and stripped of his wings.  The head “bad” tries to turn his daughter, Shadoe, into a vampire so she will be immortal but Adrian prevents it by killing her.  Unfortunately, he killed her too late and her soul became immortal.  She reincarnates at intermittent periods.  Adrian lives for those moments that he has with her, sometimes it is 20 minutes, sometimes it is 20 years. She never remembers, but he always finds her. Destiny brings them together.  I’m not sure if he kills her every time, but she dies every time although it’s not explained why. Or it was and I totally missed it.

I want to emphasize this. ADRIAN LIVES FOR THE MOMENTS SHE IS REINCARNATED.  Everything he does between the periods of dormancy is await her return.

Two hundred damned years. She’d been gone long enough to make him dangerous. A seraph whose heart was encased in ice was a hazard to everyone and everything around him. He was a danger to her, because his hunger for her was so voracious he questioned his ability to restrain it. When she was gone, the world was dead to him. The silence within was deafening. Then she returned, and the rush of sensation exploded around him—the pounding of his heart, the heat of her touch, the force of his need. Life. Which was lost to him when she was.

Unfortunately, her soul is gaining dominance and this time, she is exhibiting very real supernatural abilities. In her latest incarnation, Shadoe is sharing a soul with a red haired, fair skinned woman named Lauren.  She senses “otherness” about people. She has been killing vamps and demons for 10 years. She senses that this guy named Adrien she meets at an airport is an “other” and Adrien recognizes immediately it is “Shadoe”. She agrees to go with this ”other” to his highly reclusive compound and eat dinner with him.  She doesn’t drive herself.  She leaves the airport to go with someone she recognizes as “other” (and thus ordinarily will kill) to their private compound in his car.  This is not classic TSTL behavior?

When she gets to his compound she is amazed by its beauty and wealth:

She kept her bag close to her side and faced him. “What’s not to like?”

“Good.” He gave a regal nod. “You’ll be staying here indefinitely.”

His imperiousness was stunning. “Excuse me?”

“I need to keep you where I know you’ll be safe.”

I need to keep you . . . As if he had the right. “Maybe I don’t want to be kept.”

Where’s her fear, outrage? Why this meh acceptance of being held captive in some strange “other” compound?

Adrien can’t wait to have sex with Lindsey/Shadoe despite the fact that he was CREATED to administer punishment to those angels who decide to mate with humans.  When questioned about this he responds:

“They are responsible for what they are. They made the choices that led to their fall.” He studied her with those fathomless eyes. “Yes, I administered the punishment. I stripped the Watchers of their wings. Wings and souls are connected, and the loss of their souls led to their blood drinking. But I’m not accountable for their mistakes, any more than a police officer is responsible for the crimes committed by offenders.”

At one point in the book, one of the sentinels came to him, confesses she loves her lycan guard and asks for mercy.  Adrian gives her one hour lead before he hunts her down and kills her lycan and if she has had smex with him, he will rip off her wings and she will become a watcher. This is, of course, minutes after he has had smex with the heroine. He regrets his hypocrisy but this is his charge.  Agghhh!

If an author sets up two factions and has one faction standing on the neck of the other “for the good of the world”, the author is asking the reader to make a qualitative judgment about who is standing on the right side of the line. When the head guy standing on the right side of the line is doing everything he can to violate the line but still maintains the need for the suppression of an entire set of beings, how can you make that qualitative judgment?

I’m not saying that a book needs to be all black and white, but if the author is exploring gray areas, then that exposition should be in the book. Why is Adrian not grappling with this? Why is it okay for him to fuck the brains out of the heroine but he’ll ruin any one else who takes the same liberties? Why doesn’t he question the rightness of his position? Instead, this is what he says:

“You and Helena can’t be the only ones to form attachments,”  Jason said.

“No.” Everything seemed to be coming to a head at once. Or maybe it felt that way because he was still reeling from Lindsay’s decision to leave him. She was being selfless for him. He had to try to be the same  for her, which might mean letting her go.

“You can’t be surprised,” Jason went on. “We’ve been on this mission forever.”

“I’m only surprised it took this long.” Adrian looked at Damien, who lifted both shoulders in an offhand shrug that neither confirmed nor denied whether his opinion aligned. “But what are the alternatives? Dereliction of duty? The forfeiture of our wings? Preying on the mortals we were created to protect? Who the fuck wants to live that life?”

But but but. He is living that life.  He is engaged in doing exactly what he despises in others and has so little remorse for it.  Why does he have anyone who obeys him? Who follows him?

What possibly makes this book even more wall banging is the resolution of the reincarnated soul issue.  I’ll say obliquely that if an author chooses to end the story in this fashion, then why the hell is there a reincarnated storyline in the first place.  Why make such a huge friggin’ deal about how Adrien cannot live during the periods Shadoe is not reincarnated?

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

Toward the end of the book, there appears to be a fracturing of the world that has been in existence for thousands and thousands of years.  The lycan, who are under control of the Sentinels are rebelling.  There are groups who do not want to be under the thumb of the Sentinels (and frankly who can blame them?).  There is a discovery about the Sentinel blood that will turn them into hunted instead of the hunters.  That this discovery has just now occurred makes me think that these are the dumbest paranormal beings ever.

Finally, I’m going to talk about the racial depictions in this book.  I want to state at the outset that I don’t think that what was shown in this book was in any way intentional but the way in which race was portrayed made me uncomfortable.  I also want to note that I believe that you are half Japanese and I only state that because I suspect someone in the comments will say “Day can’t be racist, she’s half Japanese”.  And I am not making a claim that you are racist, only that the depictions of race in this book seemed to elevate blue eyed, classically featured characters over “exotic” or people of color.

Let’s start with the heroine.  She was once the spitting image of her Asian mommy. Now she has red hair blue eyes and fair skin.  This is an authorial choice.  The reincarnated soul has no rules in this world.  She did not need to start out Asian and then, through reincarnation, become more and more Western in coloring.  This is a paranormal story. These characters could be anything, any color, any race.  But for some reason the heroine started out as Asian and when she became the true and forever love of Adrien, she was red haired and fair skinned.

Now his daughter was stripped of her genes along with her memories. Once the spitting image of her mother, her incarnations bore the trademarks of someone else’s lineage.

All the Sentinels and I believe the original Watchers  are blue eyed although the hero has “olive toned” skin.  When the Seraph “fall”, they change from blue eyed gods to “amber” (I’m not sure whether this is a result of blood drinking or not as it is never expressed).

Sentinel descriptions:

Jason:  ”Despite the roar of the aircraft’s engines, Jason didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard. He also didn’t cover his seraph blue eyes, despite the pair of designer shades perched atop his golden head.”

Adrian:  ”His eyes were the most unusual shade of blue. Like the vivid cerulean at the heart of a flame. Set within olive skin and framed by thick dark lashes, they were mesmerizing.”

Damien:  ”Damien’s seraph blue eyes returned to her. He was gorgeous: long and sculpted, with his dark brown hair cut short, and sleek, framing eyes nearly as blue as Adrian’s.”

Helena:   “He knew what the hostess saw—a stunning, statuesque, radiantly beautiful woman with waist-length blond hair and seraph blue eyes.

Salem:  “He’s young,” Salem said beside her, momentarily distracting her with his latest blinding hair color of primary blue. It was fortunate for him that he possessed classical bone structure; there was a regal quality to his handsome face that transcended whatever crayon hue adorned his head.”

All the Sentinels had the same flame blue eyes, although only Adrian’s ever gave off heat. The Sentinels were works of art, really. It was rather intimidating being surrounded by dozens of perfect, gorgeous beings.

Fallen (who were all Angels at one point):

Vashti:  “Hello, Adrian,” she muttered, her lips curved in a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Sunlight fell over her pale bare arms and chocolate-colored hair. Her amber eyes glittered like tiger’s-eye, but he remembered when they’d been blue like his own.

Shadoe, the daughter of a fallen angel and a human:  An exotic and breathtaking woman.

Shadoe’s brother, Torque:  ”His brutally short hair stuck straight up in opposing directions, the thick Asian locks bleached nearly white at the tips. It was a style that suited both the exotic features he’d inherited from his mother and his sharp-edged lifestyle.”

Another guy but with questionable alliances, not a Sentinel:

Raguel:  “The archangel hesitated a moment, then dipped his head with the expected deference. His smile was dazzlingly white within the framework of skin as smooth and rich as the finest milk chocolate. There was a smattering of tight gray curls at Raguel’s temples, but that telltale sign of aging was an affectation to disguise his immortality.”

Lycan (set up to be a bad guy although may be a good guy in future books):

“It was a quiet surety inside her. She knew the fallen angel who stood across the room from her, looking far too young to be her father. He was gorgeous. Tall and elegant, like a Sentinel, but much darker. Definitely dangerous. Not just in his looks, although those were dark and dangerous, too. His black hair and caramel-hued skin were paired with eyes the color of toffee, making him stunning in a wholly exotic way.”

