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| 1925750566
| 9781925750560
| 1925750566
| 3.61
| 2,295
| unknown
| Jul 01, 2019
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did not like it
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At home with a new baby, I'm in need of lighter, fun books these days and everything about the premise of this one indicated it would be a great fit f
At home with a new baby, I'm in need of lighter, fun books these days and everything about the premise of this one indicated it would be a great fit for me. The protagonist's name is Bae, a name I loved and wanted to give my baby, and it's about a passion for books and reading and sharing those things with others. Sadly, the novel did not deliver on its premise. Bae Babbage is 29 going on 30 (or perhaps 29 going on 14?) and a bit of a follower. Her best friend Cassandra is a dominating, judgemental type whose marriage, barely five minutes old, is destroyed when Bae reveals to the groom that Cassandra slept with a waiter on her hen's night. With Cass no longer speaking to her Bae leaves Perth for a new beginning in Melbourne, finding herself in a crappy marketing/advertising job (the two blur together) and whose only 'friends' are a woman, Martha, whom she talks to in the ladies' toilets but has never met or even seen, and the barista at the nearby cafe, Dino, who doesn't even seem to like her very much but who writes quotes around her takeaway coffee cup. Then Bae discovers and buys a second-hand book full of annotations and she soon becomes obsessed by the idea that she can find and meet the mystery author of these scribbles. As she pursues flimsy clues she meets and falls into a relationship with Zach, is fired from her job, creates and hosts a new book sharing event with the help of Dino and Bae's Instagram Influencer sister, Lizzie (second runner-up on the Bachelor and doesn't let anyone forget it), and eventually establishes her own marketing business. But Zach isn't who he seems, Dino's hiding something, Lizzie keeps trying to turn her event into a dating one, and the hunt for the mystery scribbler puts Bae into hospital. But Bae is nothing if not determined! My biggest complaint with this novel is the writing. It's poor. Being an author requires more than stringing a grammatically correct sentence together. To be truly good, you need style, a voice or tone, you need to understand structure and the timely placing of clues and information that both allows your reader to stay engaged by letting them figure things out, and prevents them becoming lost. I don't know how two people write a cohesive novel together, I really don't, it's not something I'd ever want to collaborate on, and I certainly couldn't tell when one of the two authors was writing or the other. But it read like a hobby, and a lazy one at that. It read like two people having fun putting together a story that really shouldn't have been published - at least, not without some serious editing. Too many niggling gaps, like when Dino kisses Bae and Bae does the whole "let's pretend this never happened" dance because she's thinking about Sunday, the woman who was only ever described as Dino's "silent business partner" (she's the cook at the cafe). This completely threw me, there had never been the slightest sign that a) Dino and Sunday were a couple or b) that Bae thought they were, prior to the kiss. Such inconsistencies are jarring, confusing and frustrating. These inconsistencies are one of the reasons why the novel as a whole felt rushed, sloppy and far from being a 'labour of love' that had undergone revisions and careful editing. The story is also much too predictable, with too many deus ex machina moments (well, one would be more than enough). The first one - Zach - only makes his real role all that more predictable. The final 'reveal' is a bit of an eye-roll. In a small country town in the middle of nowhere, sure, but in Melbourne? Really? And finally, the characters. I found it quite hard to get through this novel and finish it because there was nothing particularly interesting about Bae - I don't even really know what she looks like. She's a standard rom-com, 'chicklit' female protagonist - *yawn*. You could have had a checklist of stereotypical characters and ticked them off: ditzy blonde, token gay, broody love interest, handsome decoy, eccentric older lady etc. I can't recommend this novel, it's really not worth it. I was quite disappointed and even the passion for books that Bae has and the literary references couldn't save it. They were, in fact, muted and lacklustre. The premise - finding the 'mystery writer' - became increasingly flimsy and rather boring; the love triangle (the blurb bills it as a 'love quadrangle' but I couldn't see it) is stale; the writing is of poor quality and overall, there just isn't anything good I can say about this one. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Jul 17, 2019
not set
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Jul 06, 2019
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Paperback
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| 1921997508
| 9781921997501
| 1921997508
| 4.22
| 11,800
| Feb 01, 2015
| Feb 01, 2015
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did not like it
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None
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Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Feb 04, 2018
not set
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Jan 23, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0857522329
| 9780857522320
| 0857522329
| 3.96
| 3,057,736
| Jan 13, 2015
| Jan 15, 2015
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it was ok
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When term break rolled around (today marks the last day - back to work tomorrow!) I thought about how nice it would be to go and see a film, something
When term break rolled around (today marks the last day - back to work tomorrow!) I thought about how nice it would be to go and see a film, something entertaining, a no-brain-required affair, and saw that the adaptation of The Girl on the Train was about to be released. It's always best to read the book first, and since I already had a copy, it was just a matter of finding it (which, on my densely packed shelves, took about half an hour!) and then making the time to read it. The novel, a psychological thriller set in and around London, reminded me somewhat of SJ Watson's
Before I Go to Sleep
, both in terms of tone, setting and cheesy denouement. And as with Watson's debut novel, after reading this I had zero interest in seeing the film. The Girl on the Train is an okay read, but I can't give it much more than that. I quite liked having a protagonist who is an alcoholic with a failed marriage, who has lost her job and is, in general (and by most people's terms), a bit of a loser. Hawkins takes the idea of the flawed sleuth to new heights, as with Camille in Sharp Objects, but Rachel does wear your patience down a bit. She's not the only narrator in this novel, though: Megan, the missing-then-found-dead woman narrates, beginning a year earlier up until her death, and Anna, the woman Rachel's husband Tom left her for, also increasingly gets her voice heard. What's interesting about this book and these three women is the idea, captured in the dominant male characters, of women's voices being silence in a patriarchal society - and not just silenced, but redefined. It is the men who decide what the women are, and the women who absorb that and take it on as fact, before turning on each other. That aspect of the book makes it worth reading, but as a psychological thriller there was virtually no tension, absolutely no twist - the truth is so gradually revealed and carefully constructed that you see it a mile before Rachel does - and the 'thrills' are completely absent. The crime - the disappearance which, later, turns into a murder investigation - begins on a Saturday night, a night when Rachel, drunk, returns to Whitney where she lived with Tom in the house by the train tracks, on a ridiculous errand. Megan and her husband, Scott, lived just a few doors down. Rachel wakes up on Sunday in a sorry state and with absolutely no memory of what happened. It's this absence of memory that drives her to involve herself in the case, making her an amateur sleuth. As an alcoholic, the police consider her to be an unreliable witness and this, coupled with Anna's vehement hatred and fear of her, pushes Rachel into the fringes: with a stable place to live (renting a room at a friend's house), she's only one step up from a homeless person. The memory lapse is the only thing that kept me reading what is, essentially, a rather slow and uneventful book - wondering, for a while, not what she saw, but what she did. I think a previous review I had read led me to think that Rachel was the real villain, some kind of disturbed character - and the idea of a psychological thriller told from the perspective of the stalker intrigued me. Well, that's not it at all. I must have misread that review entirely. The Girl on the Train is simple, rather straightforward and, after about the halfway mark, fairly predictable. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 05, 2016
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Jan 22, 2016
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Paperback
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| 038574160X
| 9780385741606
| 038574160X
| 3.73
| 11,418
| Oct 09, 2012
| Oct 09, 2012
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it was ok
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This review contains spoilers, but trust me, it won't make any difference. Not so far in the future, New York is a city of underwater streets infested This review contains spoilers, but trust me, it won't make any difference. Not so far in the future, New York is a city of underwater streets infested with the malnourished poor - called the Depths - and towering skyscrapers graced by the wealthy elite - the Aeries. The Aeries is divided between two powerful families, the Fosters and the Roses. Aria Rose, seventeen and beautiful, wakes up one day to the news that she is engaged to Thomas Foster, son of her father's rival, and that they're to be married only weeks after the upcoming mayoral election, for which Thomas' older brother Garland is running. Everyone is rejoicing that these two feuding families have put aside their differences and joined together through Aria and Thomas' romantic love story. The only problem is, Aria can't remember anything about it. She's never met Thomas before, feels nothing for him beyond mild admiration for his good looks and buff body: he doesn't stir in her any of the feelings she always thought would come with love. But her parents told her she overdosed on Stic and it wiped her recent memory - she has never taken the drug that she can remember, but she believes them. In her efforts to remember the past and rekindle the love she must have felt for Thomas to have gone sneaking around in the Depths with him, Aria meets Hunter, a young rebel Mystic from the Depths. The mystics are the things of legend, propaganda and scary stories. Long blamed for the Conflagration - a bombing that killed several people, including a Mystic leader, Ezra Brooks - their punishment is to be drained of their magical power twice a year. The Mystics had built the Aeries, their magic powers the city and from it is made Stic, among other things. Now, the ruling families of the Aeries drain their power from them and hoard it, leaving them weakened and vulnerable far below. As Aria gets to know Hunter more, she learns that everything she had thought was true, is not, and the people who are meant to love and protect her, are doing the opposite. Who can she trust? What is in her wiped memories, and can she get them back? And when the time comes, which side will she choose? This book was full of promise, with an exciting if unoriginal premise (I was reminded, for instance, of NK Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy) - and, yes, a very pretty cover. But if fell, and it fell hard. I hadn't gone farther than the first chapter before I was frowning, mumbling to myself, grimacing, and getting increasingly frustrated and annoyed. It's such a shame, especially considering that all its problems could have been fixed through better editing and better writing. The list of issues I had with this story is long, and I'm not sure how best to get it across - but maybe a list is all I need. __________________________ 1. Aria: She's stupid, naive, gullible and yeah, did I mention stupid? Oh she's nice, and kind, but so vacuous I can't understand what Hunter could possible see in her - Hunter loving Aria just gives me a low opinion of Hunter, really. For instance - and this ties into other issues that I have - she believes Elissa when the drained mystic tells her she's a double agent, and is too stupid to realise that if she was working with the rebels, she wouldn't need Aria to get a message to them, drained or not. See what I mean by gullible? When she confronts Thomas to ask him point-blank whether he's a Stic dealer and he says whoever told her that was lying, she says, "Why would someone lie about that to me?" [p.248] (She has a similar reaction to learning the truth about mystics and the Conflagration.) See, it's not that I object to having a protagonist this naive and stupid, but that one minute she's thinking something pretty honest about, say, her father's line of work - hell, she's seen him or his bodyguards shoot people point blank but she still thinks he's a decent man??? - and then the next minute she's surprised that someone lied to her. She's a dupe, and she's a painfully slow one: even by the end of the book, I couldn't tell you that she'd grown a brain or had her eyes opened wide enough to actually make her THINK. And try this: during her first visit to the Depths, she is assaulted and knifed by a group of poor teens until Hunter rescues her (she's often the damsel in distress); another day, she wanders around the Depths in a dress "studded with Swarvoski crystals" and "high-heeled sandals that tie around [her] ankles." [p.102] You can see that she really gets it, yeah? She learns from her mistakes, this one. What makes it especially laughable, is when Aria says things like this: "Maybe when I get to know her better, I'll ask her more about her choices. But for now I have to remain Johnny Rose's naive daughter, so as not to raise suspicion." [p.128] Oh dear, Aria really believes she's not naive? That she's worldly enough to be manipulative? Absolutely nothing in the entire book gives evidence of this. As a narrator (in the first person), she is rendered - not unreliable, but so dumb you want to push her aside, roll up your sleeves and just sort it out while she keeps her mouth shut. Oh right, just the way her family treats her. Speaking of, Aria has zero backbone, which makes for one incredibly lacklustre heroine. Not even being aware that she's being manipulated makes her do anything about it. And sadly, I don't think the irony was deliberate in this telling scene: "Aria, may I have a word with you?" Aria is one giant push-over, and while she does go through a little bit of character growth by the end of the book, she's still pretty vacuous and incredibly dumb. __________________________ 2. World-building: This New York doesn't make sense, as it's described, and so it seems to contradict itself. We're told the streets are underwater, navigated by raised footpaths in some areas and motorised gondolier taxis in most places. But then Hunter's friend Turk has a motorbike, and when convenient, the streets suddenly become dry. I've never been to Manhattan, but I understand that it's pretty flat - that and it being at sea level is part of the concern regarding rising sea levels, right? So how can some parts be submerged and others not? And the subway tunnels - the water fills them, and yet doesn't. It could easily make sense if it were better explained, but it wasn't, which is typical of the entire novel. Also, in such a changed and damaged