Author Archives: sadie

Review of Indigo & Iris (Indigo Lewis #1), by C.M. Stunich

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Indigo & Iris

Early last year, I grabbed C. M. Stunich‘s Indigo & Iris from the Amazon free list.

Description from Goodreads:
“If I had known last week that I would be sitting in the middle of a Dr. Seuss/Wild, Wild West hybrid nightmare, I would’ve brought more booze.”

Rule One: Gold protects but doesn’t prevent.
Rule Number One Hundred and Eighteen: Do not discredit any information for all things are, in time, inherently useful.
Rule One Hundred and Eighty Seven: Remember the Rules.

They sound more like fortune cookies than bits of advice, but Indigo Lewis is going to have to get real used to ’em if she wants to survive. After eight years on the lam, her maniacal twin sister has finally caught up with Indigo and taken away everything she’s finally built for herself. On the coattails of that tragedy comes Lynx, the man with the goofy grin and the gold epaulettes, who brings with him a train that travels without tracks and an arsenal of weapons that shouldn’t reasonably exist. And all of it for a broken spyglass. Indigo thought she’d seen it all. She was wrong.

Review:
Ok, I’m just gonna go ahead and start off with the same pissed off rant I’ve had about a million times now. (I’m not sure when this became an acceptable norm, but I wish it hadn’t.) Books should consist of at least three important things: a beginning, middle and END. Yes, an end is a required part of a book. Why then, have I read so many novels that don’t have one? Angry, it makes me angry. It makes me want to write off otherwise perfectly acceptable authors out of pure spite. (And Stunich can sure write.) Can’t bother to give me, the reader, an ending? Well, I can’t be bothered to start any more of your books. BAM

This is especially pertinent when speaking about a book like Indigo & Iris that starts out somewhere in the middle, with a whole lot of unsaid history, a confused MC and even more confused reader. For at least the first 50% of the book you have no idea what is going on (and very little even after that). This book is literally like running around with the Mad Hatter and his dozy door mouse. There’s even a lot of tea. But it’s random, unpredictable and makes little sense. However, it does manage to inspire confidence in the reader that at some point it will.

It’s a fun read. Indigo is pretty badass, in a cranky, bitchy kind of way. Lynx is hot stuff, even if he is crazy as all get out. It even manages to avoid falling into unintended YAness. (A trap a lot of books of similar intent seem stumble into.) It’s an adult read, full of cursing and sex jokes. It’s fun. But their vivacious tête-à-têtes and the steampunk descriptions are all the book manages to ride on. What plot there is, is too hidden to even guess at. And believe me, as interesting as the machinery and the characters’ repartee is, it gets old quickly. As did Indigo punching Lynx in the face and pulling guns on him constantly. It was funny for a while, but when it (and little else) happened again and again it lost quite a bit of its lustre.

Then, when it all just starts (and I mean JUST starts) to come together in something resembling a recognisable story arc the book ends. Essentially, I was lost in the beginning but enjoyed the characters enough to keep reading. I then lost patience with the whole thing and wished for a quick end. But it eventually started to pick back up and I became invested again, only to have that relit spark immediately doused by an untimely ending. It’s like an emotional sucker punch. Ha, gotcha!

I’d love to know what happens next. But I just can’t be bothered, because you know what, I’d bet top dollar that if this book ends on a precipitous cliffhanger with no discernible conclusion the next one will too and I’m just not doing that to myself. (You see authors; this is the sort of expectation you’re creating in your readers with all these serials.)

It’s worth noting too that, while well written, there were a few editorial mishaps and a little more attention could have been paid to both textual and digital formatting. There were a number of places where hard returns were missing, creating confusion in terms of who is speaking or reacting to the statement and the font changed sizes several times in the course of the book.

The Fallen

Book Review of The Fallen (Sons of Wrath 0.5), by Keri Lake

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The FallenI downloaded a copy of Keri Lake‘s The Fallen from the Amazon free list. I believe it is permafree.

Description from Goodreads:
To catch the Fallen, you have to become the very evil you were bred to slay.

Show loyalty. Be willing to go deep into the gritty underbelly of the world, where the vilest acts of human carnage thrive and seep into your mind like a black poison, consuming every part of you that was once good. Ignore your dark cravings and keep to the most important rule of all: never save the mortals.

This is the life of a Sentinel. 

Some call us the toughest angels in the heavens. Unbreakable. But even the strong can break in the face of temptation. 

Human females have always been the forbidden fruit for our kind—an enticement I’ve resisted for centuries, until she came along. 

Karinna lusts for vengeance. 

She wants inside the darkness, where the Fallen own the corrupted streets of Detroit—the perfect bait to take down the biggest crime ring the city has ever known. 

I want her. To have her, though, I’ll have to break the rules. 