So why is it that all the “good” angels have blue eyes, classical features and most have golden hair?  Why not a huge variation of racial features on the “good” angels.  Why are the “good” angels and the “bad” guys in the stories differentiated by phenotype?  It’s noteable that the only time skin color is mentioned is when it references a non white person.  The default then is that the characters are white if not “olive skinned, caramel hued, milk chocolate” colored.  Maybe individually, these things wouldn’t have rung my bell, but with the heroine’s ethnicity “stripped away” through reincarnation (not to mention what happens in the spoiler) along with how all the Sentinels are blue eyed, classically featured, then yes, it all becomes very uncomfortable for me.  If they are of different skin color, different races, why wasn’t that described?  Why was the heroine’s ethnicity erased so that by the time she gets her HEA she is no longer an “exotic” beauty (as she was described in the book).  Overall, this book disappointed me on many levels but having the heroine’s ethnicity erased was the topper.  D

Best regards,

Jane

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What happened here, Dray? Your first book was so very good. This one screwed the pooch.

In first book, Selene takes control of her own fate ends on happy note

this book takes that book and pretty much destroys it I hated each page

On [...]]]> (Lots of spoilers ahead – beware!)

What happened here, Dray?
Your first book was so very good.
This one screwed the pooch.

In first book, Selene
takes control of her own fate
ends on happy note

this book takes that book
and pretty much destroys it
I hated each page

On her wedding night
to Juba, Selene is raped
by Octavian

She tells her new spouse

He says, I know, I let him

do it. Sorry ’bout that.

Me: What the fucking
fuck just happened in this book?
Seriously now.

If that were not bad
enough, Selene runs from this
to her brother’s arms

They have sex. A lot.
This plot goes from bad to worse.
Hero is her BRO???

Plot continues down
Octavian offers her
Egypt if they fuck.

Selene must decide
Egypt or her new kingdom?
Whore to her rapist?

This plot is just gross
Entire book is about
“Will she or won’t she?”

Selene wants Egypt
So very bad. She teases and leads
on Octavian

Would rather read a
book about a strong queen or
historical stuff

Not brother love. Not
flirting with her rapist. Not
any of this. At all.

I am so, so sad
I love your writing and voice
WHY did you write this?

I loved your first book
Cannot recommend this one
Wish I could. Sorry.

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In a recent podcast, Sarah Wendell and I talked about how there are titles we would like to have rebound into collector’s items so that they can sit on our shelves and be read and admired.  Some of your titles would be on that list. After the Night.  Now You See Her. [...]]]> Dear Ms. Howard:

In a recent podcast, Sarah Wendell and I talked about how there are titles we would like to have rebound into collector’s items so that they can sit on our shelves and be read and admired.  Some of your titles would be on that list. After the Night.  Now You See Her.  The Diamond Bay/Kell Sabin series.  Yes, even Dream Man.   But ever since your move to hardcover, I have felt that you’ve taken your work in a direction that I wasn’t prepared.  For that reason, I have a hard time grading “Prey.”  Maybe if I was a mainstream fiction reader or a mainstream thriller reader, I would read this book differently.  My assessment and my disappointment stems from the fact that I wanted more interaction between the male and female protagonists.

Instead, the book treats me to several scenes from the primary antagonist, an accountant who is fleecing his mobster boss, a long scene from a random hiker, and yes, even a black bear.  I don’t read a lot of mainstream so maybe this is normal? Having scenes from an animal’s point of view.  The bear is an antagonist.  It’s not presented as a particularly loveable, lumbering bear, but one that is intent on eating, well, hikers and whomever else it can get it’s jaws on.

He studied the sheep. He was downwind of the heard, the cold mountain air bringing the scent sharp and clear to his nostrils…He went into a frenzy of destruction, bellowing his rage and frustration
as he took out his killing fury on the vegetation…

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to take from seeing the bear’s point of view.  Was it to show him as sympathetic? Was it to create increased atmosphere?  Was it some unique literary technique they are experimenting with in the litfic world?

As for the accountant, he was supposed to be very clever, so clever that he as leading his mob boss off to this wilderness trip to go bear hunting and plans to kill the boss and the hunting guide and then will escape to Mexico with his money.  He is afraid of the mob boss’s associates.  Yet, why does he think that shooting the mob boss makes sense? Why not just escape to Mexico?  I was never quite sure why the mob boss went with the accountant. After all, the accountant believed that the mob boss was starting to get suspicious of the accountant’s activities.  Why would the mob boss be by himself?  But when the bear shows up, the accountant thinks to himself that he never planned for a bear despite the fact that they were going BEAR HUNTING.  If you are going out to hunt bears, wouldn’t you plan for bears?

The small glimpses of interaction I saw between the hero and heroine were fun and interesting but so so few.  According to my notes, I was up to 244 of 300+ pages and I think we had about 10 pages of dialogue and interaction between the two.

Angie Powell runs a wilderness hiking business she inherited from her dad and not very well.  She doesn’t recognize her own strengths (catering to families and other women) and instead runs the business focused on hunters and fisherman, like her dad did.  She’s been losing a tremendous amount of business to Dare Callahan, a war veteran, who has set himself as a guide in Montana.  People, particularly the big game hunters, prefer to hire Dare. Plus his website is up to date and his facilities are more modern.  Angie decides to throw in the towel and sell her spread, the land and her home, and move on with her life.  Before her father died, she had been happy as an admin in a Billings hospital.  But before she sells her land, she has a client to guide into the wilderness and that client is the aforementioned accountant and his mobster boss.

Harlen, her friend and Realtor, gets worried about Angie going by herself into the wilderness with two guys and takes his concerns to Dare.   Dare decides to trail Angie, just to make sure she’s okay.  In another life, Angie and Dare would be lovers, not these barely speaking acquaintances.  Dare had asked her out, twice, when he first got to town and had gotten shot down twice.  She still does it for him but he’s too dim, I guess, to figure out that she resents his success.  Or he recognizes it, but is still irked at her refusal to date him? I don’t know. Not much time is spent contemplating this.  Dare isn’t a deep guy and that’s not an insult.  He knows what he wants. He tries to get it and in Angie’s case, he fails.

Angie’s very competent at what she does and maybe in a better economy and without the mortgage her father took out to encumber the land, she could have made it.  She’s a no nonsense kind of girl and while it pains her to give up the land, she knows it is the best thing for her.

I liked Angie and Dare. It was obvious how they were going to end up together. Hinted early on is Dare’s hatred of paperwork.  Good thing that Angie loves doing the admin stuff.  The bear stuff, the not so clever accountant, the danger, none of that turned the pages for me, primarily because the minutae of planning and detail was dry.  I kept reading for more glimpses of Angie and Dare but I felt like I was a desert traveler having to suck the juice out of a cactus.    When I got to the third POV scene from the bear, I was utterly defeated.  There was no hope for me.  Even the cactus juice can’t keep me going at this point.

Best regards,

Jane

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When I first started this book, I wondered if was a reprint of a formerly published book because I felt like I had read it before.  I double checked and no, it was a self published work and possibly your first one.  Yet, I had read a story very similar to this [...]]]> Dear Ms. Wolf:

When I first started this book, I wondered if was a reprint of a formerly published book because I felt like I had read it before.  I double checked and no, it was a self published work and possibly your first one.  Yet, I had read a story very similar to this called In Bed with the Boss by Susan Napier which is one of my favorite Napier books.  The more that I read “Working Arrangements”, the more uncomfortable I began to feel.  This wasn’t plagiarism.  There was no overt copying of text but the story sequence that played out was incredibly familiar.

The hero in both books are owners of multi millionaire dollar tech companies.  The heroine in both books is his personal admin.  The heroine in both suffered the loss of a lover.  In In Bed, the heroine lost her husband; In Working Arrangements, the heroine lost her fiance.  In both books, the hero was good friends with the former lover.

The story opens in both books with the heroine admitting that she just got engaged the night before.  In both books, she is afraid to reveal the truth because she knows her boss will not be happy with the results.  It is apparent, from the setup in both books, that the hero has been waiting until the heroine has recovered from the death of her lover in order to make his move.

In both books, the heroine has only been dating a few months and she has been dating a man with whom the hero has had a past bad experience.  In In Bed, the man owns a rival firm and Working Arrangements, the man is a journalist who wrote an untrue story that endangered their business.

There are passages throughout the book that ring with similarity:

In Bed with the Boss: “…You don’t talk to me about the women that you date!’

‘That’s because—’ He broke off, and his eyes narrowed on her pink face. ‘No, I don’t, but that doesn’t prevent you knowing about them, does it? You field my calls, open my mail and have access to my diary and hard drive, and what you don’t know I’m sure the grapevine provides—this place is a hotbed of internal gossip and the network bulletin board seems to keep well up to date with jokes about my social life. I bet you end up knowing the women in my life better than I do!’

Working Arrangements: It is hard to overlook when I am the one who goes through your bills from the florist and the jeweler, isn’t it?’ Hiding her vulnerability behind sarcasm seemed to work, she decided. She was furious with herself for this unfortunate slip of her tongue. ‘You are very generous to your women, Luke. That should certainly be applauded, I admit.’

Both accuse the heroine of being pregnant:

In Bed With the Boss:  His brain was already fast-forwarding to other possibilities. He was piecing together her unease, her embarrassment and unaccustomed reluctance to get to the point. He blanched. ‘Are you pregnant?’

