Monthly Archives: March 2015

Prophecy Foretold

Book Review of Prophecy Foretold (The Prophecy Chronicles #1), by Ron Hartman

Prophecy ForetoldAuthor, Ron Hartman sent me an ecopy of his novel, Prophecy Foretold, for review.

Description From Goodreads:
These are dark days for Naphthali. The king has been murdered, the land invaded by the Imperial Army. It will absorb Naphthali into an Empire that stretches across all of Enialé at any cost. The ravaged people cling to an ancient promise, an assurance that a prophesied savior will come to set them free.

Daniel Martin is trapped in a life that hasn’t gone as expected. His pharmacy is struggling and he is losing all hope of making a difference in his patients’ lives. His family is the one shining light in his disenchanted life, but he is torn from them when an accident draws him to Naphthali. The people need him, but Daniel is driven by his need to return to the family he loves. Is he the Prophesied One? Only time will tell as both the Empire and the Resistance battle for Daniel while the fate of Naphthali hangs in the balance…

Review:
*groan* I found this deeply dissatisfying. The writing was fine and, though I noticed a couple missing words and such, I had no complaints about the editing. I just plain found the whole thing dull, dull, dull.

Yes, there where plenty of skirmishes. Violence was a constant threat throughout the novel. But Daniel basically traveled for the course of the ENTIRE novel. I’m serious. He got picked up by one army, that schlepped him against his will in one direction. Then he got rescued by another one and marched the other direction. He was still dragging himself forward as the novel ended. He traveled from the beginning to the end of this book and when it looked like he might get where he was going and the story actually finally begin…the book ended. There was no payoff at all.

I can’t even say it was character driven and garner enjoyment in that manner. You don’t get to know anyone deeply because there is so little conversation. What’s more, the bad guys are very bad and the good guys are predominantly very good. No sense of moral ambiguity or grey to them.

As an example, every soldier of the opposing army is, without exception, is a raping, murderous villain. They kill indiscriminately and rape or threaten to rape every single woman they come across and we’re given a few near misses of raped children (both girls and boys). They are dysfunctional evil. By which I mean, a group of men can only commit so many open atrocities before even a cowed populace will risk death to rebel. These characters were so openly vile that they became caricatures of themselves and were utterly unbelievable. There was no depth to them at all.

All in all, Hartman can write and I appreciated that the hero was middle aged and out of shape (in other words, normal) but this book drags interminably. It just never picks up any speed. Though there is an interesting idea here, I have no interest in continuing the series.

Annoying closeup guy

This Week’s Reading Challenge: Annoying Close-Up Guy

Annoying closeup guy

I own thousands of books…literally thousands. This means that, at any one time, choosing a book to actually read can be difficult. Like Barry Schwartz claimed in his book Paradox of Choice, more options can make decisions harder. So I spend a lot of time scrolling through my To Be Read list.

I do this on Goodreads, where I can see all the covers together. (I’m a visual creature after all.) I could just as easily do it in Calibre, but I like GR’s format. Some covers are more attractive than others. As it happens, I find the picture in the above covers particularly unappealing. I don’t know why, but I do. And, as all four of those books came from my TBR list, I own four books with essentially this same yucky cover. I see it all the freakin’ time, because it has four times the likelihood of popping up, even in a randomised order, than any other book I own. So, the repetition is unavoidable and unignorable.

[You see authors/publishers, this is why you shouldn’t use easily accessible stock photos on your covers. It annoys readers, because we notice and it just looks like you didn’t put much effort into it. This certainly isn’t the only cover photo I have several books using.]

In this case, I’ve decided to do something about the situation. And the obvious answer (besides just deleting them, which isn’t my style) is to read the suckers so they never show up in my TBR list again. I’m going to spend the coming week doing what I’ve deemed an ‘annoying closeup guy’ reading challenge. I’ll read all four books back-to-back.

And I know that from an author’s perspective, it may seem a good thing that the cover got their book read, but surely having a reader start out irked isn’t an ideal situation. Of course, I’m not going to allow this irritation to colour my reviews. They will be as honest about the good and the bad as any other.

Here are the books deets:

Spell Struck

Book Review of Spell Struck (The Witchblood Dossiers, #1), by Nicole J. Fawcett

Spell StruckIn December of 2012, I downloaded Nicole J. Fawcett‘s Spell Struck from the Amazon free list. I read it as part of me TBR reading challenge (reading books I’ve own 2+ years).

Description from Goodreads:
Rhiannon Grey is a detective in a hectic police headquarters. She’s also a witch, in a society that’s learned not to think too highly of the supernatural, and her boss is a two thousand-year-old vampire. Rian has discovered the hard way that trouble is always just around the corner.

This time, trouble is called Griffin King, a fifteen year old runaway whose strangled corpse is found floating in the river. He’s not the first street-kid to vanish recently, or to turn up later, very dead. When Rian starts to suspect he was a witch, too, and that his magic led to his death, her investigation turns into a personal crusade. 

No one seems terribly concerned about the fate of a few disappeared urchins, though. And when a series of brutal murders starts panicked speculation about a nest of vampires, Rian’s boss has other things on his mind.

But Rian won’t be distracted. Not by bureaucracy, not by murder, and certainly not by her dysfunctional private life. Her family think she’s going to end up dead; her friends think she’s going to end up dead lonely; and her lovers are dead frustrated . . .

Reading:
This is a perfectly passable, but basically uninspiring PNR. Rian wavered between being strong and smart and being the child-like joker of the detective team (certainly never quite as slick, together and leader-like as any of the men who were ostensibly her equals).

She went back and forward between kicking butt in a fight and tripping over her own feet, especially when scantily dressed such that the UST was artificially amped up. (Because she forgot to put a robe over her panties and crop top pyjamas while self-consciously sharing a hotel suite with a man she’s attracted to. Sure, that kind of thing happens all the time, right?)

She also oddly needed a two thousand-year-old vampire to teach her how to use magic, despite coming from and being raised in a long-standing, powerful family of witches with Fae connections, had a tendency to run off and do TSL stuff when she was unhappy, suffered a minor mental break-down out of nowhere and instigated what will obviously be a love-triangle in future books. So, there were definitely parts of this book I distinctly disliked but for the most part, I enjoyed it. I was especially fond of Cato, Safi and Marco.

The writing and editing was fine. Though there was a habit of putting a space between the beginning quotation mark and the first word of a quote (like this, ” bla, bla, bla”). I’ve seen people do that before, so maybe it’s a standard somewhere but it drove me crazy. Otherwise, I have no real complaints about the writing/editing. (Oh, except that the title makes no sense when, not once in the whole book, did ANYONE sling, craft, chant, speak or even get struck by a spell. In fact, we’re kind of told magic doesn’t work like that. Maybe I missed something.)

I enjoyed the book enough to pick up a sequel if I saw it on sale, but not enough to buy it at full price. (That’s a legitimate way to rank a book right?)