world, there's no way that people would have the same kind of consumer goods - from food to designer bags - that they do now. It pays to study some economics and, indeed, climate change, if you're going to write a novel that uses it as a framework, a structure, because it effects everything. Food production is a big one, but the thing is this: as climate change effects people's livelihoods, they turn to crime in poorer countries without any social welfare or support, which further disrupts economics. It's not that New York couldn't still be prosperous in this world, but beyond its city limits, there's just a fog, a void, a nothing. I wouldn't mind, for the sake of a good story and great atmosphere, but we get neither of that here, so it all sounds as vacuous as Aria. The weakest part for me was the construction of the Depths and its population. It was hard to get a clear picture of what exactly life was like for them. They're poor, right, got that. Malnourished, yes, that's mentioned several times. Dirty, that too. Down-trodden, that I can see. But they still have school, apparently. And the buildings are flooded and falling apart, but people still live in them? It needed more concrete details, really. I loved seeing where the Rebels live, in converted subway cars underground, but the mystics are only a small portion of the population, and there seemed to be yet another divide, between the poor, and the mystics. There was an emphasis on the wrongs done to the mystics, but no one cared about the non-mystic poor. It reminded me of the American war against the British, back in the day: the Americans wanted freedom from the British, but it was only ever a freedom for the white colonials, not for the slaves. On a related note, it was bizarre but oh-so-convenient that, even though the residents of the Aeries don't ever use cash (everything is electronic, computerised), Aria just happens to have accumulated a small pile of coins over the years. Where on earth from? She's never been to the Depths before all this mess - and if she had just a small pile, wouldn't she have used them all when she was mucking about with Hunter before having her memory wiped? Maybe not, but still, the fact remains, that it seems highly unlikely that she'd have any coins. And if you have walkways, bridges over space, as high up as the Aries (and we're never told exactly how high up that is), then it's going to be very windy up there. But there's no wind. It would normally be very cold, too, but "global warming" (an out-dated and now useless term) has brought on incredible heat, even up there. __________________________ 3. Climate change: I appreciate that Lawrence has made climate change a background issue, or rather, its effects, but he doesn't seem to understand how a little thing called GRAVITY works. Cue this: The heat, they say, is because of the global climate crisis, the melting of snow and ice around the world and the rising sea level that swallowed Antarctica and all of Oceania. Global warming is also to blame for the canals that line the Depths, filling what used to be low avenues and streets with saltwater. Soon, the scientists say, the rising waters will overtake the entire island. [pp.15-16] Um, right, so rising seas will completely cover mountainous New Zealand and ancient Australia, among other places, but Manhattan will only have slightly submerged streets? Dear me, on what planet could that happen?!! That is not how water works, that is not how GRAVITY works. And that was only page 15. You can understand why, then, my trust in the author took a nose-dive fairly early on. __________________________ 4. Poorly sketched out supporting cast: Take her father's job, for instance. You have to piece it together with scraps of information, because Aria is too flaky to just tell us what her father does for a living. For a while, it seemed like she had absolutely no idea what he did. And while all we really learn is that he is one of the people who arranges for mystics to be drained, that's clearly not the extent of his business empire (and she only learns of it during the story). To be honest, we learn extremely little about any of the characters, despite Aria's supposed curiosity and drive to understand what's going on. For someone who is so obviously being manipulated, she seems incapable of being suspicious - of anyone. She has so little reaction, or feeling, towards people when she finds out they've betrayed her. It takes her a long, long time to say anything to her mother, for instance, and that should have felt like the biggest betrayal of all. __________________________ 5. Plot inconsistencies and holes: These are rife throughout, most of them fairly small details, but it doesn't matter how apparently minor they are: each and every one jarred me. It was like the story had been edited so many times, scenes rewritten over and over, that the author lost track of what people had said or done. That's what proof readers are for, though. Little things like, Hunter's mystic-powered touch gives her a jolt, a zap, when they touch, and he apologises, and at one point Aria thinks he's making an effort to control it or something; and yet, mixed in with that thread, other times he touches her and it's just warm, like the first time on the balcony, and after he rescues her from the gang and heals her arm. So which is it? Pick one and stick to it! Another example: Elissa tells Aria about her job monitoring the Grid, and keeping watch on the subway tunnel entrances, where the rebels are hiding. Later, Aria is following her servant, Davida, in the Depths and when they reach a subway entrance, Aria recalls that "Elissa Genevieve told me how her team was searching for a way into the underground subway tunnels to flush out the rebels. How all the entrances are blocked with mystic shields." [p.202] Except that Elissa never said anything about mystic shields. When the little things don't add up, it gets annoying very fast. __________________________ 6. Cliches: I know, what book is without cliches? It's not even necessarily a bad thing. But some of the cliches in Mystic City were just so glaringly cheesy I actually noticed them. Like, the mysterious metal door which Aria tells us about when she starts working as a coffee girl at her father's company: After I take the elevator, I walk down the hallway, passing Benedict's office and those of some of the other executives, and a stainless steel door without a keypad or a touchpad. I'm not sure what it's for, and nobody else seems to know, either. Then the hallway opens into a maze of cubicles, which is where I work." [p.123] BA BA BOOM! It's like in a really corny movie, when the important details practically have neon signs pointing to them, y'know, in case you missed it. I wanted to clock Aria over the head. And then, maybe, the author, too. Another one: There is a rustling outside, from the balcony. [...] I go over to the windows and open them, stepping out onto the balcony in my bare feet. No one is here. How convenient, that the voyeur just happened to leave an incriminating piece of evidence behind. And why would they have a second pill on them, when they'd just taken one? It's lazy writing. Then, don't forget the C-list movie ultimatum: George Foster pulls away, ad Dad motions to Stiggson. "Fine. Cuff the boy." Then he speaks directly to Hunter. "You'll lead us to one of the mystic entrances and allow us to go through. If we find out that you've warned your people of our arrival, Aria will die. If you do as we say... she'll remain unharmed." I was caught between wanting to roll my eyes and pulling a face to say, "Really?" Aside from the theatrics, it has to be one of the biggest cliches out there. And the whole, "you'll die, of course" bit really tipped me over the edge of wanting to laugh into outright incredulity. Then sometimes it's just a line, a sentence, one that I've read time and time again. Like this one: "The pity washes away, leaving something else in its wake: fury." [p.377] __________________________ 7. Aria's relationships with others: This is an extension of 1. above, but it annoyed me so much I felt it deserved it's own spot. I'm not sure that I can see beyond the glaring words STUPID, NAIVE and SHALLOW; I'm not sure that there's anything more to it, but it really tested my patience, having a heroine, a protagonist, who thinks like this: How could Davida never have told me any of this? How could I not have known, never have suspected? I've lived under the same roof as the girl for practically my entire life. Why didn't she tell you? Oh, I don't know, because you're a ROSE and she's a SERVANT? (and in the Aeries, you don't speak to the servants except to give them orders - they're all from the Depths, anyway.) Why should she tell you anything, you silly twit? What right do you have to feel betrayed by Davida? What does she owe you, really? Why should she trust you? Oh and this comes days after Davida confesses a part of her story, or a version of it, and Aria hugs her and tells her that from now on, they'll tell each other everything. Which Aria of course never did, but now she's upset that Davida didn't either? __________________________ 8. Present tense: I'm sick to death of present tense in YA fiction, now. Use it once, maybe it works. Use it in every second book, and it's just silly. I wouldn't mind so much if people could actually write it properly. It can be a great affect, when done well, but you have to know when to use it and when to use past tense, which is a much more versatile, flexible and forgiving tense. I used to think past tense was a bit boring, but now I can appreciate its strengths. In contrast, present tense can have oomph but it can also be very limiting. You have to obey its rules, and one of those rules is you can't play with time. You can't really even acknowledge time, not in the many ways you can with past tense. You can't say, "Later that day..." or "eventually..." or "after a while..." That's what you'd say in past tense, but in present tense you're confined to the moment, the present. Lawrence falls for these traps quite often, but otherwise he uses present tense pretty well. I don't think it adds very much to the story, but I can see why he'd choose to use it, given Aria's lack of memories, and to emphasise the sense of danger and tension. __________________________ There were parts of the plot that had me interested, engaged even, but with so many problems that I just couldn't overlook, I simply couldn't enjoy this story. I can be very forgiving of weak writing and other things, when I'm sucked into a story and its characters' lives, but that was far from happening for me here. Within the scope of the story, Aria did make sense as a character, but the fact that she never really wised up and did anything decisive, never really learnt anything, made me want to bang my head against a wall. Or throw the book. And if Aria was a weak character, the plot too was weakly devised. The mystery is no mystery, not to us, not from the very beginning. Every so-called plot twist is only a surprise to Aria, not the reader, and every double-crosser practically has an arrow pointed to their head. Any true mystery, like who gave her the locket with the note that says "Remember" at her engagement party, is impossible for the reader to solve because Aria is so hopeless at putting two-and-two together. She doesn't compare handwriting, for instance. (oh god, I feel another rant about Aria's naive stupidity ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 2012
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Oct 17, 2012
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| B00951B4SC
| 3.84
| 47,661
| Oct 16, 2012
| Oct 16, 2012
|
did not like it
|
Harper was raised by her father, an officer in the Marine Corps who kept her under his cold and distant thumb. Having been brought up - and schooled,
Harper was raised by her father, an officer in the Marine Corps who kept her under his cold and distant thumb. Having been brought up - and schooled, in her father's office - on the base in North Carolina, her friends and pseudo-siblings are all "jarheads" who have taught her how to defend herself but not much else. Now she's eighteen and ready to start university, she's moving to San Diego in California to finally start a life of her own. Her roommate in the dorms is Breanna, a lively, fun-loving girl who, on Harper's first day, takes her to a party at the share-house her older brother Chase rents. Harper's first experience of a real student party with dirty dancing and booze doesn't impress her much, and neither does Chase, a womaniser who drinks too much and speaks aggressively to her. When the semester starts, she meets more of Bree and Chase's crowd of friends, including one who hadn't been at the party: Brandon Taylor. A tall, large, muscled guy, he's surprisingly sweet and tender and is instantly attracted to Harper. Unlike Chase and Bree, who are independently wealthy from an inheritance from their grandparents, Brandon earns money from the underground fights he continuously wins. As he and Harper start seeing each other, Harper is surprised by how antagonistic and strangely Chase is behaving. It doesn't help that for as much as she loves Brandon, she's still strongly attracted to Chase. Bree's parents, Claire and Robert, welcome her into their family as another daughter and Harper spends every Sunday with them, a family day. There she sees another side of Chase, a funny, relaxed, caring Chase, an artist who works at a tattoo parlour and designs a tattoo for Harper: orange lillies, her favourite flower. Seeing this side of Chase she starts to believe him when he tells her he quit drinking and sleeping around, but he also does her head in with his erratic behaviour, friendly one moment, aloof the next. It's at New Year's that Harper succumbs to her desires and makes one huge mistake - a mistake she can't entirely regret. But it changes everything, and no one could have predicted the events that follow, least of all Harper. I just have to say - in fact it's dying to come out, I can't stop it: WOW. Just. Wow. This isn't going to be pretty, and I've barely had time for it all to sink in so as I go my rating will probably decrease even further, but I just have to let my thoughts out. They need some fresh air after being trapped in this book for the last couple of days or so. This is - I don't even know what to say. Unbelievable? Only if I were being ironic. It's the kind of self-indulgent melodrama that I deplore, that not only doesn't appeal to me, it makes me feel pretty scornful. I mean, Wow, the Angst! The Drama! Four hundred and fifty-four pages of self-indulgent melodrama! In many ways this book reminded me of two other self-published novels that hit the Big Time and scored a publishing contract: Jamie McGuire's Beautiful Disaster and Thoughtless by SC Stephens. If you've read those, you'll have an idea of what to expect from Taking Chances, story- and character-wise at least. Like the guy from Beautiful Disaster, Brandon fights in the underground fight scene. Both Brandon and Chase have lots of tattoos, and Harper, well, let's just say she gets married awfully young. As in Thoughtless, Harper is with one guy while lusting after the other. At least Harper came clean with her mistake after less time than it took Kiera, and with less self-flagellation about it too. But really, I felt like these were all the same book, more or less. While I do agree that there are some great authors out there who started out self-publishing, or at least, some great books that were self-published first, the one thing that Taking Chances desperately needed above all else, was a good, experienced editor. It wasn't painful to read, in that sense, but it really needed to be trimmed back, pruned to rid it of the endless descriptive fillers - I'll give you an example in a bit - and shortened, and it really needed someone to fix the grammar and punctuation. McAdams has the most bizarre and awkward habit of using run-on sentences: linking clauses, or two distinct sentences, with just a comma, so much so that it was sometimes hard to follow the direction of a sentence. What she should have done was use my