…That was going too far, even for Duncan. Kalera leapt to her feet, her slight body vibrating like a tuning fork as she matched his outrage. ‘For goodness’ sake, what rush? We haven’t even discussed a wedding date yet!’ she yelled. ‘We’ve only just got engaged. Of course I’m not pregnant. Do you know how insulting you are? Believe it or not Stephen wants to marry me; he’s not doing it out of duty or necessity or because he’s been trapped into retrieving my soiled honour. If you’d stop trying to cram words into my mouth you might have time to listen to what I have to say!’

Working Arrangements: ‘Are you pregnant, Laura?’ His face even more forbidding, he glared at her accusingly, his lips one firm line. ‘Is that what it is all about?’

‘Of course not!’ Her angry outburst surprised them both. Laura gritted her teeth with frustration as she lost her usually unshakable control. ‘How can you even think something like that, Luke?’

Both fiances were obsessive and jealous:

In Bed with the Boss: Duncan’s head turned at last, his expression a volatile mixture of bitterness, anger, resignation and contempt. ‘Yes, he had a reason—his own obsession! He always did have a controlling personality but it pushed him to want absolute control in his marriage. He was always demanding to know where Terri had been, expecting her to account for every moment of time she spent away from him, objecting to anything that took her attention away from him—job, friends—both male and female—shopping, family, hobbies…’

Working Arrangements:  ”There were clouds in paradise, mostly because Eric was obsessively jealous about her past, hating any man that had as much as held her hand. He threw so many scenes where he belittled her and her supposed lovers, she finally had enough and told him to take a break and examine his behavior which he took as a confirmation of his suspicions, following her everywhere and even hired a private detective to make sure he knew her every step.”

Here are some other, chapter by chapter comparisons:

CHAPTER 1

In Bed with the Boss:  Story opens at the office. Heroine hands in her resignation in anticipation of her new marriage arrangements to boss’ business rival.  He accuses of her of being pregnant. Frustrated that she is now taking off her rings.

Working Arrangements:  Story opens at the office. Heroine reluctantly reveals secret engagement to boss’ enemy.  He accuses her of being pregnant.  She had been wearing a “sign” on her forehead to keep away.   Eric, the fiance, is planning a big engagement party. Laura reveals that she is not sleeping with Eric.    (See also Ch 2 of In Bed with the Boss)

CHAPTER 2

In Bed with the Boss:  Stephen, the fiance, takes her out to a fancy restaurant. Is planning a big engagement party.  Fiance is banned from the building.  There is a scene that takes place in the restaurant between hero, heroine, and fiance.

Working Arrangements:  Laura’s car breaks down. Luke and Laura go to her house for dinner. Have a passionate encounter. Eric calls and she feels guilty.  Eric is banned from calling heroine at work.    (See Ch 7 of In Bed with the Boss)

CHAPTER 3

In Bed with the Boss:  Kalera and Duncan are dancing and recalling the first dance they shared three years earlier when Kalera was married.

Working Arrangements:  She tells Luke that she will be resigning and going to work for Eric.    (See Ch 1 and 4 of In Bed with the Boss)

CHAPTER 4

In Bed with the Boss:  They mention, obliquely, a sexual encounter that occurred 18 months previously while Kalera was grieving and lonely. This sexual encounter was initiated by Kalera.  Kalera admits she is not sleeping with Stephen.  The story swings back to the restaurant where Kalera meets Stephen’s ex Terri.

Working Arrangements:  Laura remembers the sexual encounter that she and Luke shared around Christmas approximately three years prior wherein she was the sexual aggressor.

CHAPTER 5

In Bed with the Boss:  The scene opens with Kalera back at work.She is thinking about the end of the evening and how Stephen railed about his break up, making her very uncomfortable.  The rest of the chapter is spent watching Duncan and Kalera banter and then work.  Assistant says that if it was anyone that Kalera was going to hook up with, everyone thought it would be Duncan.

Anna shovelled her make-up back into her shiny black bag. ‘Yeah, well…I think it’s too weird,’ she sighed. ‘I mean, I always thought that, if you got it on with anyone, for sure it would be the chief.’

….

Amazingly Anna seemed to understand her incoherent fumblings. ‘Oh, I know he was happy to, you know, like—worship you from afar with his respect and all that while he thought you were still hung up about losing Harry, but jeez, you must have noticed he behaves differently around you…He doesn’t flirt the way he does with other women, and he’s always sort of gentle—you know, as if he’s trying to slow himself down to your speed…’

Working Arrangements:  The scene opens with Laura back at work.  She thinks back to the dinner she had with Eric where the his ex showed.  Ex confronts Laura in the bathroom.   Several pages are given over contemplating the past and how the ex made heroine ponder some heretofore unknown flaws in the fiance.  Ex is fashionable and gorgeous.  It also swings back to a previous day in which the heroine visited friends.   This is part of a storyline that is much different than In Bed With the Boss.

CHAPTER 6

In Bed with the Boss:  Scene opens at work with Kalera at her desk. Stephen is upset because he can’t get through on the phone.  Kalera contemplates her life without Duncan, without her job and she feels uneasy.  They interview possible replacements with Duncan liking all the hot ones and Kalera liking all the older, married, male, or lesbian candidates.Kalera cuts herself and Duncan comes over and sucks her finger. The assistant walks in on them.

Working Arrangements:  Scene opens at work with Laura at her desk.An assistant wonders as to Laura’s engagement to someone else:

‘I am not so sure he is having so much fun nowadays, Laura… Sometimes I’m almost sorry to see him trying so hard to be on his best behavior all the time. As if he wants to prove to you he isn’t the crazy Casanova you wrote him off as from the moment you joined us at the office, Laura. Too bad you don’t ever notice. Everyone else does, though.’

They make out and the assistant walks in on them.

Luke admits he’s found a replacement for her.    (See Ch 5 of In Bed with the Boss)

CHAPTER 7

In Bed with the Boss:  Kalera and Duncan are at her house after a long day of work. She agrees to cook for him, something simple. (This the scene from Ch. 1 in the other book)  They are having an intimate moment when Stephen calls.

Working Arrangements:  Laura is at work, training her hot new replacement Belinda.Laura is getting ready for her engagement party. An anonymous gift comes with a necklace. It’s modest and perfect. Laura thinks it is from her fiance, Eric.    (See Ch 9 of In Bed with the Boss)

CHAPTER 8

In Bed with the Boss:  Kalera and Duncan go off to Kalera’s parents’ home after she finds her car disabled and must receive assistance from Duncan.  She learns that her fiance ex has a son. Duncan tells her that it is her fiance’s but her fiance is convinced (wrongly) that it is Duncan’s.

Working Arrangements:  The story opens with the very posh engagement party. It is filled with very fashionable people who have responded to the “perfectly designed invitations that Eric ordered to be delivered with his usual attention to detail.”  Eric is upset that she wore such a simplistic necklace and that she thought it was from him. He wanted her to wear something else.Luke arrives at the party with Elaine. Eric challenges their entrance because you can’t come in without an invitation. Luke presents one that Laura had given him.  Eric and Laura are dancing when Eric sees something going on with Elaine. He leaves Laura in the middle of the dance floor and chases after Elaine.

Luke comes and takes Elaine away.  (See Ch 9 of In Bed with the Boss)

CHAPTER 9

In Bed with the Boss:  The scene opens at the very posh engagement party. The party is packed with everyone who has accepted “Stephen’s gilt-edged invitations” Kalera is upset that Duncan has hired a drop dead gorgeous admin by the name of Bettina.  Kalera is wearing a dress that she received with an unsigned note. She believes it is from Stephen.  Stephen denies it is from him and is aghast she would think he would send her such a loud dress.  Duncan arrives at the party with Terri. Stephen challenges him and says they cannot enter without an invitation. Duncan produces one with Stephen calls a forgery.  During the party, tension swirls around Terri and Stephen.   They face off in the middle of the dance floor. Kalera heads over to smooth things over.   Stephen barely notices Kalera and runs after Terri, leaving Kalera standing alone in the middle of the dance floor.

Duncan takes her away.

Working Arrangements:  Laura goes to Luke’s house, where he has his own private beach, and they make love.    (See Ch 10 of In Bed with the Boss)

CHAPTER 10

In Bed with the Boss:  Duncan takes Kalera and his team to a hideaway to finish an important and secret project.   He takes her to the beach because he loves it there.  They make love. He admits his feelings for her. HEA.

Working Arrangements:  Laura finds out that her former fiance cheated on her and had a child. The child was given to the mom who recently died. Guardianship transferred to friends of Laura’s.Chapter Eleven resolves the feelings of uncertainty Laura has due to Luke’s complicity in hiding Joshua’s love child.

****

It’s hard for me to grade this book.  On it’s own, it’s probably a C-.   There are deviations in Working Arrangements but I enjoyed the choices that Napier made better.  Napier has better facility with dialogue and she’s able to eek out strong emotion with a lot less internal monologuing.   Napier’s characters are more vivid and she took greater chances by having the hero not only being good friends with the deceased husband and not diminishing the deceased husband in any fashion.  In fact, in Napier’s book the hero feels that his honor which had been impugned long ago by the fiance was redeemed by being a true friend to the deceased husband.  Working Arrangements also suffered from grammatical problems such as wrong word usage and pronoun misuse.

