Category Archives: books/book review

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Book Review: Married to the Mahr, by Delilah Dare

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I picked up a copy of Delilah Dare‘s Married to the Mahr as an Amazon freebie.

married to the mahr coverTraeyr’s favorite thing about being the demon that inspired the word nightmare is traveling the world. His second favorite thing is squeezing through the tightest possible holes to infiltrate his victims’ chambers.

When a delicious scent draws him to a sleeper’s room miles away, he only meant to imbibe the peculiar nightmare. He can’t explain why he licks the sweat from her brow instead, engorging his shadow power to nearly full mass. On the second night, he laps her tears as well as the nightmare clawing at her dreams.

On the third night, the dreamer wakes . . . and she can see him.

Addison never meant to bind Traeyr to her bedroom. She only wanted one dream that wasn’t a nightmare.

my review

I wanted to like this—I really did. It has a decent kernel of an idea. Unfortunately, it is clumsily executed, superfluously written (that’s a hint at the writing style), and poorly edited. I liked the character archetypes the author was aiming for, but she didn’t actually manage to capture them. There is sex, but it’s bland and repetitive. There are hints at an interesting world of supernaturals. Unfortunately, hints are all you ever get.

All in all, this was a failure for me. It feels like early work. So, maybe the author will improve with time.

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Book Review: Demon’s Mate, by Harper Dakota

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I purchased a signed copy of Harper Dakota‘s Demon’s Mate from the author (through TikTok).  

Viv had her job, her best friend, and a great apartment. So what if dating had been awful lately? When her best friend finds his forever person, it turns out that those paranormal romance books she liked to read had some truth to them. Unfortunately, she also learns that having a mate doesn’t mean happily ever after.

Mac wasn’t looking for a mate, especially a human one. He’s avoided humans as much as possible for hundreds of years after his first mate tried to kill him. To say he has trust issues would be an understatement. He’s happy his friend found his mate and they seemed to be doing well, but no one could make him accept the one suddenly thrust into his orbit. Who knew fate would give him another mate after all these years?

Will they be able to overcome Mac’s fears, or will an enemy lurking in the shadows take the choice from them?

my review

I had a fantasy while reading this book. It went like this: the author hires a really good developmental editor who sits her down and makes her read every chapter out loud. Then,  explain how the events of that chapter contribute to the plot. They discuss, and the editor brings the author around to realizing that a full third of the chapters (like the one where the reader follows a character to work while he investigates a crime not relevant to the plot in any way) do not, in fact, progress the plot in any fashion and should therefore be cut. Yes, that means the book would be a hundred or so pages shorter. But it would be a significantly better book for it. Similarly, the editor forces the author to tell them the plot and helps the author tighten it up so it doesn’t feel so much like a list of random events that pop up indiscriminately instead of a plot.

The simple fact of the matter is that I was bored out of my mind by this book. I liked the characters well enough. I appreciated the platonic cross-gender friendship, found family, and engaging sex scenes (even if they 100% do not fit the tone of the rest of the book). But, honestly, the story drags a lot. This isn’t helped by pedestrian writing and endless repetition. I lost count of how many times something happened or a character was told something and then turned around and told someone else the same thing. I do not need to read everything twice. I do not want to read everything twice! This got significantly worse past the halfway mark.

Lastly, a large personal complaint (and a spoiler): As a heavy reader of the romance genre, I suffer heavily from rape fatigue. I’m just so sick of reading it. So, I am really critical of rape (and attempted rape) in books. I don’t mean trigger warnings or what is or isn’t appropriate in a romance/dark romance. But every time an author throws it in as a cheap plot device (and it’s too often just a cheap plot device), I pause and put true thought into it if it was necessary to the story or not. I similarly side-eye the use of a scorned (or similar) woman as a villain. (There’s no shortage of internalized misogyny in a lot of this particular trope’s depictions.) Here we have a villainous woman using gang rape as revenge for the loss of her lover. It isn’t necessary to the plot at all. In fact, it feels tacked on and out of place, considering the character has been physically abused for days prior to this event. The escalation feels unnatural. The torture was demons mate photobad enough without needing to go the extra mile. I promise authors, readers know a villain is a villain even if you don’t sign-post it with rape.