friend the semicolon (;) or simply end the first sentence and start a new one, even if it was a short one. (Incidentally, she used a semicolon ONCE - yes, I do notice these things - and it was used incorrectly, which just makes me wince.) It makes it harder to read because the flow is shot to pieces, and I had to fix it in my head as I read it. Her dialogue punctuation was off too; McAdams has another habit of using a comma instead of a full-stop before dialogue. I can open this book at any page and find examples, so here you go: I floundered for a minute trying to remember everything that he and Derek had said, "Because you ... isn't that ... wasn't that why you wanted me to leave?" [p.138] That should have read: "I floundered for a minute trying to remember everything that he and Derek had said[FULL STOP!]" - and then start the dialogue. There are so many of these, it's like they kept breeding. Here're some random examples of run-on sentences: Right away Kale threw a punch, Brandon leaned back letting it pass an inch from his face, his smile never faltering. [p.88] I think you get the picture, but I could honestly find multiple examples for you on every page. There were other mistakes, of the typo variety, but at least McAdams used "led" instead of "lead" - that would have been one error too many for me! You can also get an idea from these snippets of how focused the narrative is on including all the little details, no matter how irrelevant (or rather, everything becomes relevant when really it's not). I've noticed the same thing in other self-published books, including (especially) Thoughtless. The other thing Taking Chances does a lot of is perpetuate stereotypes and clichés, and it's clearly written with the Bible Belt in mind. I don't want to include any spoilers in this review, but I'll just say that for all the premarital sex (and excessive drinking) going around, when consequences catch up with Harper, there's never any question about what course of action she's going to take. This speaks to a sad lack of character development with Harper - with all of them, really, but she's the narrator going through all these big changes and important decisions, and yet not only did I never feel like I understood her, she never really had to deal with the consequences of her actions. Certainly, there are consequences, but there happens to be one very convenient factor in Harper's life: EVERYONE LOVES HER. Seriously. Seriously?? Yes, seriously. She has two gorgeous (so we're told) young men desperate for her love, Bree's a loyal friend and her parents informally adopt her. Her best friend from the base, Jason Carter, is also in love with her, everyone likes her and everyone accepts her and everyone just conveniently embraces the directions her life takes. It's hard to elucidate on that last point without giving things away, but let's just say that her life is a tad unusual, the way it all turns out. It's all just highly unbelievable, because sad to say, people just don't agree all that much. We're all opinionated, have our own motives, our own experiences to draw upon, and so on. It's great that everyone was so supportive and understanding of her, but really, how likely is that? Possible, sure, but not very realistic. Brandon and Chase love Harper so much, but who is she, really? (And who are they?? We never really get any deeper than their surfaces.) What are her interests? (nothing) What does she want out of life? (um, nothing? except to be loved?) To me she came across as bland and uninteresting. I couldn't relate to her, especially the casual way she tossed aside her tertiary education like it was the least important thing in the world. After one year. Just like that. Oh she can afford it, but what would she do with an education? She's just a woman, after all. Only once does she think that she shouldn't jump into a relationship but should take the time to "find herself" and figure out what she wants, but she tosses that aside just as easily. It's not that, within the scope of her life, she isn't a strong person with solid morals and a loving temperament. It's that, and I hate to say this, it's that her world is small, narrow-minded and downright tacky. She's far too young - emotionally, mentally, age-wise - for the things she takes on, and for all that she's happy with the way her life has turned out, I couldn't get over the uncomplicated tawdry tackiness of it all. It wouldn't have been so tacky if it weren't so self-indulgent, but that's the quality that adds to the sense of Harper's narrow world view. Her story never goes beyond what's happening to her, that's all her world is. Everything revolves around Harper, and I got more than a bit sick of it. Actually, I got a bit tired of the whole story, to be honest. It just kept going on and on and after the sudden and dramatic (as always) events of chapter 13 (around the 272-page mark), it definitely lost steam and its "oomph" died with a whimper. After that, I just kept doggedly turning the pages because I'd made a commitment to read and review it - something I agreed to because I had actually bought this as an e-book last year, only I hate reading things electronically and I knew I'd never read it otherwise. (And this paperback is rather lovely to hold! About the best thing I can say about it.) Oh and it lost major points for the pregnancy/labour/child birth descriptions, which clearly showed that the author has little experience with any of it - and I'm sorry, but after all the emphasis on how huge the pregnancy belly was, and how big the baby was, you can't then tell us the baby weighed only six pounds at birth. That's pretty small for a boy these days. Mine was nearly 9 pounds when he was born (over 4kgs), and that's pretty average these days. 6 pounds for a boy baby?? Ha. None of that added up. It's at this point that I have to drop my rating from an initial 2 out of 5 (it was okay) to a measly one (it was crap). I always feel bad giving a book a "crap" rating but I have to be honest with you. There were moments when I was entertained by this story, almost against my will, and I definitely started reading it with that rosy blush of anticipation that you get when you start a new book, only to have it severely doused when it became clear this story wasn't going to improve. It's a story of second chances, on the surface anyway, but really it's a generic story of how much everyone loves Harper and how easily they forgive her for her stupid mistakes. It's clearly not my kind of story, even if it hadn't been so self-indulgent. It's like really cheesy reality TV, of the Kardashian/Jersey Shore variety, and reality TV is my least favourite thing. I suppose these days this book fits the "New Adult" label, but I refuse to use it so I'm calling this "lite adult romance" with some kind of grammatical dyslexia. My thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book via TLC Book Tours. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 21, 2013
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Sep 11, 2012
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Kindle Edition
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| B008MZ2E0O
| 3.29
| 7
| Jan 01, 2012
| 2012
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it was ok
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Five years ago Evangeline Bailey, then only nineteen, met the man who set her aflame and got married - not in that order, and not even with the same m
Five years ago Evangeline Bailey, then only nineteen, met the man who set her aflame and got married - not in that order, and not even with the same man. She married her dear friend, Leo Fitzherbert, because he was trying to get into politics but was gay - to help him avoid the scandal of being caught by a journalist in a compromising situation, they gave the paper a juicier story: a wedding. It was always meant to be a temporary thing, to appease his parents and get his career started. But it stretched into five years before they finally divorced. Now, twenty-four and a bit more mature, Eve and her four-year-old son, Tyler, have arrived at a tropical resort island in Asia for a much needed holiday with Leo, sparking rumours that they might be getting back together. Leo has fallen in love with a man and is gearing up to come out of the closet, while Eve is simply enjoying spending time with her son. Or so she tells herself. But when she sees Gabriel Gray at the resort, Leo's cousin whom she hasn't seen in five years - not since her wedding night when a chance encounter led to a night of passion that ended abruptly when Gabriel discovered she was married - everything she'd kept locked away threatens to burst out into the open. Gabriel still feels the same searing anger when he sees Eve again as he did when he first discovered her betrayal: betrayal of his cousin, betrayal of him. Despite his anger, he still feels on fire at seeing her again, talking to her, dancing with her. Ignorant of the truth of Eve's marriage - and that of her son's parentage - Gabriel takes a warped kind of pleasure at tormenting them both, and Eve rises to the bait each time. But as they're thrown into each other's company more and more, they start to learn about each other, and come to realise that neither is the person they'd built up in their heads for all these years. Alexandra Slater's debut novel is pretty standard romance fare, plot- and character-wise, but the writing is capable and there's potential here. My biggest problems with Evangeline's Secrets are the lacklustre plot, the immature heroine and the unlikeable hero. Romance depends on its characters, rather than plot: they need to be likeable, loveable even, and there needs to be strong chemistry between them. I found neither here. Certainly, I was told the chemistry was there, repeatedly, but I didn't feel it, precisely because Gabriel was such a bastard and seemed to relish saying cruel things to Eve and being unpleasant and rude in his manner all round. His thoughts are as toxic as his dialogue. Setting his jaw, Gabriel headed back down to the ground floor and tried not to think about the last time he had held Evangeline in his arms. Gabriel's mental reasoning often confused me, not that a character has to understand everything of course. But since I was trying to get my head around this pair, trying to understand what they saw in each other and why they kept torturing each other, I was disappointed that he misunderstood Eve's comment so drastically. They were like two characters performing two different plays together, following a different script. It could get frustrating. Gabriel has some excuse for his anger and bitchiness, but he failed to be a better man and handle it in a mature way. He continually did everything to make me dislike him, and even feel contempt for him, so that I couldn't understand why Evangeline still found him so attractive. I like to think that personality makes up a huge portion of man's attractiveness - for me it does, anyway (on a related side note, I may have found the Fifty Shades books fun to read, but I would never find Christian Grey attractive in real life: arrogance and superiority, and all his other issues, would make him quite repulsive to my eyes). So why was she "gagging for it", so to speak, when he's being such a prick? Was he destined to become a carbon copy of his father, whose pursuit of his own selfish desires twenty years ago had caused his family untold heartache and ripped apart two marriages? I wanted to like Gabriel for having standards, and morals, and I could understand and sympathise with how he must have felt when, having made such an explosive connection with Eve, he learned that she was shagging him on her wedding night. I can understand the contempt he feels. But what I don't understand is his attraction to her, and her to him. Especially when Eve is so stupidly immature: "Evangeline, Rachel is..." When I first started reading it, I had somehow created an idea of Eve as a graceful, calm, patient sort of woman, one who might tease a man like Gabriel with softly-spoken jibes and clever innuendo, but who didn't tend to show how she really felt. I'm not sure where this impression came from except the first chapter, where we first hear of Evangeline Bailey and her ex, arriving at the island resort, but haven't met them yet. I don't know, it was just me putting together a picture of a woman I could respect, one I would be interested in knowing more about, the kind of woman who had helped a friend out by marrying him, had a son without the support and love of his father, and who was keeping all these secrets in order to protect others. That's no one's fault but my own. I wanted to like Eve for her own sake, as her character slowly came together, but I have little patience for sulky, immature people who make things difficult for themselves and then whinge about it. "By the way, that's some dress you're almost wearing," Gabriel muttered, curling his hand round hers in a curiously possessive gesture as he led her on to the dance floor. Gabriel is, of course, a philanthropist, not just a millionaire businessman - he's like every Mills & Boon hero in that way. It was heavy on the cliches: "That man is so modest," sighed a lavishly-clad woman standing to Eve's right. Leaning towards her rapt female companion, she added confidingly, "GG Inc my foot! He funded the entire project out of his own pocket. Sir Terence was telling me this morning." The two of them do the usual dancing around each other: lusting after each other, refusing to acknowledge it, almost deliberately misunderstanding each other, and showing none of the usual signs of actually caring. Eve does finally acknowledge to herself that she knows nothing about Gabriel, but she doesn't make much effort to get to know him. Same goes for Gabriel. The only time you get to see him act "normal" is when Eve is laid up in bed for a week and he spends all his free time playing games with Tyler and keeping them both company. That week is mostly glossed over, so we still don't get to know Gabriel much better. And I've never cared for romantic heroes who play the stoic card, the "I want this woman but I WILL rise above it, dammit!" Like that's a show of strength or something. At the end of the day, there'd be no drama between these two if they'd just act like sensible, mature adults and had a calm conversation, or even if they made an effort to get to know each other enough to trust each other with the truth. Since trust and communication are such key attributes of a loving, respectful, successful relationship, I spent the entire novel uncaring whether they got together, and thinking that I'd actually rather they didn't get together. This debut novel falls into too many old and worn pitfalls, uses too many formulaic cliches, and struggled to hold my interest. If only it had had steamier sex scenes, I might have at least picked up on their supposed chemistry. A disappointing read, but I think Slater has potential. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 06, 2012
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Jul 25, 2012
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Kindle Edition
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| 0061969575
| 9780061969577
| 0061969575
| 3.93
| 345,713
| Aug 03, 2010
| Aug 23, 2011
|
did not like it
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I don't often bother commenting on books I don't finish, as usually it's more of a case of not being in the right mood for something, or too much happ
I don't often bother commenting on books I don't finish, as usually it's more of a case of not being in the right mood for something, or too much happening in life and I forget what's going on to the point where I'd have to start from the beginning again. In the case of I Am Number Four, however, I know I'll never pick it up again and attempt to finish it. It's so dreadfully written, the narrator's voice is eye-rollingly lame and, even worse, creepy, and the plot has too many holes to survive. It's a sinking ship, and one I wouldn't want to rescue. And can I just repeat that the narrator, the 'hero', is super creepy? Ugh, the way he 'charms' the girls, *shudder*.