There was too much internal monologue.  The decision to use only the female POV is challenging because the author has to convey the feelings of the hero fairly obviously while still maintaing a believable fiction of uncertainty of the heroine.  Napier is so much better at this than Wolf.   I settled on a D but frankly, I find this type of book troubling.

Best regards,

Jane

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As an aside, I did send a facebook message to the author asking if she had read the Napier book in question but have not received a response. I would send an email but there is no email address or contact form on her website.  Update:  Ms. Wolf did reply that she has never read In Bed with the Boss by Susan Napier before.

Dreamspinner Press had five shorts I was interested in this week, so I thought I’d do lightning reviews of them. And then I ended up ranting at the end of the reviews, ending up more like an Opinion Letter than anything else.

Russian Roulette by Alex Alder: Jacob teaches martial art fighting in…somewhere in [...]]]>

Dreamspinner Press had five shorts I was interested in this week, so I thought I’d do lightning reviews of them. And then I ended up ranting at the end of the reviews, ending up more like an Opinion Letter than anything else.

Russian Roulette by Alex Alder:
Jacob teaches martial art fighting in…somewhere in Texas. His new neighbor is worryingly reclusive, but then they finally meet and Jacob sees how gorgeous he is. They get together, go out a couple of times, have great sex, go out for three months, everything’s great. But because Nate still hasn’t let Jacob into his apartment, Jacob convinces himself that Nate is the Dallas Strangler, the local serial killer (who started in Dallas but is now wherever Jacob and Nate are). He reports him, the police raid the apartment (with Jacob in tow!), and Jacob realizes Nate is just an artist with genius but no self-confidence. Nate breaks up with him (no, really?!), but then the serial killers comes to get them.

This book was…strange. I was never emotionally connected to the characters. They seemed to be doing everything because the story needed them to, not because it was integral to their characters. And there was no relationship tension — they met, were attracted, got together, had sex, everything was great. Which is great in real life, but doesn’t make a good story. All the tension comes halfway through or more from Jacob’s ridiculous assumptions about Nate and Nate kicking him out afterwards (too right!). As a result, the sex was boring as hell (to me), and after Jacob’s betrayal, I didn’t really care whether they got back together. In fact, I thought Nate was right to kick Jacob to the curb and the fact that Nate took Jacob back because of the shared danger when the serial killer attached them both just made me think less of Nate’s self-preservation skills — maybe he should have been killed by the serial killer.

Grade: C-

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“New Tricks” by Kate Sherwood:
After I read this short, I did a bit of research, to find that this is a continuation of the relationship of previous characters. Aaron and Quinn are together, but Aaron was a virgin before they got together, so Quinn doesn’t really trust Aaron to know what he’s talking about when Aaron says that he loves Quinn. Quinn thinks that Aaron will eventually leave to sow his wild oats elsewhere, because he’s never had the opportunity to do that. This is a short little sex scene, in which Aaron takes complete control over Quinn. He ties him, blindfolds him, and effectively gags him so that when Aaron tells Quinn that he loves him, Quinn can’t qualify the statement and has to listen to Aaron, has to really hear what Aaron is saying.

It’s a cute little scene and works well as a stand-alone scene (I hadn’t read the original story). There’s an emotional component to the story, something that the characters need to overcome during or through the sex, an actual plot, with narrative tension, and deftly handled at that. I enjoyed it.

Grade: B-

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The Playwright by Carolyn LeVine Topol
Nick and Ken live together, gay playwrights writing successful plays for Broadway. Ken signs Nick up for The Male Room, an online dating website, because he’s worried that his friend (and they really ARE just friends) never gets out. Nick’s first hit on the website is Mark. Mark’s amazing. They hit it off immediately and fall in love.

So where’s the story? It’s manufactured whole cloth in the middle. Nick has an emotional crisis–literally between one line and the next, he does an about face on the relationship, feels it’s too emotionally risky, an about face that has no foreshadowing, no flicker of angst to warn of its coming. I had to read it three times to figure out what the hell was going on. But then THAT’S dealt with almost immediately and suddenly Nick has to worry about Mark’s job — he’s a hard-news investigative reporter who goes out chasing dangerous stories. But then that’s solved immediately…and you get the idea. I couldn’t tell the two main characters apart. There was nothing to distinguish them, neither of them had a personality to speak of, let alone any differences between them. (And they both had four-letter names, making it impossible.) The story was boring, the sex was forgettable, and the characters cardboard. Yuck.

Grade: D+

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And I gave it the D+ because it wasn’t as bad as the next one:

“Take a Dip” by Lacey Wallace
This one is really short, which is good, because it was really bad. Adam is 23 with a 7 year old daughter he takes to the pool at the weekend. He thinks he’s straight, but one of the lifeguards at the pool convinces him he’s not. The story’s full of emotionless, internal monologue info dumps about Adam’s life that are boring precisely because they’re emotionless:

He had become a teenage father at the age of sixteen; a girl named Cynthia was the mother. Although he didn’t want a kid, he had decided to do the responsible thing and be a real, involved father. Cynthia had brought their daughter to his house for an afternoon. Supposedly, he was only going to watch her for the day so she could look for work.

Cynthia never came back.

Adam later found out that she had moved away with her parents, leaving Denise with Adam. His parents had demanded he take the baby to an orphanage, but Adam refused. They threatened to kick him out of the house. Adam still refused, believing it was only a bluff. They followed through with the threat, leaving Denise and Adam homeless.

Luckily his aunt, who was estranged from the family, stepped in. Aunt Belinda was wonderful. She taught him how to care for Denise properly and baby-sat while Adam worked and finished his high school education, and then earned a B.A. in Business.

Like, really? Can we talk about the terror, the boredom, the resentment, the pain, the panic, the…whatever? That was just…awful. These are PEOPLE! In a ROMANCE NOVEL. Let’s talk about FEELINGS, please. Please? No…?

Anyway, we have to get it this background on Adam from infodumps because Mark the lifeguard isn’t interested in anything other than a quick fuck in the shower room. And that’s what they have, and that’s it, that’s the story. It’s bad writing with an attempt at character depth that just fails (Adam is angsty because he’s figuring out the gay thing, but really, despite having been a teen single father, he doesn’t feel anything deeply and his daughter isn’t even a plot moppet, she’s just a prop). And the sex is boring as hell except for the “ew, in the shower at a public pool, really?” aspect that I felt, not Adam. And there’s NO HEA or HFN. It’s pure stroke fiction and it’s not even really good for that.

Grade: D

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But! OMG, even THAT wasn’t as bad as…

The Godfather’s Lover by Ann T. Ryan
Chris grew up in an orphanage, we find out in a Prologue, and the only person who cared for him is a priest (not like THAT). The second Prologue shows us an 11 year old Jarod at his mother’s funeral, where, apparently, he finds out that A. she’s dead, and B. she committed suicide. Oh, and C. his father’s an asshole and a Mafia don (although not, like, Italian). Seems a promising start. We next find Jarod in the back alley of a club overseeing the execution of someone who betrayed him. Chris shows up and becomes a potential witness, so, to take care of him, Jarod fucks him through the wall. A month later, Jarod finally tracks his anonymous trick down, kicks out his own latest “kept man” (the cousin of a rival family), and starts keeping Chris. Who, we discover is actually an FBI Special Agent looking to take down Jarod because a mob turf war killed the priest. Right. Because FBI agents always get to work on cases their bosses know they’re emotionally connected with. They’re together for a YEAR, Chris never finds out anything worthwhile, he contacts his boss via EMAIL (oh REALLY?!), and he starts getting a conscience about betraying Jarod. In fact, he falls in love, quits his job, quits Jarod, and disappears to go teach math in, I’m not kidding, Saskatchewan. Where Jarod goes to get him. And everyone lives HEA. But back in LA, not in Canada.

And really, that’s all this story is: plot points. A happened, then B happened, then C and D and E. Oh, and someone might have felt something in there, but probably not. Chris does not angst about falling in love with a mob boss. Jarod does not angst about being a gay mob boss, nor does he worry about falling in love with his piece of ass. There’s no indication why these guys fall in love — we’re just told that they do — because, after all, there’s nothing to fall in love WITH. They have no personality. At all.

The prose feels like it’s written by a twelve year old or an ESL writer:

“Where is he?” Jarod asked into the phone, without preamble.

“I will get back to you, boss,” Mike replied.

Five minutes later, Jarod received a text message. Your boy is at Suede. His boy. Jarod liked the sound of that.

“Lee.”

“Yes, boss?”

“Drive me to Suede.”

“All right, boss.”

These guys talk like this ALL THE TIME. Very few contractions (“I will” especially, is NEVER “I’ll”), which is not how people talk. And the book is just full of this witty repartee.

And Chris feels bad about betraying Jarod:

Chrisd listened as Jarod spoke to him. Telling details that Chris had already committed to memory. Jarod wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. But the fact he was opening up made Chris feel guilty about the whole thing. Yes, Jarod was a mafia boss, with his fingers dipping in every illegal pie across the country and around the world. And yet, when he was with Chris, he was just Jarod. The hard walls Jarod put up outside would slowly crumble, revealing to Chris who Jarod Greene truly was, without the responsibility of a whole clan to take on. Chris felt bad, and that was a feeling that had eluded him in all of the cases he had handled. Somehow, Jarod had wormed himself into Chris’s heart, making the conscience Chris thought he had lost wake up.

