Yes. I read this in two days, which actually should be a recommendation, but it really isn't. It just means tI have trouble properly reviewing this...
Yes. I read this in two days, which actually should be a recommendation, but it really isn't. It just means the mystery was pretty straightforward and the writing facile. It started out with something exclusively geared to shock, but nothing much at the back of it.
What I really loathed was this mannerism of ending every chapter (and by that I mean: every single one) with a cliffhanger. By the tenth chapter I was enervated, by the end of the story majorly pissed off. As manipulative as hell.
Another few things that got on my nerves:
Hunter always had abilities or knowledge which happened to be necessary to solve a part of the case. Deux ex machina in style. Not like e.g. Jack Reacher, who has a finite known number of abilities he adapts to solve his problems. Nor like Tony Hill, whose studies, academic knowledge and personality are a well-known entity right from the start. Nope - Hunter has them just fall in his lap whenever he needs them.
Garcia has a much repeated knack for happening onto clues.
The entire novel is blown up in size by the memories of Hunter. We get huge chunks of backstory and most of them are needless.
This attempts at modern psychologic Noir, but it is kid's play compared to what Jo Nesbo or Val McDermid write. By the way, including the shock moments, which McDermid does so much better.
At the end of the day, this is just a wannabe of a thriller. I'm astonished at the huge success this series has....more
I'm asked to like a horrifically vulgar, aggressive idiot of a woman who vomits snark and disrespect at everyone she meets. Within sight of Meh.
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I'm asked to like a horrifically vulgar, aggressive idiot of a woman who vomits snark and disrespect at everyone she meets. Within sight of the front-matter I was ready to nail her to a wall and forget her up there. Yuck.
Apart from that, the plot was rather boring, the entire thing US-centric, and containing the typical (for US-UF/PNR) menagerie of badly researched beasties pulled straight from some TV-series (be it Buffy or Supernatural or Charmed - I couldn't care less). Not an original thought or idea anywhere in sight.
What shocks me most is the huge amount of people rooting for this....more
This is the first book I read because the cover was so pukeworthily off-putting that I thought, the book can't be that bad.
I mean, look at that cover This is the first book I read because the cover was so pukeworthily off-putting that I thought, the book can't be that bad.
I mean, look at that cover model! He is HIDEOUS. Not just ugly, but he embodies every negative facet I hate in men irl. And the cover designer and the author seem to think, that this guy is better than sliced bread, or whatever. What the fuck?
Alas, my hope was mistaken. Actually the cover model is an excellent representation of the H, who is just apeshit batty alpha and that beyond even the slightest chance of repair. Come on, Hannibal Lecter (the Anthony Hopkins version) is 1,000% sexier than this unshaven, childish, self-centered army clod. And the h apparently loves being kicked around by that arsehole. I can't even.
A magazine for authors doodled up like a fucking fashion magazine? All complete with a delusional editor who self-identifies as a bloody goddess and wA magazine for authors doodled up like a fucking fashion magazine? All complete with a delusional editor who self-identifies as a bloody goddess and who hands out apple pie recipes and do-goody christmas stuff? Some cutesy hyper feminine and done up female model author on top for cover content, and not - maybe - something bookish?
Good grief!
Nothing against a solid magazine for the profession, but this is geared to appeal to an IQ well below room temperature....more
Sometimes I pick up on a book far too late. With the entire wave of dystopian YA already more or less a past thing, I couldn't find any majoOoookay...
Sometimes I pick up on a book far too late. With the entire wave of dystopian YA already more or less a past thing, I couldn't find any major motivation left in me to drag myself through yet another version of "pwoor US kids on a quest".
Quite frankly, the pidgin language gimmick quickly grated on me. I'm one of those obnoxious people who firmly believe that the less language draws attention to itself - outside poetry and song texts - the better the work is written. When I completely forget that language is the medium which makes me live inside a story, then I personally consider this a master piece. Which is why James Joyce isn't one of the greats for me, and while Newman seems to have had aspirations, she sure as hell isn't even a few steps on her route towards Joyce. Indeed, and as an outsider looking in, I found all that pidgin or attempted Ebonics being rather racist towards black and brown people. Sort of making Hollywood's "Mammy-English" the natural version for black people born and raised in the USA at our day and age. Happily I am not the only one thinking this:
If you take the undeniably huge effort for inventing pidgin English out of the equation, you are left with a dime a dozen plot very common in YA dystopia. As I said, I got to this one too late. Maybe ten years ago I might have appreciated some of the ideas, but truth be told, I still consider "Unwind" the far superior take of that genre....more
Read a long, long, loooong time ago - review also long overdue, because people tend to ask when I scoff.
