Category Archives: books/book review

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Book Review: Beauty & the Necromancer, by Kate Seger

Kate Seger‘s Beauty and the Necromancer kept passing my TikTok feed. I suppose I was influenced because I decided to get a copy and give it a read. To my great surprise, I discovered that I already owned the series. I think I must have picked it up in a freebie event at some point. I love it when this happens!

beauty and the necromancer cover

When Beauty steals into the cursed lands of Eldritch Manor to save her starving family, she finds herself ensnared by its master— Darius, the dreaded Necromancer. Amidst a crumbling gothic manor where the dead dance and lost souls wail, an unlikely and dangerous passion ignites between captive and captor.

Beauty sees humanity buried beneath Darius’s monstrous exterior, while Darius, enthralled by her defiant spirit, remembers the man he once was. Together, they seek to break Darius’s curse. But vengeful forces in Beauty’s village soon threaten to tear the lovers apart.

my review

Sadly, this was a flop for me. So much so that even though I have book two, I’m not going to bother reading it. I feel like I’ve done my due diligence by at least finishing this one. I have two primary complaints…well, three, but the third is a personal preference kind of thing.

The first is the writing. It’s readable, I don’t mean to say it isn’t. But it’s the purplest purple prose that ever purple prosed. For me to complain about this is a sign of how purple it is, because I’m generally pretty tolerant of purple prose. Seger’s writing surpassed even my generous allowance for flowery speech.

Second, I’m unsure where the line between copying and retelling lies. However, this definitely falls much more closely to a carbon copy of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast than any retelling that uses the fairytale as its source material. Sure, Seger changed the names (And we won’t even touch how blunt changing Belle’s name to Beauty is in this scenario or that her mother’s name is Marybelle). The beast is a shadowy necromancer, rather than furry, but the plot points align precisely. So exactly, in fact, that by the end, I was literally calling them. “It’s time to go to the garden now.” “It’s time for Gaston (Harrow) to show back up.” “It’s time for the angry Beast to make an appearance.” Honestly, while I don’t think this is actually the case, I almost beauty and the necromancer photofeel like this reads as if Seger gave ChatGPT a “Write me a Beauty and the Beast story” prompt and this is the result*.

Third, and on the personal preference front, this is far too sappy and sweet toward the end. This is an issue for me, both because it happens far too quickly and there isn’t enough substance to support it, and because it’s not believable (or for me, pleasant to read).

*After I wrote this review, I googled “Does author Kate Seger use AI to write?” This is what came up. So, maybe I wasn’t so off the mark, after all. Here, the author claims to use AI to revise already-written scenes that she believes could be improved. I felt, in reading this book, that AI outlined or structured it, plotted it out. The book feels AI-generated to me. But I’m not dropping any sort of allegation. I’m a university student, and I know far too many people writing essays that AI-detectors are calling AI-generated because they know how to use an em dash, etc. (Hell, I use Grammarly, and I swear sometimes it wants to rewrite my sentences so extremely that it could probably be considered AI.)  I’m just saying the book/plot feels the same as many AI-generated pieces of writing do.


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Book Review: Kiss of Smoke, by Amy Pennza

I purchased a copy of Amy Pennza‘s Kiss of Smoke from the TikTok shop.

Kiss of Smoke Cover

What was supposed to be a dream vacation just turned into a nightmare. It’s not every day you board a private jet for an all-expenses-paid trip to Scotland with your two gorgeous bosses. And it’s not every day you spot your fiancé kissing another woman across the terminal.

The man I was ready to marry has been cheating on me for a year. Dumped and humiliated, the best I can do is get on the plane and lick my wounds. Fortunately, my bosses are more than willing to help…and in more ways than I ever imagined.

But Lachlan and Alec can’t possibly be interested in me. They’re in love with each other…right? Scotland is cold this time of year, but these Scots are bringing the heat in ways I’m not sure I can handle.