...more
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1
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not set
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Aug 09, 2016
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Aug 29, 2011
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Paperback
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| 1442409053
| 9781442409057
| 1442409053
| 3.80
| 100,488
| Mar 22, 2011
| Mar 22, 2011
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did not like it
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I feel like lately I've been very hard on books - not physically, I'm not throwing them around or anything (never!!), but critically. I seem to find w
I feel like lately I've been very hard on books - not physically, I'm not throwing them around or anything (never!!), but critically. I seem to find way too many things to grumble about, and how much of that was due to fatigue, stress, hormons (thanks pregnancy!) and coming out of the winter blues, is hard to say (I mention it because I've noticed that since I started maternity leave recently, I've been enjoying the books I'm reading so much more). BUT, my reaction to the books I've been reading is still valid, and if I were to read Wither again now (please no don't make me!), I would have the same response. That is: not good. I was looking forward to this one, too. On the face of it, it's right up my alley: it's Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction, and its premise regarding the future of humanity as a species sounds intriguing. It's certainly not the first speculative fiction book to deal with ideas of limited breeding capacity - The Handmaid's Tale is easily the most famous one (and a much older one too). Also out right now is another YA novel on a similar theme, Bumped, which I haven't read yet. But you need more than an intriguing premise to make an idea work - you need to flesh it out and carry through with it. In this futuristic America, global conflicts have destroyed much of the planet - or so the remaining population believes. The oceans are poisoned, and the surviving Americans believe they're the only ones left. About a hundred years ago, scientific advancements in medicine cured every known disease and virus, creating a generation of long-lived super-humans, called the First Generation, genetically free of illness and disease. But the price was high: every child born since has suffered from a drastically reduced lifespan (I'm not sure if this happened before or after the global wars, but my guess is before). Males live to the age of 25, and females to the age of 20. Not long after their birthdays, they begin to cough blood and deteriorate until they die, and there seems to be nothing the First Generation can do about it. With life so shortened, girls are being abducted and forced to have children at young ages by the men of wealthy First Generation parents. The First Generation are getting old, even by their own standards, but they are the only ones with the skills to find a cure (how ironic). Time is running out, and those who don't survive - including babies - become experiments for finding an antidote. Rhine is sixteen and desperate to earn some money for her and her twin brother Rowan: they've been on their own now for a while, since their First Generation scientist parents died in an explosion in their lab while trying to find a cure - some people believe it's humanity's time to die out for good. They live in their parents' house in New York, barricading themselves against burglars and kidnappers in the basement, fending off the multitude of orphans scavenging for food and shelter. When Rhine is kidnapped and sold to a wealthy First Generation household in Florida, she feels she has only herself to blame, but that doesn't stop her from being determined to escape and return to her brother. But in the meantime, there's nothing she can do to stop herself being married to a twenty-year-old man, Linden, the son of a First Generation doctor and scientist called Housemaster Vaughn, along with two other girls: fourteen year old Cecily and eighteen year old Jenna. Cecily is from an orphanage and sees her prison as the magnificent and luxurious mansion it appears to be. Jenna has had to sell herself on the streets and, as much as she loathes Linden and his father, Housemaster Vaughn, seems resigned to her fate. Rhine doesn't trust either of them with her plans, but she does form a friendship with a servant boy called Gabriel. It soon becomes clear that Housemaster Vaughn is the real enemy in this house, a dangerous, creepy old man who performs experiments on those who died, including Rose, Linden's first wife and the love of his life who died on cue, at twenty. First of all, a lot of people have labelled this book as Dystopian: it isn't. It's science fiction, it's post-apocalytptic science fiction, but there's nothing dystopian about it. (The point deserves bold print for the sheer fact of annoying the crap out of me.) In fact, one of the reasons why I found this novel so dissatisfying - regardless that it's the first in the trilogy - is how poorly the world is fleshed out. In fact, it didn't even make all that much sense to me. There's way too much going on and none of it really works effectively. I was intensely curious about the state of the world, but if the oceans are poisoned and much of the land too, there would be serious consequences for what's left that is conveniently ignored here. Without ocean life, it is doubtful the planet would be able to sustain any life at all. I didn't think, either, that Florida would even still be above sea level. There's also no clues, nothing at all, given about how this America is being governed, if at all (and without some kind of over-arching ruling body, there can be no dystopia - that's a basic trope of the sub-genre). How is this world organised? Who's in charge? How do people live, really? How do they have power, and fancy technology like 3D illusions in their living room, when the world has pretty much gone to crap? Who's doing all the skilled jobs - it would have to be First Generation people; not all of them are rich. It's all very vague and glossed over. It was frustrating and with such a weakly fleshed-out post-apocalyptic world Rhine's story itself became weak and inconsequential. Rhine herself was one of the most boring, unlikeable heroines in YA fiction that I've come across in quite a while. I didn't warm to her in the slightest, and it's not for want of trying. After all, I would be just as angry and resistant in her situation, being sold into a polygamous marriage (yuck), having my freedom taken away, and my "husband" completely clueless about the true state of affairs. But Rhine was so unremarkable, if she hadn't been narrating the story I would have overlooked her entirely. Cecily and Jenna had more character but weren't likeable either - I think the only characters who I felt any interest in were the servants. Linden was a naïve wet fish, and in that regard he was written quite well. But with Rhine narrating, and restricting our understanding of this world and the people in her life to her own narrow, self-absorbed understanding, there's little chance to really delve into it. On the whole, this story would have been much better served if it had been written in third person, past tense. The use of present tense is another big sticking point with me (I coincidentally read several books in April/May that were written in present tense, and only one of them was successful at it). For a debut novel, DeStefano was very ambitious, and has clearly put a lot of effort into this story and how it was written. There's a strong attempt at some powerful prose but it just felt contrived to me, and didn't suit Rhine's voice (such as it is). With the slow-moving plot and poorly fleshed-out futuristic world, flashy descriptions and present tense only added to my overall dissatisfaction with Wither. I even marked a page (shock horror I dog-eared!!) where Gabriel wakes Rhine because she was "thrashing" in her sleep due to a nightmare: the truth is, when you dream, even scary dreams, your body is essentially paralysed. You don't move at all. You tend to wake suddenly and in shock from nightmares, but even then the most that you do is to open your eyes, maybe give a little start. The whole concept of sleeping restlessly while having a nightmare is a cheap cinematic effect used in movies to visually convey the horror of a dream. There's no place for it in fiction. (You might make moans or mumblings in your sleep but that's about it.) I fall asleep and have horrible dreams of sad girls with exquisite eyes, gray vans erupting with butterflies, windows that won't open. And everywhere girls, tumbling from trees like orange blossoms and hitting the earth with sickening thuds. They crack open. [p.111] Very poetic prose, sure, but I don't see how vans can "erupt" with anything while at the same time have windows that don't open, nor how orange blossoms can hit the ground with a thud and crack open - it's a poor simile. There's no doubt that the polygamy - and the "sexual slave" - aspect of the story is chilling and disgusting (especially when Cecily, at fourteen, gets pregnant): Rhine, Cecily and Jenna are sold into this household, forced to marry a stranger and expected to sleep with him for children, while the girls who weren't picked were unceremoniously shot. It's a nightmare scenario that makes your skin crawl, there's no question about it. But I don't get why. Cecily was an orphan, and is happy to be in the mansion. Why bother abducting girls off the street, why pay the abductors large sums for this "service", when, with so many parent-less children in the country with nothing to eat and nowhere to live, they could simply take their pick without killing anyone? Considering the alternative, there would be plenty of girls who would be willing volunteers for a life of luxury for a price that, in their world, wouldn't be all that bad if it gets them a nice house, a comfortable bed, and plenty of food. The whole set-up didn't work for me, it all seemed unnecessary and used not only for dramatic effect but to get Rhine into the situation from which she must escape. The whole premise rests on something that doesn't make sense to me, and in fact is deeply flawed. The other aspect of the premise that could have been so interesting, is the notion of curing all diseases, right down to the common cold. Aside from the fact that I don't think this is at all plausible or realistic, even suspending my disbelief I failed to feel anything but contempt and anger to those who did such a thing. Of course it would be good to find a cure for cancer, alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis and every other life-threatening and debilitating disease, but it's also socially irresponsible. There are reasons why these diseases are on the rise, and a longer lifespan isn't the only one. A cure isn't really feasible while the causes are still so prevalent. I couldn't suspend my disbelief for very long, because you can't cure viruses like the cold - and really, you shouldn't. If our immune systems don't get something to fight, like germs and simple viruses, then we weaken to the point of being susceptible to the silliest of things, and dying out altogether. I understand that DeStefano created a genetically superhuman generation, but I don't buy it. It does, however, speak to certain ethical debates around genetic manipulation, that are definitely worth exploring - in this fictional world, there is an extreme consequence for messing around with genes, and that's the most plausible thing in the story. But it just wasn't convincing enough, the way it was told. For such a hotly anticipated novel, Wither is one big fat disappointment and, when not excessively boring or confusing, at times it was sheer painful to read. I see no point in reading the rest of this trilogy, no matter how lovely the covers are. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Apr 30, 2011
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Apr 06, 2011
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Hardcover
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| 3.07
| 330
| Dec 01, 2001
| Nov 08, 2006
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did not like it
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This is a short book - a novella really - and honestly you wouldn't want it any longer. The Toy is a prime example of how unsexy Erotica can be, and f
This is a short book - a novella really - and honestly you wouldn't want it any longer. The Toy is a prime example of how unsexy Erotica can be, and for very good reason. In fact, I'm rather surprised this one was published, as I thought rape was a pretty firm no-go area for erotic fiction. In this story, Gina is a young woman from a dull, conservative and religious family who volunteers at the Christian Outreach Center and is not long away from marrying her equally dull boyfriend Dwayne, mostly because they've been together so long and that's what's expected of her. On her way home one evening she is kidnapped from her bus stop by two men who keep her locked in a windowless, soundproof padded room for months while they "break her in". One, Gordon, is a misogynistic homosexual who is disgusted by women but toys with them anyway, and is brutal and cruel. His own personal boy-toy is Frank, a young, handsome man who is much kinder to Gina and teaches her the gentler side of sex, among other things. Aside from completely changing Gina into someone who could never go back to her old life, there seems little point to this story and a whole lot of horribleness. There are a few erotic stories that I've read that I feel have left a taint behind in my mind, and this would be one of them. It's not safe, consensual sex, for a start. And there's nothing much else to the story but the gross interactions between the three characters. And, of course, Gina falls in love with Frank. I wasn't impressed. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 15, 2011
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Jan 16, 2011
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Paperback
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| 0312580150
| 9780312580155
| 0312580150
| 3.75
| 650
| Dec 07, 2010
| Dec 07, 2010
|
did not like it
|
A few years ago I read Blush by the same author, and it was quite good; this is her newest book and I thought, why not. Well, I'll tell you why not: i
A few years ago I read Blush by the same author, and it was quite good; this is her newest book and I thought, why not. Well, I'll tell you why not: it's bad. Really bad. Hard to believe it's her 8th novel. It reads like diarrhea all over the page. Not sexy, and very amateurish. It begins with Marie having sex with a complete stranger by the lake on her weekend retreat, a man called Zeke who has tattoos, rides a motorbike and screams "bad boy" at her - just the type of man she's looking for, after her failure with the "Mr nice guy" types (she's all into typecasting, is Marie). The sex is so good (apparently) that they continue their relationship back in the city - only it gets complicated, because the Mr nice guy who lives in the apartment next to her, Ty, knows Zeke. And Ty wants Marie to himself. There's more, but I'll spare you. Between the increasingly badly written characters, dialogue and sex scenes, there's very little on offer here except some cringing. It was like reading tacky 80s porn (I know, I'm hard on the 80s, but face it, it was an incredibly daggy decade!) I read it with something of a stunned look on my face, I'm sure. It was laughable, the set-up, the "hot bad boy guys", the sex, the plays at dominance and submission - even their feelings were corny and infantile. Save yourself some wasted time, and give this one a miss. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Dec 06, 2010
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Dec 11, 2010
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Paperback
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| 0778324214
| 9780778324218
| 0778324214
| 3.79
