Monthly Archives: May 2016

Blood Moons

Book Review of Blood Moons (The Blood Series #1), by Alianne Donnelly

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Blood MoonsI picked up a copy of Blood Moons, by Alianne Donnelly, from Amazon when it was free. I read it as the first in my Blood Moon Reading Challenge.

Description from Goodreads:
They say no good deed ever goes unpunished, a sentiment Dara understands fully now that she is paying for a crime she didn’t commit. It was stupid to call in a murder she didn’t really see. But how could Dara have kept silent? Now a stunning—scratch that, a dangerous—man with a frightening secret of his own is telling her he can help. Yeah, right. A telepath knows better than to trust mere words. 

The last decade of Tristan’s life has been penance. All that time spent among the worst dregs of society might have made him begin to question his humanity, but he’s never felt so much like an animal as he does around this timid, delicate female. Her very presence stirs the beast within him; Tristan can feel it growing stronger every day. Any more time with Dara, and it might overpower him completely. But without her, he stands no chance at all…

Review:
I had problems with this book. It wasn’t the writing. That was fine. It wasn’t the idea behind the plot. That was fine. It wasn’t the dialogue. That too was fine. It was the fact that the first third is basically just ‘let’s protect the fragile heroine from being raped in this unbelievably vile, but oddly sterile prison with a gender ration of 4 women to 200 evil, evil men that the reader never sees or feels the threat of’ and the last two-thirds rambles on and on forever. This book needed an editor. Not for typos and grammar mistakes, I never noticed any, but for someone to tell the author to cut a third of the length and tighten the plot a lot.

I also thought the characters, Dara especially, were very shallow and did things that were not only too stupid to believe, but often out of character. Like volunteering for maximum security prison with the most violent offenders (because you usually get to choose your level, apparently) despite being innocent and as fragile as glass or leaving the person you are so protective of that you literally guard her from passer-bys on the street alone when there have been legitimate threats against her.

Close, but no cigar for me.

Blood Moon challenge

Blood Moon(s) Reading Challenge

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You know I often stumble into little self-imposed reading challenges. The habit started a couple years ago, when I discovered I had a number of books with the same title. Since then, done it again, read all my books with Omega in the title, and I’m currently slowly reading all the alphas.  I even did one where I had several books using the same stock photo on the cover and another where I just read books by people I’d met online. Sometimes it’s the little things that keep me amused. Plus, I have so many books, it’s often a relief to find some way to ease the what-to-read question.

Well, I started reading Blood Moons, last night. Then, as I had everything ordered roughly alphabetically, I noticed I had six books with almost identical titles. There is some variation, a plural moon or Blood Moon being in the series title versus a book title, but it’s enough. ‘Imma read em,’ I thought, and thus was born the Blood Moon Challenge.

Blood Moon challenge

Part of what makes a challenge a challenge for me, is  the intentionality of it. Declaring what I intend to do, so that I can accomplish it. You know, kind of like making a to-do list so that you can mark each item off. So, that’s what this first post is, my I-plan-to post. And I plan to read six books with Blood Moon(s) on the cover (that way I’m including both titles and series).

Here is a list of the books (most were free at the time of posting):

*Edit: There were initially 7 titles. But I found that, though I had one more marked as owned, I couldn’t actually find it. So, I removed it, leaving 6 for the challenge.

Blood Rights

Book Review of Blood Rights (House of Comarré #1), by Kristen Painter

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Blood RightsI borrowed a copy of Blood Rights, by Kristen Painter, from my local library.

Description from Goodreads:
Born into a life of secrets and service, Chrysabelle’s body bears the telltale marks of a comarré—a special race of humans bred to feed vampire nobility. When her patron is murdered, she becomes the prime suspect, which sends her running into the mortal world…and into the arms of Malkolm, an outcast vampire cursed to kill every being from whom he drinks.

Now, Chrysabelle and Malkolm must work together to stop a plot to merge the mortal and supernatural worlds. If they fail, a chaos unlike anything anyone has ever seen will threaten to reign.

Review:
Man I’m in a slump. I haven’t read anything I love lately and the best I can give this book is that I didn’t hate it, like the last two books I read. But I’m certainly not going so far as to say it’s good. I didn’t find anything particularly new or innovative in it; just yet another growly alpha male and a woman in need of rescue and protection. Sure, Painter made sure Chrysabelle said ‘I’m well trained and can take care of myself’ several times (often enough it got repetitive), but I didn’t really notice her doing much successful defending of herself. Add to that the fact that I didn’t even like either main character and you have a fail in the making.

What I did find was about a million ways to sexualize Chrysabelle to make the whole thing artificially more titillating, something that annoys me to no end. I mean she let herself get ‘blood drunk’ in a dangerous environment from a condition she’s had her whole life (so no surprise it was going to happen), stripped down to her smalls and sexily prowled around offering herself to the man. None of which was actually necessary or even remotely like her personality to date. Or lets not miss the fact that, despite being a 115-year-old virgin she was called a whore about a dozen times (as are most the women). The giving of blood was pretty clearly equated to sex and she was constantly either offering it up or having some random male laying claim to it. Ugh.

Then there was the identity of the villain….show of hands. How many readers saw that twist coming? Come on now, hands up. Let’s see, one, two, seven, ten, four hundred….Oh, I see, everyone. I guess we can call it predictable then. Plus, the use of the loss of a child to drive her insane was clichéd. Probably the second most common reason women in fiction go bad, just behind being scorned by a man. And the fact that she was prostituting herself for power (or maybe agreeing to regular gang rapes, not sure how to categorize that one, unpleasant as it was)? Oh, I see, one more way to make sure readers know women are just whores and only have one path to power, that just happens to start at the apex of their legs. Got it. Side-eyes hard.

Then there was the whole ‘pure’ thing and the ‘patron’ thing, neither of which are actually defined in any way. What makes her pure? Being a virgin? No, I don’t think so, though sex does apparently muddy the purity. Eating well, not taking drugs, some characteristic of birth, etc? No idea. What about the owning of blood rights and the patron thing? Was that a physical attachment or just a legal arrangement? Still no idea.

All in all, if you like this sort of Urban Fantasy, moving into Paranormal Romance you’ll likely enjoy this. It kept me busy for an evening, but I didn’t love it and I’m not interested in continuing the series. In fact, writing this review brought out how many ways I disliked it and I realize I liked it even less than I thought.