And as they continue fanning the flames, it’s clear they’ve been hiding more than their attraction to me. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. Now I have to hope I don’t get burned.

my review

Oh, what a disappointment. I really wanted to love this, but I just didn’t. Some of the issues are first-book-in-a-series syndrome, setting the world, introducing the magic system, etc. However, it’s mainly that the book felt poorly balanced in two ways.

First, it’s about 85% sex, which is fine. Except that the author didn’t seem to recognize that it’s an erotic novel and kept trying to insert plot points. Unfortunately, they felt random and ill-supported, since it’s otherwise an erotic fantasy novel. The end result is that the book neither excelled in plot nor erotica, as it could have if it had chosen one or the other.

Second, this is a polyamorous relationship in which the two men are an established couple trying to find a female mate to bring into their bed. You feel this a lot. From start to finish, this was Lachlan and Alec, plus Chloe. At no point did I feel like she was equally as important in the relationship as the two of them. This comes out in the sex scenes, especially. There are a lot more of just the two of them than the three of them, and none with just her and one of them. They are a couple outside of her; she is not a couple with either of them outside of the other, and they never form a balanced trio, in my opinion.

Lastly, though not a matter of balance (and this is a spoiler), I really disliked the solution to the sticking point over her humanity. One of the men does not think a human is good enough to be a dragon mate. Meanwhile, she is experiencing significant issues with self-worth. Instead of writing a solution in which her self-confidence is improved and he comes to appreciate humans, kiss of smoke photothe author instead threw in a sudden and random “Oh, she’s not human after all,” which did nothing to solve the underlying problems.

All in all, this was a flop for me. I appreciate that some of the author’s random attempts as plot made obvious attempts to normalize some contentious real-world issues of contemporary America. But that wasn’t enough to save this for me. I was hoping for a new series to dive into. But I will be stopping here instead.


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Review: Kiss of Smoke by Amy Pennza

 

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Book Review: The Rejected Shifter’s Required Bride, by Brigitte Delery

I picked up a copy of Brigitte Delery‘s The Rejected Shifter’s Required Bride during a freebie event last Christmas.

the rejected shifter's required bride

Promised to a stranger in an arranged marriage masked ball he wasn’t supposed to attend. Paired for life with a monster she doesn’t know how to tame. The last thing either expected to find was love.

Wolf shifter Malin Fenren of the Dark Claw Pack should have been celebrating his first days as a happily mated future Alpha. Instead, the woman he thought was his forever mate left him at the altar for someone else and his exciting future turned into something far more horrific- a fate where he turns into the worst kind of monster he could imagine before succumbing to his own destruction. In a last ditch effort to save him from a quick decline into madness and death, Malin’s parents swap him in for a spot in the Mate Masquerade, where volunteers from each supernatural community are paired in arranged marriages with strangers to maintain peace between them all.

As part of the often-maligned human community, Isabella Thompson stepped up as a volunteer for this year’s Mate Masquerade in exchange for payment of her father’s debts. She doesn’t quite know what she’s gotten herself into, but if it saves her sisters from poverty and destitution, she’s going to make the best of things. Getting paired with a monster who might kill her at any moment was a risk she’d have to take. But falling for her assigned mate definitely wasn’t part of the plan.

This paranormal fantasy romance book was originally part of the Wicked Arrangements collaboration and is now part of the Mate Masquerade series. Each book in this series features an arranged marriage masquerade ball where participants are paired and expected to wed and bed a stranger by the end of the night.

my review

The cover is atrocious. The editing is hit or miss, often miss. The plot is pretty predictable, and the necessity of the mate-ball being a masquerade makes little sense. (It’s my understanding that this was initially written as part of a multi-author shared world involving the mate masquerade.) Despite all of that, I enjoyed this. Isabella is immensely practical, and I love a practical heroine who will just get on with what must be done. Malin is just incredibly sweet and trying to hold it together to do the right thing in what is, for him, a very challenging situation. And the sister offers a little comic relief. All in all, it makes for an endearing read.

the rejected shifter's required bride photo


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