Georgette Heyer wrote a pretentious, anachroniRead a long, long, loooong time ago - review also long overdue, because people tend to ask when I scoff.
Georgette Heyer wrote a pretentious, anachronistic, pseudo-scientific retcon version of the regency era, concentrated her allegedly so realistic writing on less than 300 people and those few they interacted with within a world-spanning empire, obliterated in a fell stroke everything else happening during a time which was one of the most important of industrialisation and science, not to speak of featuring the major political upheaval of an entire continent.
And she all but killed - doing all the above - any serious engagement of female writers with said era. Not just that, her books and how they reduce everything to a mere play of manners for more or less silly goals, are cause and reason for the continued contempt people direct at female romantic writing about that era. Or even just female writing. I can't even scorn those who do so, because they are absolutely, completely right.
Where Jane Austen wrote acerbic, brilliantly sarcastic and often even cynical accounts of what it meant to be female and constrained by the rules and laws of that era, and how women were reduced to hunt and grovel for male support, and left not the slightest doubt about how she despised this, Georgette Heyer erects some fantasy Disney world in which she feasted The Empire, sexism, misogyny and classism. Which is morbid.
Indeed, there are enough scholars who have proven that Heyer looked at the Regency from the point of view of a negatively thinking, sexist, racist, classist and terminally reactionary 20th century conservative, who not only was worse than any and all of her contemporaries, she also is much, much worse than any of her ilk of the Regency era. And she traded these negative properties to the majority of the contemporary authors trying hard to emulate and repeat her writing style, because... well, because she "invented" it. Looked at without the rose-coloured glasses this is toxic.
I wish she had stayed with her crime novels, and never unleashed her dolls' house version of Regency. Gah....more
This book is what happens, when an author is not just a bit in love with herself, but thoroughly self-indulgent instead. Convoluted, repetitive [image]
This book is what happens, when an author is not just a bit in love with herself, but thoroughly self-indulgent instead. Convoluted, repetitive and horribly cluttered prose, a grimdark setting which turns G.R.R. Martin into a writer of candy-floss fluff. A book which wallows in the alleged grime and horror of 19th century London. I mean, even Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy write rip-roaring humour compared to this.
I need brain bleach now.
It took me less than five pages and I was terminally depressed. I needed a hearty shot of brandy to get out of that mood, while watching Doris Day...
Seriously, this is the sort of writing that I know a couple of my friends adore, but which I consider pointless and pretentious, disrespectful of the actual history, and - well, no way around this - utterly self-indulgent on the author's side. It's an emotional wankfest of angst and h/h.
Stumbling across various comments in my friendlist, I finally got around to reading this book... and developed an immediate and MASSIVE headache.
[imagStumbling across various comments in my friendlist, I finally got around to reading this book... and developed an immediate and MASSIVE headache.
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I need to clarify that I actually like epistolary books, both the classic and the scrapbook kind. And I love comic books. When well done. When not overtaxing my willingness to pay attention to detail. When not straining my eyes. When not very boring.
Unfortunately this book is all of this and did all of this. Hence the headache. Thanks, but no thanks. My attention span is too short and I am too far-sighted for this sort of thing.
At least my TBR pile now is two books shorter. I ought to stop buying serieses without reading first the first book....more
Interestingly my former, quite elaborate and scathing, review is gone. So let me just reiterate that I have rarely read such an epitome of a misandrisInterestingly my former, quite elaborate and scathing, review is gone. So let me just reiterate that I have rarely read such an epitome of a misandrist, sexist story written by a woman as this one. Something is very awry between American men and women, and it most assuredly is not what the author allows her heroine to lament in her stead.
The female protagonist is a sexist, fat-shaming pig, and the male protagonist has so much of no clue at all, that his intelligence seems to stay within reach of room temperature. Unfortunately the author doesn't write well enough to divorce her own narrative voice, and thus herself, from the story and its protagonists, so she will have to own up to their behaviour. Which is disgusting, especially the woman's.
Blech.
Oh, and the story itself makes no sense at all. We live in the 21st century, not in an age of impeccable manners. All the female protagonist would have needed to do was say "no" and leave. That is all, and it is extremely hard to - realistically - conjure such an arsehole before my reading self who'd rather fuck someone for manners than simply shrug and leave....more
Let's quote Max Liebermann: "I cannot eat as much as I would like to vomit."