For one taste of the forbidden, I’ll have to commit the most heinous sin of all …

Review: **spoilerish**
I must have missed the memo. When exactly did the word erotica become synonymous with abuse? This is complete drivel—cheap thrills and post Fifty Shade of Grey crap with a paranormal twist. Seriously, it is one big rape fantasy and glorification of abuse.

The thing is, I can understand the rape fantasy part. I REALLY don’t enjoy reading them (in fact, I had to force myself to finish this one), but I understand women who do. I totally get facing that fear on safe pages and forcing it into something you can garner a little excitement and fun from instead of just a terror inducing real possibility. I get that.

What I don’t get it why women, WOMEN (of which Ms. Lake is just one of many) would continue to write all females as mindless, volition-less, disposable commodities who rather enjoy their own abuse, up to and including death and dismemberment (and starting in childhood). This book is littered with quotes like this:

This woman has suffered since the day she was brought into this world.” Hasziel cupped her cheek and smoothed his thumb over her skin. “It is the only place in which she finds comfort.”

What nonsense. This book even suggests that the female=tradable possession to be passed by a man to a man as reward belief exists even in Heaven. Wow, I bet that’s what every good Christian woman dreams of when she prays for those pearly white gates.

Why is this seen as sexy? Why is this so common that I’m tempted to call it cliché. Women in this book are collected, disparaged, drugged, raped (almost constantly as background noise), beaten, “trained” (which is a euphemism for being abused until they stop fighting back and become docile enough to be raped by others…but it’s then presented as enjoying her position as sex slave), killed and dismembered. Meanwhile the MC is physically abused in some bastardized version of BDSM in which she has no control or realistic expectation of not being killed. In fact, she’s terrified.

Of course, she comes to love and crave it as an illustration of how all women really only want to be dominated, hurt and broken (and what good are they then?) by the men they love. (Thus, all those other women who have been abused and killed in the book probably enjoyed their rapes and murders too.) While simultaneously regaining memories of being gang raped by her father and his cronies, as if to suggest that any woman who desires something different than monogamous, vanilla sex must already have been defiled in some fashion. You’d think these were mutually exclusive, but apparently not. 

It’s horrid. I went into this knowing it was a dark read. I’m no prude and enjoy the darker side of fiction (that’s why I picked this book up in the first place), but that doesn’t mean I wanted to spend 200+ being told how worthless me and my pussy are. I mean the whole concept of this book is that Xander can torture and kill people regularly, he can get blow jobs from a mindless sex slave, he can break women into said slave, he can kidnap, whip, and abuse Karinna, all with no heavenly repercussions. But god forbid his penis enter her vagina, even in love, and he’s condemned to Hell for all eternity. We women apparently aren’t just worthless, our vileness is contagious.

And let’s not miss that it is essentially JUST women we’re talking about. Almost as an afterthought Kid’s are thrown in too (but one would presume they’re at least half girls to start with and who know when boys age out of the victimizable children’s group), but never, NEVER men. The book is very clear on this.

Nothing more stony and unapologetic than a bitter angel forced to leave the heavens—even demons avoided the Fallen. Humans, on the other hand, couldn’t avoid them if they tried. Every day, kids and females got snatched up from the streets like smelt in a shallow pond, drugged and used at the amusement of their sadistic captors.

I could write an essay on the distancing technique being used in the use of ‘female’ instead of women, girls or a name (it crops up a lot). But I’ll let that one go. What I really want to point out is that I’m always amazed that truly evil beings are still expected to adhere to strict heterosexual norms. Men are never victimised, be it in a any sort of homoerotic way or just, you know, basic power dynamics. Baffling.

To wrap this up, I’d like it noted that at no point have I used the world misogynistic. Misogyny being the hatred of women and girls, but the word is often thrown around willy-nilly whenever a book or character treats women badly. I never got the impression that the author or even any of the cruelly dismissive men in the book hated women. To hate someone (as an individual or gender grouping) requires caring enough to have an opinion about them. It elevates them at least to the level of ‘human enough to think about.’

No one here did that. In a sense, I think this is worse. Women weren’t hated. They were just not accorded any sense of human agency, or even faces as they’re all masked as well as apparently thoughtless automatons. They were, as a whole, mere shadows that men act upon. I’m holding out hope that sometime in the near future the female population will realise that we’re worth more than this.

The book did try to redeem itself at the end by punishing the bad guys, but it was too little too late for me and really the exact same story could have been relayed without dehumanising every woman…excuse me, female…to pass the pages. (And been a damn good book too.) I’m giving this two stars and the only reason it’s not a single star is that mechanically it’s fairly well written. I like a spot of erotica here and again. I even like a bit of dark erotica. But I don’t want to finish the book feeling like shit about being a poor, pitiful, potentialess, penisless, disposable victim…i.e. a woman.