Jarod’s a MOB BOSS. Who KILLS PEOPLE (although not personally anymore, so that’s okay). And CHRIS has the crisis of conscience?! Not ONCE does Jarod worry if he’s doing the right thing, wonder about what else he could do, have any sort of problem with his inherited position in life. Seriously, what have we come to in this world that an author could think that a man like this deserves the love of a good partner without serious emotional trauma on both their parts and some serious remorse and renegotiations of the mob boss’s life? CHRIS is the one who gives up his job at the end, not Jarod. Chris makes some half-assed protest at the end:

“I still don’t like your job description.”

“But you still like me?” Jarod smiled tentatively at Chris.

“Yeah, seems like I’m a sucker for a handsome man with grey eyes.”

Really?! You were an FBI agent and that’s all you’re gonna say? And really?! You’re an author and that’s the sum total of the consideration you’re gonna give to this issue, as if Jarod DESERVES an HEA?!

And! AND, guys, there was this scene when Jarod’s henchman was outside a cafe, watching Chris meet with his FBI boss (Chris is quitting, actually). Henchman recognizes FBI boss. Then POV goes to Chris, inside the cafe, who is ON THE PHONE with his boss. Then back out to henchman threatening FBI boss’s life in the cafe. SERIOUSLY?! No one noticed this issue?

Grade: F because this one seriously offended me, as well as being suck-ass writing.

Goodreads | Amazon | Dreamspinner Press

The Too Long; Didn’t Read (TL;DR) for the five stories: one was good, the others were awful. And good here isn’t anything unusual: I’m looking for a story that

• can string a sentence together
• can make characters sound real
• can make characters feel real and make me care about them
• can make characters act in consistent, character-worthy manner, rather than as puppets moved around by the plot without motivational rhyme or reason
• has an emotional conflict present throughout the book with an arc of its own
• has a plot conflict that the characters have to solve, that may or may not be the emotional conflict
• doesn’t have huge gaping plot holes, discrepancies, or flubs
• considers the emotional ramifications of character actions
• considers the moral ramifications of character actions (and yes, that last one is VERY important when dealing with issues like FBI agents falling in love with mob bosses)
• has non-boring sex, which means has sex that MEANS something to the characters, that overcomes something in them, that has some affect on them.

Seriously, writers, it’s not enough to tell us that characters do things. It’s not enough to have a cool hook, a really neat “what-if” to write about. The characters have to FEEL something. They have to have reasons for doing things. They have to be REAL, with faults and foibles and fucked-up motivations that they angst over and that make them act in certain logical ways for logical reasons that are explored. It’s ROMANCE, ffs. It’s all ABOUT the emotions. And if the characters go off the rails, they have to worry about why and how and what it all means. Romance does NOT mean cool “What If?” scenarios without considering the character ramifications. Neither is it Tab A and Slot B. Even good stroke fiction has to have the characters overcoming something emotional in order to have (or even while they have) the hot sex that gets the reader off. It’s precisely the emotional struggle that’s the arousing part.

And publishers, I guess you can publish whatever the writers write, and the writers can write whatever the hell they want, but readers don’t have to like it. In fact, we can despise it. And *I* despise it NOT because it arouses strong feelings in me, but precisely the opposite. I despise it because it’s sloppy and lazy and boring as fuck. (Except the Sherwood, who I have read before, apparently, and liked.)

If I didn’t take chances on authors I hadn’t read before, I’d never have found Heidi Cullinan (at Dreamspinner, btw) or Alex Beecroft or K.A. Mitchell or A.M. Riley or any of the other brilliant authors out there who I adore, or even the ones I enjoy whose books have issues now and then, good books and not so good books, but who at least TRY to write stories about real characters with real feelings and real dilemmas that actually have a narrative arc, angst, and resolution that actually means something. But this right here is why I don’t take that chance more often. These stories were insulting.

I’m off to read Cullinan’s latest again (for review) to cleanse my palette because I just can’t take anymore awful, boring, insulting stories for a while.

January’s review kicked off quite a discussion here and around the web about this book.  I found the review persuasive, but as the arguments dragged on and became increasingly vituperative, I decided I would have to read it for myself in order to render an informed verdict. So I did. But I am [...]]]> Dear Readers,

January’s review kicked off quite a discussion here and around the web about this book.  I found the review persuasive, but as the arguments dragged on and became increasingly vituperative, I decided I would have to read it for myself in order to render an informed verdict. So I did. But I am not an expert on medieval history or Arthurian legends, so I recruited Dhympna to join me in reviewing the book. We’re calling this a Dual Review because we converge to the same grades even though we focus on different issues.

Dhympna:  When I first encountered Spoil of War, I was curious about a book that could arouse so much ire in not just the reviewer, but also her readership. This book also engendered some fierce knight–errants. Out of curiosity, I looked up information about the book and often, when discussing this book, the author touted her degrees, careful research, and a tenuous connection to Marion Zimmer Bradley.  Lately, she has lamented that the Dear Author readership wanted her work to be anachronistic and employ some sort of self-empowered feminist historical revision.  I seek neither to revise history nor to promote anachronistic visions of history.

I am a medieval historian. I am also a lover of old bodice rippers, dark historical fantasy, dark fantasy, and historical fiction in general. So, not only did this book tweak my professional interest, but it also tugged at my book interests.  I also often like books that the Dear Author reviewers have panned or given an F to, so when Sunita asked me to do this review, I agreed.

I am going to look at the book from three perspectives—as a work of historical fiction, as a historical fantasy, and as a historical romance.  Now, before you get your knickers in a twist and tell me that I should not be checking historicism (or what some of you call historical accuracy) because it is fiction, please remember that the author has set herself up as an authoritative source and has stated in her product description that some of the unsavoury events are in keeping with the era in question.

Spoil of War as historical fiction:

The one objective question to ask in this review is: how in keeping with history is this book is (i.e. how strong is its historicism)? It is hard to not write a textbook about how insulting this book is. It reads like a freshman final exam in which the student, who has not studied, has included everything she knows about the Middle Ages in the hope of sounding smart and earning a passing grade. Indeed, if this were an exam on the early Middle Ages (only someone who knows nothing substantive about the history of the era calls it the “Dark Ages”), this student would fail.

When I first read the description of the book, I guessed that it was set in the late 5^th/early 6^th centuries. Later evidence, however, indicated that the book was set in the early 5^th century. The female protagonist is described as a Briton or a Celt (you hear about the “Old Blood” all too often) and the male protag is a king who grew up in Genoa and has Roman blood (this is never explained and I was not sure what was meant by this). There seems to be a lack of understanding about the different Germanic tribes that were present in England in this time period.

I pinpointed the era from this quote:

“From my Emperor, Theodosius, aye. From my uncle, Ryan, too, if the cause were favorable. From His Eminence Celestine, certainly, if the pope were to command it.” (p. 231, all references are to the nookbook version).

Theodosius II was the Eastern emperor from 408-450. Celestine I was pope from 422-432. So, from this we can gather the events taking place are during the decade in which Celestine was pope.

All the errors made me wonder if the author just pulled in every medieval factoid she found (keeping in mind that the Middle Ages span over one thousand years), but I will limit myself to some of the highlights.

•  Oh, the difference one letter makes. Where Rian may be perfectly acceptable and I would say that name is okay, Ryan is totally a 20^th century name. I googled it and (given the author’s comment on the Dear Author review) it seems the author considers a questionable baby name website as authoritative. By the way, Oxford actually publishes a dictionary for first names.

• In the opening of the book Elsbeth welcomes her father home and is asked by a scullion maid if they are to have a welcome feast. El responds:

“No feast. Steak and squash and bread will suffice. “

• The problem is that squash comes from the New World. Steak is just possible, but roast would be a better word. Steak is from a Norse word and Elsbeth’s family is from a different Germanic language group, not to mention that according to the OED, “steak,” as the author is using it, is from the 16^th century (the Norse version means meat on a stick).

• The idea of Britain as some sort of nascent nation that needs to be united and Leo and El’s constant discussions about Leo uniting Britain. Um. No. There was quite a bit of regionalism in Britain at this time and most of the rhetoric about kings uniting Britain came from later eras. For instance, a writer in the 15^th century may try to label someone the first great British King. Indeed, Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain is guilty of this when he, for reasons of propaganda for his monastery, turns Arthur into the first great Christian king. We see this impetus again in the 19^th century as historians looking for progress look for a clear progenitor. For more information on this tendency, see Patrick Geary, Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe.

• Many people take for granted that theology is an ongoing process and things like Purgatory and Hell need to be created. I doubt very much that Elsbeth would be ruminating on the “Harrowing of Hell,” since it is a concept that first appears in the 8^th century in didactic art and pastoral texts. Nor would she wish Leo would find himself in the ninth circle of hell, because Dante won’t write the Inferno until the 14^th century.

• I found it odd that Elsbeth and Lynette often talked about sexual sin and other aspects of theology but never said boo about the sin of suicide. The era of the great martyrs had just ended, so the Christian populace would know all about that fine line between the virtue of martyrdom and the sin of suicide.