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I cannot emphasise strongly enough how much I've had it with people Let's quote Max Liebermann: "I cannot eat as much as I would like to vomit."
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I cannot emphasise strongly enough how much I've had it with people destroying other people's joy in reading.
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Yes. Yes, there are authors who have done "bad things". This ranges from authors who show the typical lack of knowledge and behaviour of their era (Mark Twain, Enid Blyton, etc.), there are authors who fiddled about their identity, some more, some less (Dick Francis, Josh Lanyon, JK Rowling, Karl May). There are authors too old to be on top of science or plainly intolerant of certain things (Anne McCaffrey, Orson Scott Card) and authors accused of things they can't react to anymore, yet are so condemning, one almost has to hide the covers if reading (Dickens, Hemingway, MZB, Joyce, Rand, Colleen McCullough).
No, I do not want to know about this! I. REALLY. DO. NOT. WANT. TO. KNOW. I'm selfish. I want to keep reading the books I cherished in the past until I die. Some I will discard anyway, because I've grown out of them. But quite many used to be and are on my constant rereading lists. I couldn't care less whether Dick Francis' wife wrote much of the prose in his books, or whether Karl May lived in a fantasy where he experienced all the stories he told. It's the stories.
The stories.
And guys like you and many others, some more, some less spiteful, take them away from us by "writing the truth about these authors." But books are about the fantasy!
Pablo Picasso was an often violent arsehole to his wives and lovers, yes, he engaged in physical and psychological abuse. Paul Gaugain was into young, though definitely post-pubertal, girls as sexual partners and infected them with his own syphilis. However, no one in the art world would even dream of rejecting the oeuvres of these painters and not every exhibition of them starts with the admonishment that one of them was a wifebeater (at a time where this was more or less the norm) or into teenagers (ages ago on an island where most girls are married off earlier).
No. I am not excusing what they did. I just see this and much of what authors lately got accused of within the perspective of era and culture. The problem is, however, that with authors you have to consciously drop into their minds when you read their books. A Picasso I can evaluate and enjoy without doing that. whereas certain accusations - quite a few of them unproven - have made it impossible to me to read these authors.
And I am angry. Not at the authors. They all were human and fallible. No, I'm angry at the spoilsports whose main joy is to destroy my fun in reading.
So, go and take your damned destruction of Karl May's image elsewhere. Thankfully I can return this book. God bless Amazon....more
Every once in a while I will try a book outside of my usual box. As I am still on the hunt for an acceptably readable YA book - not necessarily[image]
Every once in a while I will try a book outside of my usual box. As I am still on the hunt for an acceptably readable YA book - not necessarily of HP-calibre, you know, just an enjoyable and unique read - a YA fantasy coming with such high recs as this one sounded potentially interesting.
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Welp. It wasn't.
It was however written in the most self-enamoured, pretentious and convoluted prose I've read in a long while. A really long while. The thought of having to bear this for more than the fifty or so pages I actually read was a tad much. So much too much that this was the first book in 2018 which I returned against a refund.
Clearly, one has to be still a teenager to digest that much egotism and melodrama....more
I'm fed up to my gills with "special people who're particularly beautiful and accomplished".1.5* rounded up.
Not really my thing for several reasons...
I'm fed up to my gills with "special people who're particularly beautiful and accomplished". One is that super-blond norse god with the chiselled body of a skier (am I supposed to think Thor? ), an Olympic winner, no less. The other is that super-special detective, the bad ass among the bad asses with that speshul snowflake "hot" panther tattoo (scars would have been hot, and a man facing those scars would have been so). Which he has because someone whupped him one with a bicycle chain - which of course never bothered him. Clash of the titans? Superhero fanfiction?
Whatever, I am fed up with special Alphas straight out of the US male box. Both men didn't feel human to me, they felt like plastic tropes. I couldn't connect with either of them, and to enjoy BDSM or erotica I have to be and stay connected.
The writing was unfortunately overwrought, gimmicky, breathy (the "I am fanning myself so hot am I"-type) and very much in the style of current fanfics. I didn't like that all one bit. Instead I prefer reticent and precise prose, which doesn't tell me what to feel and instead allows me to feel and think for myself.
There was far too much and entirely needless sex in this, and not enough painplay. What sex there was, was rape, never mind that the author later tried to do away with that. It legally and technically is rape. When Hunter told Camden to get off, Camden should have gotten off.