Hell & High Water

Book Review of Hell & High Water, by Charlie Cochet

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Hell & High WaterI bought a copy of Charlie Cochet‘s Hell & High Water.

Description from Goodreads:

When homicide detective Dexter J. Daley’s testimony helps send his partner away for murder, the consequences—and the media frenzy—aren’t far behind. He soon finds himself sans boyfriend, sans friends, and, after an unpleasant encounter in a parking garage after the trial, he’s lucky he doesn’t find himself sans teeth. Dex fears he’ll get transferred from the Human Police Force’s Sixth Precinct, or worse, get dismissed. Instead, his adoptive father—a sergeant at the Therian-Human Intelligence Recon Defense Squadron otherwise known as the THIRDS—pulls a few strings, and Dex gets recruited as a Defense Agent.

Dex is determined to get his life back on track and eager to get started in his new job. But his first meeting with Team Leader Sloane Brodie, who also happens to be his new jaguar Therian partner, turns disastrous. When the team is called to investigate the murders of three HumaniTherian activists, it soon becomes clear to Dex that getting his partner and the rest of the tightknit team to accept him will be a lot harder than catching the killer—and every bit as dangerous.

Review:
Oh, Dissappointment, we meet again. I was let down by this book. Not necessarily because it was a bad book, but because it wasn’t the book I wanted it to be, the book I expected it to be. I was expecting something like Cut & Run orCatch a Ghost. (Heck, Catch a Ghost is even book one of the Hell or High Waterseries, so thinking Hell & High Water would be similar isn’t that much of a stretch.) From the books blurb, I expected to watch two gruff, alpha males manage not to kill one another long enough to have a touch of hot steaming sex and maybe solve a mystery when they have their pants on. 

Nope, what I got was one brooding but fragile, emotionally damaged alpha male and one loud mouthed twink, who basically just talked incessantly and shook his ass at his partner until he gave in and fucked him. Now, I generally like both types of characters, but Dex didn’t start the book all light and airy-like. He just kind of randomly morphed into it about a third of the way in and I had a really hard time fitting the latter into the role of an elite soldier/police officer. (THIRDS is part of the military, but functions as a police force. I don’t know.) It might have worked had Dex not been so ridiculous about it all. He hides nothing. He filters nothing. He ignores all rules (of fraternisation and decorum). And that’s all on his first day.

In a way that was a big part of the problem. Most of us have had at least one first day at a new job. You’re nervous, right? Not good ‘ol Dex. He’s loud, proud and cocky. He joshes his new coworkers with abandon, makes lascivious jokes at and about them, plays pranks, and amazingly manages to garner a complete understanding of team dynamics in mere minutes.

No one gets angry though. He doesn’t get disciplined. He isn’t even seen as the type of employee an employer hustles out the door. He is apparently utterly immune to normal expectations of behaviour. Plus, that first day went on and on, with a lot happening. No day or two of orientation for the THIRDS. Nope, it’s right out into the field and giving orders for Dex, rookieness be damned.

Now, I’ll admit part of this is a personal issue. I hate when authors let some characters get away with disregarding proper respect of the chain of command or aggress on alpha characters without the consequences all other characters would face. It annoys me. It especially annoys me when whole plots are based on this ability. It doesn’t feel legitimate or believable. And the progression ofHell & High Water‘s plot hinges almost entirely on Dex’s ability to ‘charm’ (if that’s what such annoyances are called) his coworkers into accepting him. 

Then there are the murders to be solved. I knew who the bad guy was from practically chapter one. It really wasn’t that hard to figure out. I could have dealt with that if the book didn’t let itself fall into the common trap of not giving the characters the information they needed to figure it out on their own, so eventually the baddie has to stop being the smart, careful villain he’d been up to that point and for no discernible reason start being sloppy and basically announce himself, his past sins and his dastardly plan to the main character. This isn’t uncommon in fiction, but it’s still a pretty weak way to solve a mystery.

I don’t want to make it seem like the book’s all bad. It isn’t. There is a lot of good humor in it. The sex isn’t horrible. There are some fun side characters, with enough hints at depths worth exploring to grab a readers attention. (I was especially interested in seeing more of Cael and Ash’s friendship.) There are also some great lines in it. Like this one:

This isn’t the HPF. You’re in our world now and it’s scary, and ugly, and fucked up. They won’t pat you on the head and tell you how special you are because you have a black daddy and a Therian brother who proudly waves his rainbow flags with you. Here, you’re a freak like the rest of us, so don’t tell me how to do my job.


I think my issue was just that everything was too over the top. Dex’s personality was too big, Sloane and his team’s grief too all-consuming, the antagonist’s instability too obvious to have gone unnoticed. It was all just too much of what could have been a good thing.