• El also begs God and does a “Hail Mary,” but the confession and penitential structure is not in wide use until the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (this is when everyone is required to go to confession).  Mariology is also not popular until the 10^th century. Evidence for “Hail Mary” as a devotional practice does not exist until the 10th and early 11^th centuries. And Marianism is adopted differently in different regions.

• Why is a Briton/Celt praying to Norse deities, especially ones for which we only have textual evidence in the 8^th century?  Now, I get that it is hard to keep all those pesky little Germanic tribes straight, but the Britons/Celts did have their own pantheon(s), and we have information about them. The author seems to think that Celt=Norse or Germanic tribe=Norse, which is not the case.

• Finally, I had a good chuckle when Gareth talked about the longboats coming down the waterways to raid (he says, “I hear there are barbarian invaders to the north who ride about in longships attacking villages as they go.” p. 74). The Norse actually don’t start raiding the Anglo-Saxons regularly until the 700s. While it is probable that some Norsemen moved around in the 5^th century, there seems to be confusion between this era, known as one of the greatest eras of people moving about (the Great Migration Era), and the height of Viking culture as the author is using it. It is dangerous and insulting to conflate differing Germanic groups, Celt, Druid, and Norse theologies. Syncretism did exist, but not like this.

• Castles like the ones described in this book are purely out of the 12^th century. Now, I get that this is an easy mistake to make since most of the well-known Arthurian legends come from this era or later and Camelot is often described as a kingdom out of the High Middle Ages, but still.  Elsbeth’s father would have lived in a long hall and Elsbeth probably wouldn’t have had her own room.

Now, remember that quote I started with? The one where Celestine is pope?  Towards the end of the book, Leo says:

“Pope and Rome have given their consent. Emperor Theodosius put his seal to it at Michaelmas and Constantine blessed it the day after the Feast of St. Luke.” (p. 717, my emphasis)

Normally, in a case like Leo’s, he may seek papal dispensation for his marriage (actually it is more common in the High Middle Ages, but since the author is disregarding what era her characters are in, well…in the 5^th century, I am not sure the Pope or the Eastern Emperor care).  Notice that the pope changed?  The problem is that Constantine I was pope in the late 7^thand early 8^th centuries.

—Grade F 

Spoil of War as historical fantasy:

This book focuses primarily on Elsbeth and her constant wanking over how she feels for Leo. It contains few political machinations and if it had been labeled as such, I would have felt compelled to write a letter of complaint and request my money back because the book is heavily structured as a historical romance.  I felt the “Arthurian Legend” bits were used as window dressing for the angsty wank between Leo and El. Get rid of Uther and Cameliard and the story really has nothing to do with Arthurian legend. I was also confused to comparisons that author made between her work and Mists of Avalon—I just don’t see how they are comparable.

—Grade F

Spoil of War as historical romance:

This is the genre that Spoil fits the best.  It really appears to be a formulaic late 80s/early 90s diet bodice ripper. I say diet because it lacks colour and any sense of the vibrant effervescence that is characteristic of books from that era. El was boring, her internal whining was tiresome, and the continual “big misunderstandings” that kept her and Leo from an ongoing, frenzied bonk-fest (because when they weren’t fighting they were having very boring, very vanilla vaginal sex) threatened to turn me into a drooling narcoleptic. Seriously, the “love” scenes between Leo and El were a steady diet of lackluster “insert tab A into slot B.” If you are going to have your characters going at it like rabbits in early spring—well, rabbits in any season really—then at least shake it up and include some variety. Different locations do not count.

—Grade D-

Overall:

I was very disappointed with this book. From the disjointed, choppy writing style where the author uses faulty descriptions (smoke as thick as cheesecloth?), to the poor use of language—I felt like I was reading an essay where the author desperately wished to convey how smart she was, which meant that not only did the descriptions fail but I was left sincerely wondering about the author’s voice.  I was expecting a dark look into the baser, dank recesses of the human nature, but instead of teeth and grit, I got an old man who forgot his dentures and was gumming on my finger. This book promised a dark and gritty story and it failed to deliver.

And what was up with BDSM Uther? It would have been nice to have seen the political complexities of The Pendragon, crafted into someone who oozed evil (if you wish to go that route), rather than turning him into a comical 8-bit villain. It was all too predictable.

[Note 1: For the purpose of this review, I am defining the Early Middle Ages as 400-1000, High Middle Ages 1000-1315, and Late Middle Ages as 1315-1500. There is much debate among medievalists about how to chronologically define these eras, since eras tend to be cultural constructions that are applied by later generations.]

[Note 2: There are many other examples of word mis-usage and historical mistakes, but to list them all would have made the review even longer. These examples, as well as the primary and secondary sources used in the analysis, are discussed here.]

Sunita: Needless to say, I was prepared for the drumbeat of rape, violence, rape, violence, war, war, rape, violence. What I didn’t expect, given the rape/violence/war emphasis, was that the story would be so. damn. boring. Yes, boring. Even rape, violence and war are dull when the reader is forced to see them through the Elsbeth, the narrator’s, perspective. This is because Elsbeth is an annoying, tedious, immature heroine.

Elsbeth clearly sees herself as an intelligent woman, because she has long conversations with King Leo, the putative hero of the story, about the place of women in her society, how Leo’s Roman society treats women, the prevalence of war, her misery at being a captive, etc. etc. etc. When Leo isn’t around, she talks to anyone else she can find and conducts internal monologues on the same topics. But Elsbeth is one of those unfortunate people who is not nearly as smart as she thinks she is, and as a result these passages read a bit like bad high school history lectures:

Only now did it occur to her that Leo’s victory over her father had had an effect far more insinuating than she had let herself first believe, reaching into generations yet unborn, generations not yet dreamt of. Would even the child of Ruth’s child still be gnashing its teeth in anguish over Leo’s conquest? Or would the world by then have moved on, leaving some history-shaped thing abandoned on the wind-swept moors to bother one no more? Minoa had blossomed for a time, then Egypt and Greece, and no one mourned their passing save for philosophers looking for a Golden Age that had never been and now would never be. Heroes fallen, dynasties tumbled, whole peoples crushed or absorbed into the vast world scheme as the Norns kept spinning fate and weaving life and death out of the very fabric of existence.

This has nothing to do with the story, it just serves to try and convince us that Elsbeth is intelligent and well-read (how she would have come by this knowledge is its own mystery). It would be more effective if we were shown these attributes through Elsbeth’s actions. Alas, we more frequently read musings like this:

The idea of lying with the man who had warred upon her father reviled [sic] her, though reason and logic had softened her repugnance some. War, she reminded herself, was an inevitable part of life.

War may be an inevitable part of life, but getting the hots for the man who killed your beloved father and burned down your home is not. Why is she debating whether or not to lie with Leo when she succumbed to his overwhelming hotness the day after he conquered Olmsbury, when she felt “peculiar sensations through her abdomen and loins?” And a few days later she has similar sensations at Cameliard:

She was trembling again, but this time it was not from shame nor anger nor hatred. Here before the queen, before a hall full of nobility, she suddenly felt a warmth, a tensing in her loins.

There has been considerable debate about whether this book should be classified as historical fiction or historical romance, but I honestly don’t see how it could be categorized as anything but romance. I don’t know of any historical fiction written in third person POV that spends the entire book in the female protagonist’s head; not Penman, not Dunnett, not Heyer’s medievals, not Chadwick, not Pargeter. And historical fiction generally has, you know, stuff happening. In this book, exciting events occur off-page, but we don’t experience them because Elsbeth doesn’t. Almost everything we see is something that happens to Elsbeth, and that’s mostly sitting around, talking to people, having sex with Leo, or getting raped by not-Leo. Toward the end of the book Elsbeth stupidly gets caught in a big battle, but unfortunately she does not die, she just gets captured and raped again (with some gratuitous BDSM-as-perversion scenes to add insult to the tedium).

And yet, despite the utter banality of most of her thoughts and conversations, Elsbeth is seen by everyone in the book as beautiful, intelligent, brave, knowledgeable, articulate, and irresistible, essentially embodying a Mary-Sue level of perfection. Even Patrise the Welsh villain, who supposedly hates her because she sees through his ruses, was smitten from the first:

She’s a prize to turn any man’s eye. How could I resist?

Of course, Leo is the most smitten of them all. A man who loses his intelligence, sense, and backbone when he’s in the presence of the heroine may be some readers’ idea of the perfect hero, but I prefer my ideal man to have a working brain that lives north of his navel.

–Grade D- 

Sunita

Goodreads | Amazon | nook | Smashwords

I don’t try and hide the fact that when I read (yet another) romance book title that features the word “scandal” or “shocking” or “Duke” or “Mistress,” the chances of me reading it drop a notch. I’m so damn sick of these interchangeable titles I could scream. For that reason alone, when [...]]]> Dear Ms. Pauli,

I don’t try and hide the fact that when I read (yet another) romance book title that features the word “scandal” or “shocking” or “Duke” or “Mistress,” the chances of me reading it drop a notch. I’m so damn sick of these interchangeable titles I could scream. For that reason alone, when you offered us your book, “Space Slugs” to review, I decided if the excerpt was halfway decent I’d give it a try. It was and I did but unfortunately, many things about the book left me wanting.