An aside: Firstly, no one needs a safeword. People can play without safewords all day long - as long as the top stops whatever they do the moment the bottom says "stop that". Meta-consensual play (play during which nothing will stop what happens) is indeed a (very rare) thing. However, it is halfway healthily and securely done only between longterm partners (which these two absolutely weren't), who are sure of each other and know each other's limits to the nth point (which these two absolutely didn't, either) and lastly, even then it still is a crime, even where BDSM is legal.
I did like one or two short sensual passages, but on the whole the story didn't give me much. There wasn't enough pain play. The little pain play which was there, was half-heartedly written, and, so sorry, but "pain by pegging/fucking" is so not my kink. Fucking someone into submission is neither. Not if you set this up as some sort of BDSM play. This came across as highly off to me. All the security gadgets and leather guards and what-not felt completely overblown on the other side. What happened to simply stringing up a guy by his wrists and having a go? Do American authors currently have this "curious household implements" fetish? What is this about wet towels and belts as percussion instruments lately?
I by the way disliked the allegation that women can't break men down, pain wise. I do that regularly, there is no need for superior muscle power to do that. All you need are the right implements and technique. The funny thing is that the human body is much more fragile than people think.
And I hated the notion that Cam forced himself on Hunter knowing full well that Hunter isn't gay. That's saying something I really don't much like as a statement.
The author has potential, but she needs a ruthless editor who not only helps her contain her purple prose, but also where she enters fanfiction self-service....more
I can only rate how much I enjoyed it, and I didn't. Neither as a satire, nor as erotica, nor as a literary smoke grenade. I feel sorry for everyone who paid money for this, but - fuck - there's sure a lot of words in these books.
What I however can't forgive the author is that, even though allegedly being in the lifestyle, she writes something which paints BDSM as even worse than the non-con and negativity in "Fifty Shades of Grey". She paints it being abuse, and this despite protests to the opposite. Considering that she states "Fifty Shades of Grey" is a story of consensual BDSM I'm not even that astonished....more
I can only rate how much I enjoyed it, and I didn't. Neither as a satire, nor as erotica, nor as a literary smoke grenade. I feel sorry for everyone who paid money for this, but - fuck - there's sure a lot of words in these books.
What I however can't forgive the author is that, even though allegedly being in the lifestyle, she writes something which paints BDSM as even worse than the non-con and negativity in "Fifty Shades of Grey". She paints it being abuse, and this despite protests to the opposite. Considering that she states "Fifty Shades of Grey" is a story of consensual BDSM I'm not even that astonished....more
Quite possibly this series was intended to be an intellectual and elaborate spoof of Fifty Shades of Grey. I wouldn't put it past the author, who undoQuite possibly this series was intended to be an intellectual and elaborate spoof of Fifty Shades of Grey. I wouldn't put it past the author, who undoubtedly is of the college-educated kind, to have aimed for that goal. Alas, even if that was the intent, there is always the huge difference between trying and doing. In this case the attempt fell right into the chasm between the two: which is on the nose, full facial.
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These three books are almost beat for beat a retelling of the FSoG series, except for it being written as if a postmodernistic literature prof had a baby with the Harvard phone book, raised by Foucault on a mix of Thorazine and milk toast. I seriously commend everyone who managed to read this bore without skimming or falling asleep.
Again, possibly that was the intent of this series. I can only rate how much I enjoyed it, and I didn't. Neither as a satire, nor as erotica, nor as a literary smoke grenade. I feel sorry for everyone who paid money for this, but - fuck - there's sure a lot of words in these books.
I might - very cautiously - mention that neither the Semperoper, nor Schloss Pillnitz, the Frauenkirche, the Residenzschloss, the Zwinger, nor finally the reconstructed or repaired baroque and rococo city centre are anything to be sneezed at:
[image] author: Geolina163 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
And beautiful, Bohemian Prague is also not a cesspool of abduction and sex trafficking. I've visited both cities, and the treatment they were given in these books is... highly curious. But this I might forgive an author, who either never travelled there, or has picked places as per old prejudices.
What I however can't forgive is that, even though allegedly being in the lifestyle, she writes something which paints BDSM as even worse than the non-con and negativity in "Fifty Shades of Grey". She paints it being abuse, and this despite protests to the opposite. Considering that she states "Fifty Shades of Grey" is a story of consensual BDSM I'm not even that astonished....more
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