| 37,146
| Jun 01, 2007
| Jun 01, 2007
|
did not like it
|
What was that book where there's a rare female animal-shifter, who has a hottie guy-shifter practically obsessed with her who is convinced she'll even
What was that book where there's a rare female animal-shifter, who has a hottie guy-shifter practically obsessed with her who is convinced she'll eventually say "yes" to him and going all moody on her; who lives with a bunch of other guy-shifters in a pack, who enforce shifter laws in their area and who aren't to be crossed with - who gets kidnapped because of who she is and locked in a cage, and who throws a mean punch? Yeah, exactly. It's Bitten by Kelley Armstrong (and the sequel, Stolen, for the locked-in-a-cage part). Not that I'm accusing Vincent of plagiarism, not at all - the publisher was wise enough to get an endorsement from Armstrong for the inside cover. But please, this story has already been written, and so much better too! Let's try again: Faythe (I'm already cringing at the name and its spelling) is one of only eight female werecats in North America - single female cats, or "tabbies", that is. The only daughter with four older brothers (or was it five? Hard to tell, they were all pretty much the same), Faythe is resistant to her birthright: to marry a strong werecat male, and have lots of kittens. Her father is the leader of a territory and its Pride, and she grew up with her brothers and several Enforcers: other males who work as security and bodyguards and live on the main property. Faythe, though, is determined to have her own life and manages to convince her father to let her go to university. On the same day that Faythe is attacked by a stray, one of her father's Enforcers comes to take her back to the family estate: one of the other tabbies has disappeared, possibly kidnapped, and the men are locking down the hatches to protect their own women. Faythe doesn't respond well to having her freedom curbed any more than she's happy to be in close proximity to Marc, one of the Enforcers and her ex-boyfriend. It's clear Marc hasn't given up on her, and it's just as clear her parents want her to pick him. But then there's hot Jace, and she wants a bit of him too. Faythe has a history of running away, and it's this habit that sees her easily captured by the Bad Guys and locked up in a cage in a basement - along with her cousin Abby, who's also been abducted. Much attempted rape ensues before Faythe rescues herself and plots to catch the Bad Guys. This is me sighing, long and loud. This is me, having sighed, launching into my mean and nasty bitch-moan-fest: Strike #1: it's highly unoriginal. Aside from being a blatant rip-off of Bitten, it reminds me of several other urban fantasy series that feature weres. I enjoy them, because they each offer something new. Nothing new here, not a thing. Strike #2: oh the soap opera, the self-indulgent, over-the-top melodramatics! PLEASE someone shoot me and put me out of my misery! No, better plan: someone SHOOT FAYTHE - before she procreates. I shudder to think of more Faythes running around. Strike #3: Faythe. Oh MY GOD could there be any character in the world of fiction more annoying, more obnoxious, more selfish, more stupid, more self-indulgent, more ... there aren't enough of these words in the English language, we need more! Christ. I can't get over how much I want to slap her. How on earth anyone could be attracted to her, much less love her is beyond me. It certainly doesn't make sense. And what kind of idiot Pride leader would want her to take over from him? I'm not buying that bit of flimsy plot-device. Strike #4: the plot. Aside from being HUGELY predictable, it's also incredibly boring. The first half of this way-too-long "novel" revolves around Faythe, back at her parents' home, taunting the boys; snapping at Marc; leading Jace on; explaining ad nauseam the history and backstory of the Prides and cat behaviour (which leads me to think Vincent doesn't know much about cats); trying to build up some kind of sexual tension between her and Marc; explaining Marc's past; shouting at people and interrupting intelligent conversations with inane, narrow-sighted and petulant comments; and resenting her mother. Later it tries to be hard and gritty but is just stupid - and still predictable. Strike #5: how many stereotypes can I perpetuate? From the scarily obvious use of South America to explain away the Bad Guys (with obligatory traitors-in-their-midst so it doesn't look too much like racial (and political) profiling), to the Grown Men acting like fourteen-year-olds - how many brand names can we fit into Faythe's description of their abode, where they eat pizza, drink beer and play video games - and never clean up, of course, 'cause that's just not manly - except WAIT! They really can clean, when it's part of their job. This is me, rolling my eyes. Not to mention her mother, who's comical in her obviousness. Vincent doesn't even try to make that one remotely believable. This entire book is like a walking American cliché, and not the kind that I think needs any more books written about. You're Texan (or whatever), you drive Big Cars and Drink Beer and are Family Orientated and Don't Like Foreigners - I get it. Strike #6: Why are they so white? Following logically from Faythe's explanation of where the werecats came from - that they arrived in North America long before the natives did - why are they white? Especially considering they turn into black panthers. Oh yes, I know, anyone can be "infected" and become a Stray, like Marc who's Mexican (just to prove that they do like foreigners - ha!), but the Pride cats are the "real" ones - there's a great deal of classism going on here - and they're all very white. The explanation doesn't really make sense, and the whole were-cat premise seems more like an excuse for the characters to have obsessive and violent behaviour. Lots of hormones running rampant, lots of beating each other up and punching holes in walls when they throw wobblies. Animals = primitive behaviour. I'm sorry, but animals behave with more reason and logic than this - there're reasons behind their behaviour, even instinctual behaviour. Have more respect for our fellow animals, please! This is more like stereotypical red-neck behaviour as far as I can tell. Strike #7: the writing. I've read worse, believe me. One thing in particular made me grimace here: Vincent's habit of turning what's meant to be a strong, decisive or poignant scene into a deflated balloon. Her descriptions and narrative are belaboured and clumsy. This kind of thing: A hand settled on my shoulder, heavy and warm. I looked up, fighting back tears. Marc stood in front of me, with a plate in his other hand and concern in his eyes where there had been only anger moments earlier. Way to make a scene lose steam! Aside from losing patience with Faythe, as usual, I felt like I was being sucked into a bog, reading this. Time ... suddenly ... moved ... very ... slowly ... and ... no ... detail ... was ... forgotten ... Sometimes there isn't enough detail in genre fiction, and you never feel like you've got a grasp of the world or characters. Here there was too much, and none of it useful. I still didn't feel like it was giving me a connection to the world or the characters. It was a struggle to get through. I really felt like I was wading through mud that tried to hold me back. If I haven't got across the many flaws of this book and how much I despised it - yes, despised it; I came close many time to throwing it at the wall in disgust - let me just recap: this book is terrible. From what I understand, the series - and Faythe - doesn't improve. If you like soap operas, yeah you'll probably like this. If you've never read Kelley Armstrong (she who rules the Otherworld), you might find this to be original *cough cough*. But I don't know how you could ever, ever, get past how incredibly obnoxious Faythe is, how awfully tiring she is. She warrants numerous italics. And a kick up the bum. What a horrible person. What a stupid idiot! I can't get over it. This is not a series I shall be continuing. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 20, 2010
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Nov 24, 2009
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0352341866
| 9780352341860
| 0352341866
| 3.38
| 123
| Apr 29, 1993
| Apr 01, 2008
|
did not like it
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This book was recommended to me by Amazon because I'd bought To Seek a Master from them, which is by the same publisher. Now and then Amazon can draw
This book was recommended to me by Amazon because I'd bought To Seek a Master from them, which is by the same publisher. Now and then Amazon can draw your attention to a book you might not have ever noticed before otherwise, and it can work. I loved To Seek a Master, which is why I had high hopes for this one; I also knew to expect something pretty extreme from this publisher, and besides, the premise made me think it was the erotic, modern-day version of Jane Eyre: timid new governess Cassandra is hired to look after the two young children of a widower, Baron von Ritter, who has powerful charisma and some very extreme sexual tastes that often involve initiating shy young women into his games. Growing tired of his mistress's cruel sado-masochistic needs, the Baron turns Cassandra's initiation into a game that pits the unwitting woman against his mistress - only one will stay, but only he knows the rules. What could have been a mesmerising novel of gothic atmosphere and erotic seduction, was instead a flat story with highly unlikeable characters and an unconvincing seduction. The Baron's so-called charisma, upon which the entire premise rests, is never really in evidence - instead, he gave me the creeps, and how he treated his two little girls made me despise him from early on. Remove his power to drive women wild and make them fall in love with him, and the motivation is entirely gone. I was told these women love him, but I couldn't believe it. I saw no real evidence of it, or what it was about him that made them love him. I especially didn't like his sexual tastes and I wasn't impressed by his skill - he was all technique, detached and cold and boring. It didn't help that the writing also got too technical, and the descriptions repetitive. The seduction scenes lacked a necessary powerful ingredient to really make them work, instead of making the reader uncomfortable. By the time the baron decides to introduce Cassandra to the joys of enemas, I'd had enough. I'm sure there is a way to get a divine orgasm from an enema, but there's nothing sexy or erotic about it. It's all so clinical and messy and unpalatable. As is the focus on the belly and water-retention (not letting them pee and forcing them to drink more and more water as a kind of sexual torture until the final, orgasmic release) - I couldn't help thinking about how you can die if you don't pee, from the toxins that have been filtered from your blood having nowhere to go but back into your system. These characters think they're at the height of sexual discovery by defeating their boundaries and pushing themselves, but honestly, I couldn't help but feel they were missing the point. There is an audience for this book and others like it, as badly written as it is, but it's not for me. I prefer the quietly simmering sexual tension and subtle build-up of grumpy Mr Rochester to the Baron's "baby-faced" charm. Yuck. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 22, 2010
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Oct 28, 2009
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Paperback
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| 0451228286
| 9780451228284
| 0451228286
| 3.42
| 817
| Sep 03, 2009
| Oct 06, 2009
|
it was ok
|
Sera Littlejohn is a thanatologist - she sits with dying hospital patients and helps them in their last hours - but ever since she was hit by a drunk-
Sera Littlejohn is a thanatologist - she sits with dying hospital patients and helps them in their last hours - but ever since she was hit by a drunk-driver her world has become one of pain medication, physiotherapy and struggle. But it's not her physical scars that draw a demon to her from beyond the veil but guilt over her mother. Either way, she's the first female in countless centuries to be possessed by a demon. Ferris Archer knows all about being possessed. He's one of many men who, at a time of temptation, have accepted a teshuva, a repenting demon, from beyond the veil. Leaving a reven - an intricate tattoo - to mark the place where the teshuva came to them, the talyan - the possessed - aren't the only people playing host to demons: some are host to angels, becoming seraphim, who fight the djinn-possessed who are too strong for they talyan, while the talyan spend their days and nights endlessly draining lesser demons. It is into this world of endless violence, death and evil that Sera finds a place at last. With the help of Archer, her possession went smoothly, but her demon seems to be a little different. Instead of simply draining a malice or a feralis, a lesser demon, she somehow sends it back through the veil. There's also the troubling issue of the strong attraction between Sera and Archer, when he's always been a loner - and he's determined not to give in to these new feelings. Soon it becomes clear that a djinn-man is targeting Sera, trying to capture her for some unknown purpose, and if Archer won't help her be bait for a trap, she'll do it alone. I'm not a big fan of good vs. evil stories, or even those that utilise Christian beliefs to create a dark urban fantasy - not unless there's a lot of originality involved. While a good dark tale about evil can be entertaining, even chilling, to read, it needs a lot of atmosphere and tension, you need to really invest in the main characters and you really need to be cheering them on. Even then, I find it hard to get into a black-and-white scenario like this, which at its worst can be just plain boring. There's a lot of promise here, but sadly it just doesn't quite deliver. The immortal, possessed warrior men bring to mind the Black Dagger Brotherhood and their fight against the lessers - but the characters lacked the fleshing-out necessary for me to really care about them. The set-up is clear-cut, with angels battling djinni and the "weaker" repenting demons off to the side, dispatching the lesser demons who pray on human emotions. The emphasis on the idea that the real battle between good and evil is played out in the human heart saves it from being too simplistic, but not nearly enough. "Good and Evil" is a simplistic concept, and you can't just "get rid of" or banish evil - if you could, then "good" is equally as flimsy a concept. (Maybe it is, but that's beside the point.) The talyan do talk a bit about blame, about whether an individual is blameless because a demon is enflaming violent etc. tendencies, or whether they are just as responsible for their actions because they let themselves be tempted. It's along the same lines of: is someone born bad or are they made bad by their environment, by society? Seduced by Shadows hints at this issue but doesn't really delve into it. Archer's idea that evil could be cured like smallpox really made me lose my good opinion of him. And there is part of its problem: it takes on too much. I found the premise and the details, especially when it got onto the veil and hell, very confusing. At times it was a comment a character would say, or something Sera or Archer would think, that produced a total "huh?" moment. The narration skips along too lightly to really cement anything, ground anything, make it feel real or plausible. Sub-plots are dropped as if they never happened, leaving me feeling like there are chapters missing. It's dialogue-heavy, and when someone isn't talking, Sera or Archer get introspective and reflective. A little bit of this can go a long way, but unfortunately it's like a constant twitch. How long had it been since he'd done anything besides destroy? And long for his own destruction? When had he last had an inkling of possibility for an end to his pain? This kind of prose just exhausts me. Characters who constantly internalise everything, ponder everything, worry over everything, second-guess everything ... it just goes on and on and I'm left knowing them no more intimately than I did at the beginning. Besides which, Archer and Sera's chemistry was lacklustre and unconvincing. I enjoyed Sera's humour and sarcasm, but it may have worked better, atmosphere-wise, if the story had kept to a darker tone. Maybe not. Either way, it didn't seem like Slade was very interested in the romance side of what is being marketed as a paranormal romance. There is a bad guy too, a djinn-man called Corvus, and I confess I never understood what his plan was or why. I mean, he wanted to use Sera to rip open the veil and free all the demons, but I don't really get why. He was old, and tired, and wanted to end it, wanted perhaps to turn earth into a battleground between God's horde and Hell's demons - but it was unclear what his personal motivations were, and I found the entire climactic ending very confusing. I couldn't follow it at all. Overall, I wanted to enjoy this, it had elements that definitely appeal to me, but the execution made it hard for me to get into it. I would normally read a paranormal romance book in a day, but this one took me a week. It's more an urban fantasy novel really; the romance is secondary, but I'm not entirely sure what is primary here. Better chemistry, sexual tension and romance would have saved it, or going the opposite way it could have delved deeper into urban fantasy and given us something really rich. A few authors, like the before-mentioned J.R. Ward, have managed to combine both genres with excellent results. Seduced by Shadows is a confused book that left me confused. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 08, 2009