Dr. Murray Livingston is answering yet another distress message from her wayward, space hopping sister Zora who’s gone and gotten engaged again. After a trip to try her patience, Murray arrives to find herself being thrown in a jail cell with Zora to await the wedding. Free spirited Zora is apparently having second thoughts about the groom and counted on Murray to bail her out of another self inflicted mess. Murray throws her hands up in disgust then notices that the ashtray Zora is using is actually a skull – well an android skull. After Murray puts the parts back together, Rook proceeds to break them out and lead them towards freedom. Only Zora insists on snagging at least one present on the way out which turns out to be a pink space slug named Neela.

With the rapidly growing Neela on board with them, the three blast off the planet only to crash land on yet another one which leads them to all kinds of adventures on that planet and two more. Will Zora keep from getting them into more trouble? Will Murray and Rook sort out their feelings? And will Neela find slug love?

I read the beginning of the book as a sort of tongue-in-cheek, humorous adventure. Murray and Zora trade zingers, the slug is cute and I was curious about Rook. But as I kept reading, I started getting annoyed.

The entire book is told from Murray’s point of view and after a while, Murray got on my nerves. I don’t mind a flawed heroine but Murray is judgmental and quick to jump to conclusions until the very end. She can also be a real bitch at times yet totally clueless at others. I got the point that she’s had to put up with Zora’s wild hijinks for years and is tired of them but still I wanted to smack Murray several times. And the romance going on between Murray and Rook…well, without his POV I just didn’t see what they saw in each other besides the fact that you told me they saw something in each other.

Okay so the romance didn’t work well for me which leaves the SF stuff. Which also didn’t work well for me. The book is named after a gastropod who ends up growing to gargantuan size but there’s actually very little slug facetime. And most of her appearances, and those of the male who shows up later, are described in terms of the amount of slug slime present in them. This got old. There’s also very little information about the slugs. I understand that they’re rare, the last of their kind but never found out why. Or why she bonded with Zora. Or how she grows so quickly. Or why Neela wasn’t initially enamored with her new boyfriend. Or why on she later was. Why, why, why?

For that matter, the entire world building here is sketchy at best. I hate info dumps but a little – no, make that a lot – more information would have been very helpful. Instead I got just enough to confuse me and not much else before the plot spun off in yet another new direction. It seemed to jump from event to event and then just as quickly abandon those for something else.

When I finished the story I was left with a ton of questions but no answers. Why was Rook on the first planet and disassembled? Who is the Emperor and what’s the deal with the clones? Why is android love sneered at? What happened to the zoo and the animals? What about all the slug questions mentioned above? Who’s the father of Zora’s baby? And I’m almost totally in the dark about Rook’s planet. Given how many questions I ended up with, the fact that the romance is skimmed over, and the SF is patchy, I really can’t recommend the for any reason. D

~Jayne

Goodreads | Amazon | nook

Dear Ms. Miller,

I decided to pick up your book because it sounded cool and slightly different from other things in the Vampire/Shifter paranormal genre and I’m a sucker for cool and different. Slade is a [...]]]> There are possibly spoilers in this review. I have done my level best to avoid them. Apologies in advance.

Dear Ms. Miller,

I decided to pick up your book because it sounded cool and slightly different from other things in the Vampire/Shifter paranormal genre and I’m a sucker for cool and different. Slade is a Therian (shapeshifter) assassin that is sent to infiltrate a local Vampire group. His mentor, Dylan, is gorgeous and he knows he should hate her on sight, but he just can’t. Dylan mentors new vampires and teaches them the rules of the vampire world. But that’s only one of her many jobs. Dylan runs ReVamp, a blood center and sort of Vampire “Promises” treatment center aimed at getting vampires to give up biting humans. But Dylan’s been accused of poisoning the vampire’s blood supply. I like a star-crossed love story, especially one of paranormal ilk. Unfortunately, this didn’t pan out the way I’d hoped when I read the blurb.

Intervamption takes place in Crimson Bay, a fictitious part of San Francisco, and sets the stage for what seems to be the beginnings of a war between the Vampires and the Therians. The two species have hated each other for years, and Therians are tasked with keeping Vampires from getting out of line (read: no feeding on humans or the Therians will kill you). How did this come about? Beats me. Are the Therians actually stronger than the Vampires? Couldn’t tell ya that either. Also, for some reason, the Vampire population seemed less concerned about the Therian threat than vice-versa. Why? Again, no idea here. Humans (referred to as “mundanes” in the book) are generally clueless about both of these otherworldly species and the Therians and Vamps plan to keep it that way.

I felt like a mundane too…with every chapter there was some new, nonsensical rule or idea imparted in a very non-organic manner. I am making a major effort not to give anything away for anyone that want to give this a try, but this is a huge issue that didn’t make sense at all, unless the reader is willing to make some crazy assumptions. Slade has been told by Moses, his Sheik (or Therian leader, for those of you that hate to read definitions as much as I do), that he will shift into a Vampire and infiltrate the local khiss. And then there’s this:

Vampires had incompatible genes, different from any other living organism, which made shifting into them nearly impossible. Those who could fight through the delirium barely made it a few minutes in leech skin. It was a pain in the ass. Slow-motion shifting, wicked bouts of nausea, and sub-par strength made them easy prey for a leech who got wind of such a deception. Not to mention shifting into those parasites never lasted long. Therians who tried it in the past had shifted back to their original form without so much as a gut-clench warning.

Well. If that isn’t a recepie for disaster…but hey. It’s a paranormal. Worldbuilding rules were made to be broken, right? Er…not. Does any of this weakness/sudden shifting/only a few minutes as a vampire happen to Slade? Absolutely not. Oh, and Slade doesn’t know who his target is when he goes in. Somehow, they’re going to set up a newbie vampire with the high ranking officials and he’ll have all sorts of power. Now, trust me, this isn’t a spoiler: Slade isn’t given a high ranking. In fact, the only reason he has any interaction with the “high ranking” set is because Dylan keeps him around ’cause he’s hot. But does Slade find any of this odd? Nope…he goes on his merry way trailing after Dylan and occasionally pounding his chest if another guy gets too close to her.

Dylan is totally mission-focused. She needs to find out why the vampires are weakening and must find a way to strengthen their blood supply. Her gorgeous blond buddy Ruan sorta tries to help her but not really…hell, I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. But Dylan somehow gets sidetracked without anyone’s help because of all of the other crap she’s made herself responsible for. She’s going in so many different directions that I was getting dizzy. But with all of her running around, this is all I got about new vampires: They didn’t know any better. Ok…but how does one become a “new” vampire? Yeah, I know, at least one of your parents has vampire blood. But then what? How does one make the transition? Do they even call it that? What happens? I get that you’re hungry for blood and starved for sex after (hell, that’s a given regardless of the book!) but getting to that point is a giant blank. Now, is that something I need to know? No. But there are holes like this one all over the book. This happened it the beginning, so I’m running with it.

You’re probably wondering why I haven’t talked about Dylan or Slade much. Well, let me put it this way: tropetastic. It was hard for me to get into the characters when so much was going on that I didn’t understand. I was busy trying to fill in the gaps, and the personalities seemed to be overshadowed by a bunch of tropes. Dylan has a goal. The goal must be met. Slade has a goal. Same goes. Dylan is promised to someone in an arranged marriage she can’t get out of. But hey, the way the vampire marriage works, if the guy isn’t really meant for the girl, she dies. But Slade *knows* Dylan is his! Can you say fated mate? And his blood pressure goes up every time another male is in the same vicinity as her. Rar, Alpha Male. Slade knows it would never work with him and Dylan because of the whole therians want to kill vampires thing. Star-crossed lovers! Oh, and Ruan is in love with Dylan too. Ooh, love triangle! There’s the double cross, the fucked up family, the other fated mate, the hidden secret, a serious deus ex machina…I could keep going but I’ll stop here.

And the worst part? The vampires and therians were as clueless about each other as I was about them. How does that happen? You really have no idea that your enemy is so well organized and has a functioning society after hundreds of years of fighting each other? Are you kidding? I got tired trying to make sense of everything that was happening here. D.

~ Shuzluva

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The first half of this book detailed a setup that I found pretty incredible, so much so that I set the book aside and didn’t finish it for 2 months. The latter half of the story worked far better, but only in isolation. Together, neither the romance nor the worldbuilding held up.

Zoe Nickles loves the small-town atmosphere, the [...]]]>

“Three months have passed since Steve Compton’s last visit to Crystal Falls. Now he’s back, but far from pleased about it. Convinced there is more in the air than clean living, he’s a journalist on the hunt for a story that’ll launch his career into the stratosphere.

Zoe Nickles loves the small-town atmosphere, the people, and most especially the great hiding places in Crystal Falls. She’s heard rumors about the magical aura in the tiny town, and when her powers come to fruition one June night, she knows the whispers are true. She’s the Tooth Fairy–with a sexy new look!

But there’s a problem: a nosy reporter is on Zoe’s trail, with just enough street smarts and cynicism to thwart her ability to practice her newfound skills. Can she convince him Cristal Falls is harmless before he tells the world about the town’s “unique” quality, or will Steve blab the news, putting Zoe and all the paranormal residents at risk?”

