Category Archives: books/book review

Book Review: Cruel Shifterverse (1-3), by Jasmine Mas

I picked up a copy of Jasmine Mas‘ Cruel Shifterverse series (Psycho Shifters) as an Amazon freebie. I purchased Psycho Fae and Psycho Beasts.

Fight like a girl…or a shifter of lore.

After growing up with nothing, I’ve finally found my path to freedom: I’m a shifter, an elite soldier who transforms into a monster.

All I have to do is survive.

I didn’t count on my three 6’5 roommates. Covered in tattoos, jeweled, and horned, these are like no men I’ve ever dealt with before.

They don’t think I belong.
They don’t think I’m strong enough for war.
They don’t think I can fight.

I’m about to prove them wrong.

The only problem, can I survive them discovering the secrets of my past? In the battle for life and death, everyone is so much more than they seem.

Jax, Ascher, and Cobra are going to be devastated when they discover my truth…just wait until they see my shifted form.

I read Psycho Shifters, Psycho Fae, and Psycho Beasts back to back, so I’ll just review them as one. All in all, I thought this series began well, but it went downhill quickly. The whole thing started out bonkers and over the top, and I enjoyed it. But then the author just built on that theme, making it more bonkers and more ridiculous. Eventually, the jokes no longer felt like jokes. It was all just too slapstick to enjoy. It felt very much like Mas just needed an editor or BFF or someone to pull her back from the edge and suggest a little moderation. Plus, the plot of book three is basically a book two redux. I’d never go so far as to say I disliked it. But the series definitely lost any cache it might have started with.

But worst of all was just how strongly the author leaned into the ‘every woman except the heroine and her friends are worthless, slutty, and untrustworthy.’ The older I get, the less tolerant I am of this dynamic. And Mas went hard for it here. There are several passages in which we are explicitly told women are nothing but meaningless sluts with no worth. *Several* And those are just the times we’re told outright. We’re also shown over and over and over and over again, as every other female to grace the pages is either trying to get one of the men to sleep with her, betraying the heroine, or just evil in some other fashion. As a female reader, I just don’t enjoy filling my entertainment with paragraph after paragraph of how worthless my sex (and by extension) I am.

If I’m honest, it feels like a mark of immaturity. Like the pick-me girls in high school who haven’t yet grown up and done the internal work of weeding out their own internalized misogyny. Could female authors maybe grow past doing the patriarchy’s job of them? This in NO WAY endears me to the heroine (or the author).

If I came across the rest of the series for free, I might read it to see what happens to Aron. But I’m not going out of my way for it.

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Book Review: Bonded to the Alien Warrior, by Kyla Quinn

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I picked up a copy of Kyla Quinn‘s Bonded to the Alien Warrior as an Amazon freebie.

An abducted human female. An alien warrior on a secret mission. A bond created by the stars.

I have a sneaking suspicion aliens abducted me last night. My first clue? The muscular blue guys with horns and tails. My second? I’m locked in a room, and I can see two suns in the sky outside the window.

I’ve no memory of how I reached this planet, and neither have the women with me. One thing’s sure—we’re stuck. Nobody tells us why we’re here, or what happens to the women who are taken by the guards and never return.

The guards are sleazy assholes, and I’m glad I can’t understand what they say to me when they leer. Apart from one. There’s something strange about the way he protects me from the other guards but pretends he doesn’t. When this fierce alien touches me my blood runs hot, and the physical effect I have on him is um… obvious.

But instead of taking what he wants, this guard offers me something I never dreamed of—a way out.

Will escaping with my alien warrior save me, or am I walking into a worse situation? Because this domineering blue guy tells me I’m his mate and that if I want to stay alive, I must do exactly what he says.

Exactly what he says? This should be interesting.

This was a failure for me. I’ll grant it is competently written, even if it was a competently written story that I did not at all enjoy. For one, it’s written in the first-person PRESENT tense. No judgment to those who might enjoy this, but I HATE it. Honestly, I read this book as part of an author alphabet challenge and needed a Q. I might have DNFed very early otherwise.

But outside of the first-person present tense issue, I also make a concerted effort to avoid rape in the books I read for enjoyment. And while there is no on-page rape here, the WHOLE BOOK is basically just having to read the disgusting comments of rapists about the women they are going to rape (the game of it), the groping and torment of the women, the women’s fear of being raped, and the complete discord of an author trying to convince readers that some of these men are honorable while allowing this to happen around them. That’s it. That’s the plot…all of it. There is NOTHING in that for me to enjoy, sadly, not even the romance.

Jex is complicit in the whole rape situation and would have remained so, except that he found his fated mate among the victims. But he makes it VERY CLEAR over and over again that he only cares about protecting her (not the other women) because she’s his mate. This leaves the reader painfully aware that, if not for this mystical connection, he’d leave her to be raped and bred, just like every other woman. There is nothing romantic about that! There’s also no build-up or getting to know one another. So, the whole thing hinges solely on the instant mate bond. Again, nothing to go “aww” about. But there also is very little sex (and only at the end), so there’s also nothing satisfyingly steamy either.

All in all, I pretty much hated this. Do you know what it felt like? It felt like it was written by a man. If you know what I mean, you know what I mean. It was 100% the wrong book for my taste.

On a side note: The cover says book 1, and I read it as such. But according to GR and Amazon (and the fact that we meet the previous couple in this book), this is actually book 2 in the Fated Star Mates series. This annoys me because I apparently even have the previous book, but being labeled book 1, I didn’t even search my shelves to check if I had a previous book. So, now I’ve read it out of order.

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