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Sep 30, 2009
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0446543314
| 9780446543316
| 0446543314
| 3.77
| 690
| Aug 20, 2009
| Sep 05, 2009
|
it was ok
|
Sometime in Earth's future, the human population faces its biggest disaster ever: every man and woman is all now sterile. No child has been born in a
Sometime in Earth's future, the human population faces its biggest disaster ever: every man and woman is all now sterile. No child has been born in a generation, and the species is on the brink of extinction. Lucan Rourke is an archaeologist who has long been on a mission to find the Holy Grail - and cure Earth's ills. A chance discovery while in England leads him on a new path: an ancient star chart clearly shows a distant moon named Pendragon - and a place on that moon called Avalon, where the Holy Grail is said to be. Backed by a powerful and wealthy investor, Lucan travels alone to the moon and spends a few years learning the language and fitting in before using falsified documents to land a place on the team that is trying to broach Avalon's shields. Avalon is a giant stone obelisk on shaky ground, and time is running out for the people of Pendragon - who have their own legends and their own need for the Grail. Lucan's knowledge of ancient British runes enables them to crack the code and drop the shield - only to be betrayed by Pendragon's military. Beautiful Lady Cael is a Dragonshaper and High Priestess, and a member of the team trying to find the Grail. It is death to so much as touch her - but Lucan, an off-worlder, doesn't know this. His flirting and light touches warm her lonely heart but she has long since been resigned to her revered and feared position as dragonshaper. Now the two of them are the only survivors of the military's attempt to take over the hunt for the grail - aside from the scientist who betrayed them and one other, Rion, who helps them with warnings. Fleeing the scene of the military's attack, Cael changes into a dragon and rescues a badly injured Lucan - but now accused of murder, the two must run for their lives and find a way past the military to the Grail. Things are even more complicated when their growing attraction gets in the way of Lucan's mission - and he learns secrets about Cael and himself that will change everything. This is a pretty ambitious set-up really, and not all that easy to summarise. A mix of Arthurian legend, fantasy, science fiction, apocalyptic fiction, and paranormal romance, it can be bizarre at times, bordering on the ridiculous. I'm not a big fan of the Arthurian Legend and I tend to avoid books about it - I would honestly never have bought this one myself, but it was sent to me to review. There's plenty that I would otherwise enjoy, though: romance and fantasy and apocalyptic fiction. The problem is, this novel stands on even shakier ground than the obelisk called Avalon. It is set "in the near future", but would have to be a considerable amount of time in the future for Lucan to travel in a small and technologically-advanced spaceship without losing any time (despite landing on a few other inhabited planets along the way) - since little time passes for those like his sister, waiting on Earth. Yet, twice it mentions King Arthur's time being "fifteen hundred years ago" - which would set the novel during our time, since King Arthur is 6th century. The star chart is never explained, and the link between Pendragon and Earth - and several other planets - is pretty vague. How these people once travelled across the galaxy without any kind of craft or space travel is apparently explained away with the use of canons. Yes, canons, connecting Pendragon with Stonehenge. Again, very loosely implied but not actually explained. Pendragon itself is a vague place, where the people seem to be exactly like us but without knowledge of us, with some very advanced technology and some very out-of-date technology. They speak with the same idioms and expressions - only once does Lucan say something that Cael doesn't get, which I find hard to believe. The moon and its population just don't make any sense, and are so rarely described that I know no more about them now than I did at the beginning - and a very confusing beginning it was too. I generally love fantasy novels that launch you straight into the story, and you gradually learn your way around the new world and culture - it can be more exciting that way. If it's done well. It wasn't done so well here. Chapter one - well, the first several chapters, actually - had me puzzled: had we already reached the moon or were we on a space ship with Lucan and a team of scientists and researchers - and one High Priestess who's really a dragon? The "aliens" living on the moon just weren't alien. Their buildings, their clothes, their speech - everything was familiar, which is quite the cop-out. Cael I liked, though she switches from incredibly lonely "don't touch me" virgin to wild temptress very suddenly. The dragons I also enjoyed, though I don't normally. Lucan was a kind of Indiana Jones-type figure, and not terribly inspiring. I appreciated the nod at pollution, chemicals and free radicals and the long-term damage they will probably have on us, but if the science fiction side of things had been ditched, it may have been a better book, or at least a more controlled one. There were way too many plot-holes, or saggy bits that just didn't hold water, and the premise was a bit over-the-top and hard to take seriously. Makes me worried for the direction paranormal romance might be taking, into the realm of the ridiculous. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 03, 2009
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Aug 26, 2009
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0143051970
| 9780143051978
| 0143051970
| 3.67
| 36,610
| Jan 01, 2008
| Jan 01, 2009
|
did not like it
|
Three couples, a tangle of cheating relationships and an old beach house in Nantucket, scene of much healing and new beginnings. When I say that in my
Three couples, a tangle of cheating relationships and an old beach house in Nantucket, scene of much healing and new beginnings. When I say that in my head I sound pretty snarky. Perhaps I was expecting something a bit more clever, funny even - definitely something with more heart. Instead I got a cold, robotic story about awful people and their woe-is-me midlife crises - written in present tense, no less, which is guaranteed to annoy me. Nan is an ageing widow living in a big old house on 9 acres of prime land overlooking the beach on Nantucket Island, the only thing left to her after her husband drowned himself in the ocean decades ago, leaving her with an unexpected amount of gambling debt to deal with. She has one son, Michael, a jeweller in New York who is having an affair with his married boss, Jordana. After a meeting with her accountant who makes Nan realise she has no money coming in, certainly not for the expensive and extensive repairs the beach house needs, she comes up with a plan to rent out rooms during the summer. Daniel is the first person to arrive: his marriage to Bee is on the rocks as he struggles to understand why, despite loving her, he doesn't want to be intimate with her. After finally admitting to himself that he's gay, he comes to stay at Nan's beach house in order to be close to his two little girls, who are holidaying with Bee at another rented property in the same town. The other boarder is Daff, a forty-one year old housewife who's husband, Richard, had an affair with a woman at work. Their divorce is final but their daughter, Jess, isn't dealing with it well: she blames her mother (especially considering how Richard implied it was Daff's fault he wasn't living with them anymore). After establishing herself as a real estate agent, Daff finds herself sorely in need of a holiday and some "me" time. And Nan's son Michael turns up, having walked out of his job and his affair with Jordana as soon as she left her husband, his other boss Jackson, in the mistaken belief that they're in love and Michael wants to live with her. Jordana is a polished yuppy with expensive tastes who thinks she wants to give up her consumeristic lifestyle and life more simply, but Michael knows Jordana can't and won't and will instead seek to do what all his other girlfriends do: change him and his apartment. So he flees to Nantucket where a shocking surprise awaits. I really don't have much good to say about this book. It's predictable, the characters are stereotypes I couldn't relate to, it uses present tense just because, it's rather depressing really, and quite vacuous. It has a chick-lit kind of cover, but it's not chick-lit. Looking at the quotes on the back cover while I type this, I'm surprised to see comments like "A sweet, uplifting story", "a must-read summer delight" and "fresh and sparkling". Were we reading the same book? Part of the problem was the characters: they were unreal to me. The men are all middle-aged, successful businessmen and work (and cheating on their wives) seems to be all they do - that and play golf. The women are all housewives - not even full-time mothers, but the kind of housewives who expect to be looked after, financially; I have no idea what they do with their time but when their marriages die (and the cow in me sees part of the problem with their marriages being that the couple have no common ground anymore, and nothing to talk about, their lives being so repetitive and boring), they're left floundering with no skills or experience. I don't really understand how Daff so easily set herself up as a real estate agent. But all I could ask myself was, Who the hell are these people? I kind of see them as myths, not real people. I found them offensive simply for being. The book is full of gender stereotypes and two-dimensional people, and lines like this: "You're sorry?" [Bee] attempts a laugh again, still bitter, mirthless. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't listen to all my friends before we got married. Everyone told me they thought you were gay and I told them they were ridiculous, you were just sensitive, in touch with your feminine side. I can't believe how stupid I was." [p.224] (Because, of course, any man who doesn't enjoy standing around with a bunch of other boring, golf-playing, yuppy moronic men discussing football is, of course, gay. Just goes without saying really.) And this: He would build what all the new money wants these days. Their interpretation of a beach cottage, but for millionaires. Gunite pools, high-speed covers to keep their small children safe, kitchens that are equipped with everything, even though it is rare for the wives to actually cook. [p.335] (Because, of course, only women cook. No sorry, only wives could possibly be expected to cook.) I don't even know what a "gunite" pool is, but honestly, the level of yuppy wank in this novel was nauseating. It's like yuppy name-dropping, coming across all the little details of their polished, vacuous lives. Everyone comes across this way, even - to a degree - Nan herself. She was written to be mildly eccentric, energetic and the life of a party even in her 60s, but she just came across as annoying and silly, not with the dignity she was meant to portray. It wouldn't even matter if Green were parodying these people - which she isn't; simply having them occupy over three hundred pages of very mundane "real life" drama would have cancelled out any attempt at a piss-take. No, these people are treated with care and compassion. With sympathy. And the "shocking surprise" that comes towards the end? The "unexpected visitor who turns their lives upside down"? So very predictable, and so very convenient in terms of how it worked out. In general, even aside from the pointless use of present tense, I found the writing style to be rather alienating. It is a distinctly "tell" style, leaving you with very little to infer (though you can guess Daniel is gay from the get-go). The omniscient narrator who held my hand all the way through gets to be tiresome and condescending. And then there's the let-down regarding this as a potentially good summer beach read. I don't get why a book about a bunch of miserable consumeristic rich people dissatisfied with their empty lives and cheap affairs is considered a fun summer beach read. There wasn't even any beach in the story, really. An attempt was made to make the house a focal point of the story, but Green failed to make it a character as well. And I found myself rolling my eyes at the romance between Daniel and Daff - I don't feel like that's a spoiler because there was a big neon arrow pointing at it all the way through. It was a bit of an effort to finish the book, and a shame to say I don't have anything very positive to say about it. In fact, I can't think of anything positive right now. I originally gave it 2 out of 5 when I first finished it, but I think I was just grateful to have finished the book. If I didn't like the characters, I didn't like the prose, I didn't like their dramas and I found it boring, I can't in all good conscience rate it higher than a 1. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 15, 2011
|
Jun 20, 2009
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0446199486
| 9780446199483
| 0446199486
| 3.76
| 225
| Jul 14, 2009
| Aug 01, 2009
|
did not like it
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Quinton Valtrez is half human, half demon. Raised by monks to harvest and control his chi and his powers, to battle demons, he now works for Homeland