Dear Ms. Sookoo,

Okay I’ll start this out with something that is directed more at the publisher than you. This is the second book I’ve reviewed from Lyical Press that the blurb has mistakes in it (note how the name of the town is spelled two different ways). Readers notice these things and from the comments posted to “Green’s Fees,” they don’t like it.

On to my thoughts on “Midsummer’s Night Steve.” This is a novella in which the idea and blurb of it entertained me more than the book. Novellas are tricky things – sometimes they work beautifully for me as did the first work of yours I read, “The Eighth Night,” and sometimes they don’t. In this case, it didn’t. This is a part of a series and I felt like I got dropped right in the middle of it. You include some information about what went on in a previous novella that has Steve in it but I still felt somewhat lost.

Crystal Falls is a strange little town. Steve’s earlier public pronouncement that he’d seen a leprechaun there didn’t bring all the fruits and nuts rushing to this town. Really? With all the kooks people willing to believe in the strange and unusual in the US not even the National Enquirer arrived? I also wasn’t sure just how much all the townspeople know about the Institute of Magic. Some seem in the know and others clueless but then perhaps they were being coy around Steve.

Zoe is a happy soul who Believes! and has since she was a child. She’s also always been attracted to all things dental so her being the Tooth Fairy makes sense. But is she just local in a chain of Inter/National branch offices or is she The Only One? It’s not made clear in story but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for her to go solo if she’s keeping her day job. And while the outfit she’s given to wear would be an adult’s wet dream, I have my doubts if it’s appropriate garb for any young child, who just happens to wake up while Zoe is collecting their tooth, to see. Okay, I know I’m throwing cold water on the hawt of the story but she is supposed to be the Tooth Fairy and the Tooth Fairy’s main job description revolves around the kinder set.

More about my problems with the paranormal stuff. Zoe unexpectedly gets her magic and a paltry set of instructions – kind of like Japanese stereo instructions with some info missing or abbreviated. It’s “Oh So Secret” but come on, the Institute should have at least given her a phone call to help a sistah out. She then immediately screws up and breaks two of the rules which should have gotten her wings revoked but no, she traipses around at dusk Revealing All with none of the consequences that were threatened.

So Steve – our intrepid reporter – sees Zoe flying in her sexy get up and realizes he’s got his big story. Then with contradictory statements, Zoe tries to obfuscate things. Well, she confuses me. She’s supposed to keep everything hush hush but ends up literally chasing after Steve trying to convince him she’s the Tooth Fairy. So much for keeping things under wraps or facing the loss of her magic

Zoe knows Steve is after a story but does she take precautions on her next nightly run? Nope. She flies straight out her bedroom window giving Steve a great photo op. Zoe how smart are you? Then when she discovers him trailing her she first gets mad and wants to know why he’s there. What? Then she agrees to go live on camera and tell the world her story. Huh? For love? For all the misunderstood people in the world – I’m not quite sure only she changes her mind. And then backs off.

Steve’s pissed off because he’s lost his job – why he doesn’t apply at the National Enquirer (who ought to have sent a reporter there anyway) I’m not sure. But I’m not truly convinced he’s anything but upset about his job until suddenly! he’s in love. ?? So, to lose the residual baby tooth he’s got, does he go to Zoe in the dental office? Why no! He gets a biker to punch his face. Then, bleeding profusely, he goes to the office where Zoe realizes he loves her, gets him in the dental chair and proceeds to do the hootchie scoot on his lap before finally kissing the pain away after which they rattle the dental equipment.

Like I said, I think this is a cute idea but the execution of it didn’t work for me. There were too many loose ends and niggles for me to just ease into the slipstream of the fantasy and once that happened, the magic of it was gone for me. Zoe is confused about what she wants and Steve spends most of the time acting like a self involved twit. In the end, I’m not totally convinced of their feelings beyond some hot sex and lusting. D

~Jayne

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I choose this book because I like romantic suspense stories  with former special forces heroes (and heroines), I liked Hard to Hold, the first in your previous series, and this story featured a sister and BFF of an older brother romance.  The blurb alerted me to the fact that there was a [...]]]> Dear Ms. Tyler:

I choose this book because I like romantic suspense stories  with former special forces heroes (and heroines), I liked Hard to Hold, the first in your previous series, and this story featured a sister and BFF of an older brother romance.  The blurb alerted me to the fact that there was a supernatural element in the story and while that’s not a favorite trope of mine, I decided to wait and see.  Of all the things that bothered me about the book, the supernatural element was not one of them.

Mace Stevens is a Delta Force operative who also runs a bar in upstate New York when he isn’t off saving the world.  (I found this to be implausible, but what do I know).  Mace’s crew was captured and tortured and one of its members, Gray, was killed.  His body is shipped back to his family where he is mourned by his father and stepsister, Paige Grayson.

Paige has a special ability that allows her to see a person’s thoughts, memories and emotions by touching them with her hands.  So of course, she goes into nursing because if one is haunted by one’s ability, you choose something that puts you in near constant contact with people who are in pain and suffering, correct?  But an incident at the hospital brings Paige unwanted publicity and the local newsrooms dig out her story of being the sister of a boy who shot up his high school and killed several classmates.  Paige has suffered from this ever since because she knew her brother, Jeffrey, was bad. She could sense it every time she touched him.  Jeffrey was in the psychiatric ward of a maximum state prison, but he’s still haunting her.

Paige decides to quit her job and seek out Mace to find out what really happened to her brother.  There are two competing stories going on in this book.  The first is a continuation of a previous storyline involving Mace Stevens’ Delta Force team that was captured and tortured.  One of the members is dead and another has amnesia.  Caleb can’t remember what happened to him and the implication is that he may have killed Gray.  Throughout the story, Caleb is interchanged with Cael.  I thought that this was an editing error because it just made no sense at all.  I was told later that it was a nickname.  Not once in the book, however, was it mentioned that Cael was a nickname for Caleb and why wouldn’t it be Cale v. Cael.  This was actually a big deal to me because I constantly was wondering if there was another person in the room.

But Mace’s were just beginning. He’d had the feeling in his gut all day, couldn’t shake it, had snapped at Caleb for no reason and now Keagen, the other bartender, was also giving him a wide berth.

Cael, not so much. He was used to Mace’s moods—even with Caleb’s memory loss, he seemed to understand instinctively that his friend was, and always had been, a moody bastard.

and

He didn’t wait for a response before he left, which was good, since Mace had frozen at Cael’s words, was still staring where the man had been standing, although Caleb was already long gone.

and

Caleb had been drugged simply by luck of the genetic draw. Reid had been down for the count and the three of them that were left—himself, Gray and Cael—were equally capable, but Caleb was broader, definitely the biggest of the men, and DMH had figured they needed brawn.

There just didn’t seem any rhyme or reason as to when they called him Cael or Caleb.  I think the constant switching between Caleb and Cale confused me because some of the writing was rough and I would spend a long time puzzling over the meaning of a sentence rather than being engrossed in the story.

Mace needed to keep busy—goddamned, mindnumbingly busy—contemplated going for a ride on the ATV, until the liquor truck came skidding up the road, toward the bar.

“You’re not okay, Mace, so don’t try to pretend with me,” she said simply.  Not unkindly, and it was all he could do not to tie her to his bed and not keep there until neither of them could see or walk.

But how am I supposed to pick it all apart?  How am I supposed to tell the difference between the men he’d been ordered to kill in the line of duty and the man he’s not?

When he pulled her hips out and spread her legs, she gripped the sides of the sink, harder than before.  When he sank his tongue deep inside of her, she felt as if she could rip it off the wall.

The second part of the story is the suspense plot in which random bad things are happening to Paige that can be traced back to her brother, Jeffrey.  Jeffrey is just a stock crazy, icky villain.  There is nothing in his past that made him bad and there is no exploration of the childhood that Paige and Jeffrey shared to see why one kid turned out wonderful (and gifted) and the other didn’t.  Given that Paige had a supernatural gift, it seemed odd that this was not explored.

The emotional arc of the characters seemed to go from A to Z with no discernable path in the middle.  For much of the first part of the book, Mace and Paige are at odds and then suddenly, they give in to their passion and start copulating.  I guess I was supposed to find that the lust was too great for them to overcome but why at the particular time? Why not when she first comes to find Mace?  When does Mace go from the solitary independent man to not being able to breath without being physically attached to Paige and vice versa?

Paige’s gift is inconsistent, although no reason is given for this. The inconsistency is convenient, sometimes she can see whole swaths of a person’s past, but when it comes to Caleb/Cael, she only gets feelings but later she’s able to watch nearly every memory of Mace’s, practically experiencing his entire life through her hands.

Finally, I was frustrated when all  these random guys began showing up. I kept wondering a) why are they here and b) more importantly, where the heck are they all going to sleep?  How do they all fit into that tiny house? I felt like it was such an obvious ploy to say “see, look how many sexy guys I will write about in the future” but I wasn’t intrigued but irritated.  It’s possible that part of my problem had to do with jumping into a series at midpoint but you can’t blame everything on that.  D

Best regards,

Jane

P.S. I know that the commenters will say “where is the editor or copyeditor” but one thing I learned from publishing folks is that if an author is very late with her work or if she is not a very clean writer in the first place, these things are not always in control of the editor or copyeditor. I don’t know who is to blame, I only know that it was distracting.

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