There are those who will love this book, I am sure. I did not. I could see good bones in it, but I do not feel the author managed to pull it off, and I also do not think the author and I have the same ideas of what makes a good story.

Other Reviews:

@angelg035rawr Review of Demon’s Mate by Harper Dakota. Overal a 3/5⭐️ for me. However character development is ✨✨. I do recommend this novel just go into it with the mindset of a lighter read. Support smaller authors as always. 🫶🏻 #paranormalromance #booktok #smut #bookreview #supportsmallauthors #reader ♬ original sound – Angel Lee

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Book Review: Whispers of the Deep & Song of the Abyss, by Emma Hamm

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Emma Hamm was having a scratch-and-dent sale on her TikTok shop and Whispers of the Deep and Song of Abyss had been on my TBR for a while. So, I grabbed copies.

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 About the book:
One of the many engineers that keeps Beta, the city under the sea, running, Mira only wants to make her family proud and to prove herself worthy. She knows the mysterious city better than anyone and it’s her dream to help it flourish.

But then, on a solo job in an abandoned section of the city, she encounters a monster of legend. An undine. A dangerous merman from an ancient civilization, long forgotten.

Arges has fought his entire life for his people. With deadly creatures under his control, he plans to eradicate Beta once and for all to protect his kind and their peaceful way of life. But when a human woman saves him, she unknowingly creates a bond between them, one he can’t ignore. Even though her flaming red hair haunts his dreams, he needs her for information on the undine’s enemies.

So he steals her. Keeps her. Feeds her. Only to realize their bond is far deeper than captor and captive. He cannot let her go—but he cannot keep her under the sea. In a battle to determine if love can survive a war beneath the waves, it will be their decision that changes the tides.

Review:

I found this a little sloppy. Plotholes abound. Story trajectory is wobbly. There was a noticeable tendency to not capitalize the T in ‘the’ if it fell at the beginning of a sentence. (Odd, I know, but it happened SO OFTEN.) It’s not particularly spicy, with only 2 sex scenes, and leaping from 0 to DP between the two was a choice. There was some unneeded repetition, and the shift in social attitude that made the HFN/HEA possible had no real explanation.

All the same, I enjoyed the heck out of this. I liked the characters a lot and enjoyed watching them come to trust one another. Plus, the mermen species was interesting. I like a monstrous love interest. I’m happily leaping into book two.

song of the abyss About the book:
Like a songbird in a cage, Anya has spent her entire life as the General’s perfect daughter. He snaps his fingers, she jumps. He tells her to smile, she beams like she is made of the sun itself. But underneath all those games and glitter, she’s working to destroy her father and save the city she loves.

When an undine sneaks his way into her city, intent on kidnapping her, she lets him take her.

Daios is plagued by the decisions of his past. Souls haunt him, memories follow his every move, and all he knows is that perhaps stealing this woman will absolve him of his sins. If he can bring her back to his people, then they can destroy the city where his hatred was born. He’s certain this will be easy. But then he sees the General’s daughter, and he knows nothing will ever be the same again.

Broken and damaged, he’s certain no woman will ever love him. He shouldn’t even try to encourage the mating instincts that ride him hard the moment he sees her.

But when he realizes that she’s the same as he is, different from her people and on the outskirts of what others deem “normal”, he knows he’s a goner. Even if it means he has to risk everything to keep her.

Review:

I enjoyed this, maybe not quite as much as I did book one (it felt derivative and less creative the second time around), but I still thought it was a fun read. My one big complaint was that Daios had a very drastic and abrupt change of attitude toward humans that wasn’t really supported by the events of the book. In fact, it felt like it happened before he even met Anya. I liked him a lot despite that, and Anya, too. I appreciated the disability rep, the lack of magic fixes, and that despite being all alpha-like Anya was allowed agency and to make and enact her own decisions, even when he didn’t like it.

I am kind of starting to wonder if Hamm isn’t falling into the age-old fantasy trap of writing creative, imaginative worlds that somehow do not contain women, though. The 1st book had one or two minor female characters. This one has none besides the heroines that are not being set up for future love interests. So, basically, there appear to be no women in the sea. I’ll grant that there are not a lot of side characters in general, but still, it’s becoming noticeable.

All in all, I’m still looking forward to book three in November.