Quinton Valtrez is half human, half demon. Raised by monks to harvest and control his chi and his powers, to battle demons, he now works for Homeland Security and is a sniper assassin on the side. He kills bad guys without remorse, and is happy to live the life of a lonely recluse. In Savannah, Georgia, for All Hallow's Eve - a time of year when the veil between the mortal and the demon worlds is thin - Quinton sees CNN reporter Annabelle Armstrong, who's after the real story about Quinton. When a bomb suddenly explodes and all hell breaks lose, with old-world vultures descending on the scene, they both stop to help people - which is when Annabelle sees Quinton lift a beam off a man without touching it. Annabelle receives a text message telling her there'll be another bomb in another city; teaming up with Quinton, they go to Charleston where vultures have gathered, and begin tracking down the bomber and whoever is behind the series of attacks. While they hunt, Quinton and Annabelle feel the attraction between them growing - but he wants nothing more than to relieve his lust, and she isn't sure what Quinton is but knows he's dangerous. As the lord of the Underworld and Quinton's father, Zion, orchestrates events through his Angel of Death, Quinton must fight his dark urges and embrace his powers and his good side, or join Satan's army of evil. Okay, so I totally burst out laughing, writing that last sentence, but since it's very apt I'll leave it. I don't often give a 1 star rating to a book, and I always feel a bit mean about it, but I can't in good conscience do otherwise. I'm a big fan of paranormal romance, but this is joining Susan Krinard's Chasing Midnight, Brenda Joyce's Dark Seduction and Stephenie Rowe's Date Me Baby, One More Time as worst paranormal romance books I've read to date. This book is so laden down with clichés it's sinking into bog. From the title to the characters to the prose, every cliché is here, sometimes even contradicting themselves. That's not my biggest complaint, though. Actually all my peeves with this book are tied. An even worse problem is Herron's extreme case of Dramatic Sentence Syndrome. These are those short sentences that are used to dramatic effect, standing alone as their own paragraph. A few used sparingly can heighten tension and ratchet up the anticipation - and also alert you to the importance of what came before. When, like Herron, you use ten on every page, they not only lose all their effect but drive you INSANE! It was worse than Michelle Sagara in Cast in Shadow. Dark Hunger was a chore to read, and the only reason I finished it was because I owed a review - when I really wanted to just throw it at the wall. Written better, it could have been good. The sex scenes were decidedly unsexy, being brief, lacking in emotional engagement and were incredibly boring. The characters were often suddenly possessed of knowledge they had no way of knowing, and conversations were disjointed, with characters making leaps of connection and other missing glaringly obvious ones. Quinton is the classic Byronic paranormal romance hero, all big and dark and brooding, who vacillates between "I want Annabelle, I'm so hot for her" to "I must keep my distance or she'll be hurt because of me", often coming to the decision not to seduce her only to turn around and, well, seduce her. With his hairy chest. This book brought out the snob in me, I admit it. It tested my patience time and time again, and I lost all respect for Herron when I came across "irregardless". Yes, you read right. She also used "umbrage" instead of "homage" - the two have quite different meanings! I also had problems with the assertions about vulture behaviour - they don't bring death, they're just very good at finding it because they're scavengers - and I don't think there's been any case of a serial killer having Asperger's syndrome - I'd think that Asperger's would rule them out from the role, rather than encourage it. Being socially "deficient" doesn't mean they want to hurt people. I can imagine that more than a few people might feel insulted or offended at this as well. So, a very disappointing book bordering on the ridiculous. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 11, 2009
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Jun 08, 2009
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 1416550526
| 9781416550525
| 1416550526
| 3.49
| 735
| Mar 21, 2009
| Apr 07, 2009
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it was ok
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This book has me so confused. It's not the plot or anything like that, it's the genre. I would never have thought I was the kind of person to get hung
This book has me so confused. It's not the plot or anything like that, it's the genre. I would never have thought I was the kind of person to get hung up on how to classify a book, but it turns out I am. All part of being a closet librarian. The cover of this book is reminiscent of Katy MacAlister's Aisling Grey series, or Stephanie Rowe or Lynsay Sands - though I hate to put Stephanie Rowe in the same sentence, considering how much I hated Date Me Baby, One More Time. So while the humour is established by the cover, the genre is not. At least, it implies paranormal romance, but the modern romance genre, as part of its formula, must have sex in it. There's nothing more than a vaguely described kiss in this book. I simply did not know where to shelve it. Lockwood has mostly written chick lit previously, so I'm going to give it a new sub-genre name: paranormal chick lit. On the day Constance Plyd's accident-prone husband Jimmy was to sign their divorce papers, she finds him instead face-down on the garage floor with a screwdriver driven through his back. Not only that, but his murderer is standing over him, all in black, who hands Constance his business card: YAMAN Demon at Large Murder and Mayhem since 550 BC Naturally, no one believes her story that a man in black called Yaman killed her husband, especially considering the five million dollar life insurance pay-out. The one man who might be on her side is the man she never forgave for taking her virginity in the back of his mustang ten years ago and never calling her: Dogwood County Sherrif Nathan Garrett. Things become worse when Constance starts having visions, her almost-ex husband comes back as a ghost with a message from heaven that she's the Chosen One and a minor prophet, and Yaman and his colleague, Shadow, wreck havoc trying to capture Constance and arrange for the latest virgin pop princess phenomenon, Dante London (in town to film a movie), to be seduced by Satan during his 7-day window to bring forth the Antichrist. Constance has help from a talking French bulldog called Frank wearing a pink sweater, her mother Abigail, and a gun-happy priest called Father Daniels. In order to stop Satan from fathering the next Antichrist on Dante London, though, she's going to need to stop doubting and believe in God, and herself. The religious undertones are pretty thick and strong in this novel - barely "undertones" at all, really - which is set in Texas with many an obvious dog theme, but that's not what really bothered me. The prose is solid, though it could have done with some closer proof-reading as the incorrect use of tense verbs really started to annoy me, and the pacing is pretty fast. Yaman and Shadow provide some "witty repartee" which did make me smile now and then, but generally all the characters were underdeveloped and disappointingly cliched. Especially the demons. I love paranormal stories featuring demons, and this one was quite fun at times. What was a drag was how traditional it all was, and how utterly safe. It was "G" rated in the extreme, though I suppose it's true to its Texan setting where "damn" is still considered "cussing". Sophisticated it is not. I think the word I'm looking for is "cop-out". There's just nothing original here. Not only does it lean heavily upon all the absurd facets of Catholicism, but the two main characters go through very predictable motions. The last quarter I had a permanent frown on my face, which turned into a scowl at the epilogue. Granted, it is genre fiction and naturally there's a formula involved, but there's always room for originality within a genre's formula. And then there's the problem of it's identity crisis: it's not paranormal romance, it's not really chick lit, what is it? I think my new tag, "paranormal chick lit", is fitting, but not knowing where the book was going didn't make me like it any better. Overall, it was very disappointing, as fun as it sometimes was. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 10, 2009
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Apr 08, 2009
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Paperback
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| 0553376055
| 9780553376050
| 0553376055
| 3.58
| 46,077
| Aug 24, 2004
| Nov 30, 2004
|
it was ok
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While the world wavers on the brink of war, struck by terrorist attacks and embargoes, Daisy's big concern is whether her stepmother is poisoning her
While the world wavers on the brink of war, struck by terrorist attacks and embargoes, Daisy's big concern is whether her stepmother is poisoning her food and how much she hates the unborn baby. Shipped off by her father to stay with cousins she's never met in England, she's not so far into herself that she doesn't notice something a bit odd about them. Osbert, the eldest, seems fairly normal, being responsible for his siblings while their mother, Daisy's Aunt Penn, is away but really wanting to spend time with his friends spying on the enemy. Twins Edmond and Isaac are the most strange. Edmond can hear her thoughts and silent Isaac prefers to talk to the farm animals. The youngest, Piper, is a sweet girl who has a way with animals too, and likes to forage in the woods for things to eat. Daisy doesn't eat. She's made herself anorexic through her fanciful fear of her stepmother poisoning her, and then it became something she didn't have to think about. When Aunt Penn leaves for Oslo to help with peace negotiations, the five children are left alone at the old farmhouse. They feel far removed from any conflict, and hear conflicting reports. Warnings of small-pox keep people practically housebound, and idle days lead to an intense relationship between Daisy and her cousin Edmond. Finally, the Territorial Army comes and commandeers the house and land for their own use, and Daisy and Piper are sent to live with a Major's wife whose son is fighting elsewhere. Daisy's one goal is to get back to Edmond and the farmhouse, but first she must figure out where Edmond and Isaac have been taken, and how to get there. I had heard high praise of this book - with such a boring cover, I probably wouldn't have read it otherwise. I certainly never noticed it. But it was a hugely disappointing read. I can see what the author was aiming for here: to show how desensitised young people are to war and violence, and also how they can rise to the occasion and what they go through to survive. There are lots of exceptional stories about these themes; I wrote an assignment on them for my teaching degree. I just don't think Rosoff did a very good job. Also, it piggy-backs on some better novels that deal with the same or similar themes and situations. As with The Hunger Games, an enjoyable book that can be read as a Hollywood rewrite of Battle Royale, How I Live Now simply reminded me of far better books - especially John Marsden's Tomorrow, When the War Began. Written in a stream-of-consciousness first-person narration in two parts, the first part meant to show Daisy's underdeveloped ability to write "properly" because she doesn't know how to write dialogue, as compared to the second part written six years later, it can be exhausting to read. Melinda in Speak narrated in similar style but to better effect. Daisy's voice runs on with barely a breath and gives it a rushed feeling, so that details were hard to take in and I sometimes became disorientated. As an example of her running sentences, here's her description of Edmond: Now let me tell you what he looks like before I forget because it's not exactly what you'd expect from your average fourteen-year-old what with the CIGARETTE and hair that looked like he cut it himself with a hatchet in the dead of night, but aside from that he's exactly like some kind of mutt, you know the ones you see at the dog shelter who are kind of hopeful and sweet and put their nose straight into your hand when they meet you with a certain kind of dignity and you know from that second that you're going to take him home? Well that's him. (p. 3) It made me dizzy. Sure her exuberance could be seen as energising, or at least realistic, but Daisy was such an unlikeable character for the better part of the book that it's hard to listen to her. Sure, she's vulnerable and yes, she did seem to be a realistic portrayal of self-centred modern teens, and she would doubtless appeal to others for her frankness and inner vulnerability, but to me she was empty, hollow. For someone who's narrating, I didn't learn much about her, and through her shallow eyes I learnt only superficial things about others. Likewise, I didn't buy her relationship with Edmond. She talks about how intense it is, how they connect, but I can't buy it because she never shows me. She never shows anything, just tells tells tells. I've read some very good books with first-person narration that, through the author's skill, manage to reveal more than the narrator realises, so that the reader has an even better understanding of what's going on than the narrator does, even though they're our only source. There's nothing of that here. And since I couldn't get to know any of the characters, I couldn't care about them either. I was expecting more, to be honest, on all fronts. This is a decidedly lacklustre book and the more I talk about it the less impressed I become. The war situation is never explained in a way that makes sense, so it's more like an annoying gnat trying to get your attention but just isn't important enough to. Daisy says the enemy drew the British troops somewhere else then swooped in and took the country and now defend it from the original army. Okay. But that then creates a very interesting situation of invader and occupier that is barely touched upon. Want to convince me that Daisy IS in a war zone? Rationing, send the kids off to strangers, shoot a couple of people, a massacre at a farmhouse - yeah, that should do it. Huh. No. When you read books written by people who lived through invasions and occupations, who lived through war - books like Suite Française for example - you really notice that people being shot is the least of it. It's so much more than that. The elements are here, such as the disintegration of Aunt Penn's family, but it lacks any kind of real emotional involvement. Keep it superficial and hope the reader will fill in the gaps with their imagination? Nice try, but you're missing the point. The only satisfying thing about this survival tale is Daisy learning to eat - the smartest thing she does. There are other things that nag at me. Quite possibly the reason Rosoff set this story in England is because she now lives there, having moved from America - but it's more than that. For a century England has been the place of children's war stories, Narnia being the most famous. I grew up exposed to many more through books and BBC adaptations, and my mother is a big fan of these stories. There's something about England, captured in Narnia and fantasy books like Mythago Wood, that draw on its druidic roots and ancient magic that makes England a place that straddles the line between realms, that makes it a place of possibility and secret gardens and all sorts of things. Moving Daisy to England seemed a bit redundant, because it wasn't utilised to its full effectiveness. So her cousins were misfits, being telepathic and the like - with so much potential between the war and England's magic and mind powers, it's no wonder I was expecting something with more oomph. Daisy glosses over so many things, never fully explaining or delving into things so that everything becomes almost trite, that I struggled to finish it. My main emotional response a lot of the time was "So?" Depending on the laws of your country, cousinly love isn't technically incestuous - but there is definitely something a bit creepy about it. The father of Aunt Penn's children is never revealed, but considering the children's oddness it could be thought their parents were cousins themselves. Because the relationship didn't feel real to me, not the way it was written (and I'm not asking for graphic sex scenes, far from it!), it didn't feel necessary either. Add it all up, and you get a quick in-and-out survival story told by someone who's really quite boring and, yes, a product of her (our) times and not a flattering one either - but the novel fails to really explore anything, and what could have been insightful observations, gripping plot and engaging characters merely becomes flaws. The magic that should come with setting a children's war survival story in England is completely missing. A shame, but like I said, there are better books out there. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 24, 2009
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Mar 17, 2009
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Paperback
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| 0618891315
| 9780618891313
| 0618891315
| 3.09
| 1,694
| Jan 01, 2009
| Jan 01, 2009
|
it was ok
|
Calder is a Fetch. Upon his own death in the 18th century at nineteen, he joined the ranks of Fetches who take souls through the Door, down the Aisle
Calder is a Fetch. Upon his own death in the 18th century at nineteen, he joined the ranks of Fetches who take souls through the Door, down the Aisle to the Captain and his boat, who will ferry them to Heaven. When Calder's Key opens a Door to the deathbed of a small boy, a woman there catches his eye and holds him in thrall. He calls her Glory and wants to make her his Fetch apprentice by passing his Key to her. He thinks she's the governess of the children around the bed, and to make her happy he refuses to take the boy's soul and forces him to live. He never knows where his Key will take him, and is surprised but happy to see her again. It's a girl who sees him, though, but he refuses to acknowledge the meaning of this. When he arrives through a Door to take the soul of Rasputin - Father Grigory - he takes the offered opportunity to possess Rasputin's body while Rasputin's soul drifts with the Lost Souls. He animates the body but doesn't need food or water and can't be killed - fortunate for him, because Rasputin has enemies. Pretending to be Rasputin, he goes to the palace of the Russian Tsar and discovers that the lovely woman, older now, is actually the Tsarina and mother of the children he had seen at the deathbed, including Alexis, the sickly boy, and Ana, youngest girl and the one who saw him at the deathbed. She doesn't see Rasputin, but Calder's real form as solid. Crossing to the land of the living has done more than shake Calder's dreams of Glory - he's unwittingly stirred up the Lost Souls. He's also landed in the turbulent years of the Russian Revolution of 1918, when the entire family of the Tsar is executed. By giving the Key to Alexis at his mother's request, Alexis survives - and Alexis pass the Key to Ana. Now Calder must protect Alexis and Ana and try to get back his Key, which has gone missing, while Lost Souls form demons to take out their anger on him. It's a fairly interesting premise but not well executed. For one thing, Calder is a complete non-entity. He's the most dull, lifeless, slow-witted idiot I've ever come across as a protagonist - in spite of his actions. It's the way Whitcomb writes, a formal, slow prose that stifles action and emotion when it means to uplift it. The only time when her prose worked perfectly was a lovely little scene in the background, when they're on the train in England sitting opposite a mother with a baby, and across the aisle is a depressed soldier. It's a poignant moment unhampered by excessive description, and speaks volumes of the emotional turmoil this couple is experiencing in the war. That's one little scene out of the entire book that succeeded like that. Combining history with fantasy is quite common, but it can be tricky. Here we have the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the early days of the Movies, and three important characters - Ana, Alexis and Rasputin - who are incorporated into a story about angels and Heaven. It didn't work for me. I don't know much about Rasputin but he seemed an odd choice. It's easier working with Ana and Alexis because they're not larger-than-life historical figures, but they weren't fleshed out and I didn't care about them. There was very little in the way of romance except that now and then Whitcomb would remember that side of things and throw in a line about Calder feeling jealous about Ana's boyfriend Ilya and tucking a curl of her hair in his pocket: just sort of plopped in awkwardly. She didn't seem comfortable writing romance at all. It took me a long time to read this because I had to force myself to pick it up and continue, and there was a loooooong break in the middle. It's a plodding story that travels the globe but doesn't really go anywhere. The Aisle was an interesting creation - if it borrows from anything I'm unaware of it - and I liked the idea of demons forming of Lost Souls that cooperate enough to make one. The biggest problems the book has are Calder and the prose style. The latter might click with others but for me it was stiff, stilted, lumbering and trying too hard, and a YA book has never gone so slowly. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 04, 2009
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Feb 11, 2009
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0312368739
| 9780312368739
| 0312368739
| 4.21
| 6,337
| Jan 2009
| Jan 06, 2009
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did not like it
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This is one very generous star. Kia Rutherford has spent the last two years hiding. She's hiding from her ex-husband Drew Stanton, who tried to force h This is one very generous star. Kia Rutherford has spent the last two years hiding. She's hiding from her ex-husband Drew Stanton, who tried to force her into a ménage à trois with another man, a "third" from an exclusive club of men who enjoy sharing women. She's hiding from her old friends who spread the story of this secret club, which brought Chase Falladay to her doorstep, making a deal with her to retract the story. And she's hiding from Chase himself, the one man she's always wanted but could never have. Or so she thought. Chase has always desired Kia, but she seems untouchable, an ice queen. When he offers her pleasure at the skilled hands of himself and his "third", Khalid, a wealthy Saudi émigré, he finds her far from cold. Yet he holds himself back, fearful of his past, of his history with women, of hurting Kia and demanding more than she can give - he thinks her weak, and unable to manage him and his dark side. But Kia has had enough of being there only for the pleasure, and gives him an ultimatum: return alone, or don't return at all. With someone threatening Kia's life, Chase isn't about to let her out of sight, let alone out of his bed. First he has to convince Kia, and then he has to face the truth of his own feelings for her. This book was so far from pleasure it was like everything I hate in romance fiction put into one book. If someone told me "Lora Leigh" was a pseudonym for Christine Feehan on her worst days, I would not be surprised - while there are differences in writing style, the bad habits and clichés are all there. All of them. First of all, the characters and the premise. The characters are all rich white socialites who lead the kind of empty gossipy lives that seem glamorous on the surface but are really thin veneers for some utter tackiness. I felt nauseated, reading about these people, the waste that is their lives. I don't care about them, I'm revolted by their lifestyle, they just make me angry. Kia had her moments, her ballsy moments, her moments of complete abjection - I could feel for her at her lowest moments, but she was a bit of a sap. You can't really blame Chase for thinking she's weak-willed, as satisfying as it is to find out she's not. But she's just so good, so nice, it's very blah. Kia was nothing compared to Chase, though. I don't know that a male lead has ever frustrated me as much as Chase did. For sure, a lot of it has to do with the writing, which I'll get to. He was just so completely aggravating, so short-sighted, so pompous, and so tacky. He's a man who wears his mobile in a holster attached to his belt! He promised dark sensuality in bed and perhaps he was able to deliver, but you'd never really know it thanks to the writing. If I met someone studying writing, or who wanted to write a romance book, I would recommend this book (or one of Feehan's bad ones) to read and, as an assignment, get them to note down every bad writing habit and cliché they could find, as a way to learn how not to write. I didn't make such notes, but I'll point out the worst offenders. One of the big ones is the repetition. Not just of adjectives and lines used to describe something, of which the novel abounds. But also in the tiring angst-filled mental anguish of the characters second-guessing themselves, moaning about their pasts, their present, their futures until I lost all sympathy for them and just wanted them to grow up. Talk about self-indulgence. There was little character growth here, beyond a superficial falling-in-love thing. The chemistry between Kia and Chase was ruined by his complete lack of respect for her (or for any woman) and her clinginess. The sex scenes were the worst parts to read, because they were so poorly described you could hardly tell what was going on sometimes, and the characters kept interrupting with internal monologues about their own anxieties - talk about mood killer. Another bad habit was the constant switching of perspective. The third-person perspective would flit from Kia to Chase to her dad to his brother to Khalid to some random other person, all without warning. Sometimes it would switch from Kia to Chase and back again practically in the same sentence - a bit of an exaggeration, I know, but that's what it felt like a lot of the time. It left you confused, disorientated, pulled you out of the story and whacked your head against the wall. Oh wait, that was me throwing the book. It's writers like Leigh who give the romance genre a bad rep. I spent much of the time reading it (it took me a great deal longer to read than a book of this genre would normally) bitching about its many flaws, typos included. With two glaringly big flaws - writing quality and dismal plot - to contend with, that one star is looking more extravagant by the second. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 27, 2009
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Jan 25, 2009
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Paperback
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.61
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did not like it
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Jul 17, 2019
not set
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Jul 06, 2019
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| 4.22
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did not like it
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Feb 04, 2018
not set
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Jan 23, 2018
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| 3.96
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it was ok
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Oct 05, 2016
|
Jan 22, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.73
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it was ok
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Nov 2012
|
Oct 17, 2012
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|||||
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| 3.84
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did not like it
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May 21, 2013
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Sep 11, 2012
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|||||
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| 3.29
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it was ok
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Aug 06, 2012
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Jul 25, 2012
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|||||
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| 3.93
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did not like it
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Aug 09, 2016
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Aug 29, 2011
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| 3.80
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did not like it
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Apr 30, 2011
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Apr 06, 2011
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|||||
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| 3.07
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did not like it
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Jan 15, 2011
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Jan 16, 2011
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| 3.75
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did not like it
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Dec 06, 2010
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Dec 11, 2010
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| 3.79
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did not like it
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Mar 20, 2010
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Nov 24, 2009
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|||||
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| 3.38
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did not like it
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Jan 22, 2010
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Oct 28, 2009
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|||||
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| 3.42
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it was ok
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Oct 08, 2009
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Sep 30, 2009
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|||||
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| 3.77
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it was ok
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Sep 03, 2009
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Aug 26, 2009
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|||||
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| 3.67
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did not like it
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Jun 15, 2011
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Jun 20, 2009
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|||||
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| 3.76
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did not like it
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Jun 11, 2009
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Jun 08, 2009
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|||||
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| 3.49
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it was ok
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Apr 10, 2009
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Apr 08, 2009
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|||||
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| 3.58
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it was ok
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Oct 24, 2009
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Mar 17, 2009
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|||||
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| 3.09
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it was ok
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May 04, 2009
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Feb 11, 2009
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|||||
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| 4.21
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did not like it
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Jun 27, 2009
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Jan 25, 2009
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