Category Archives: books/book review

Bonds of Attraction and Livia Royce’s EMMAncipation

Book Review of Alana Davis’ Bonds of Attraction and Livia Royce’s EMMAncipation

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Since neither of these books really rang my bell I thought I might combine them into one post. Both came from the Amazon KDP list. You can find Alana Davis’ Bonds of Attraction (still free) here, but Livia Royce‘s EMMAncipation seems to have been removed from Amazon.

Bonds of AttractionDescription from Goodreads:
“It was always strictly business. I had never slept with a client. I wasn’t about to start now.”

Julie Facet runs the hottest matchmaking agency in Los Angeles, but she doesn’t quite believe in happily ever afters. Despite the file cabinets full of clients she has found matches for, she isn’t interested in anything beyond simply satisfying her own physical needs. When Julie meets the wealthy Leon Christensen, her professionalism is pushed to the brink. Leon is charismatic and cocky, and does everything he can to get under Julie’s skin. Not to mention that he owns the Poison Ivy, a nightclub that’s designed for every sexual proclivity and uses his own sexuality to push women away.

Will she able to find a suitable partner for Leon, who prides himself in his no-strings-attached relationships?

And what will Julie do when she discovers that her feelings for Leon extend beyond the professional?

Review:
I really like this book’s cover but there are probably readers out there that will enjoy the book itself a lot more than me. Me, I couldn’t figure out where Julie’s attraction came from. Leon was a dick to her from the first moment they met, and that’s really putting it lightly. Then she spends most of the book building elaborate sexual fantasies about him that have nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with the reality of the man she’d met. (By the end I was skimming, if not skipping them.)

Suddenly she ‘has feelings.’ What? She may have fallen in love with her fantasy, but the real deal (who she’d spoken to 3, maybe 4 times) was still calling her a whore and propositioning her in increasingly horrific ways. Unattractive doesn’t start to cover it. I imagine we’re supposed to understand he’s wounded and emotionally damaged. Our soft feminine urges to heal the injured male should be kicking in. Um…no. Just no. And when I thought Julie was finally gonna wise up and walk away he suddenly decided to bear his soul and the hearts and flowers start popping out all over the place. I think I got whiplash from trying to follow his sudden change of heart!

Now, I’ll credit the book with having a lead female that is comfortable with her body, even though it’s curvy and not a stick and with portraying a woman who is unashamed of her own sexuality. That really was refreshing, as was the fact that she wasn’t gagging to give up her control and cater to all of his BDSM fetishes. In fact, the subtext seemed to be that Leon craved the bondage because of his unhealthy self-image and within the confines of a safe, loving relationship a rather more vanilla scene still filled the bill. There are so many Shades Of Grey clones out there that it was nice to see female sexuality as something other than the weak-willed desire to submit and male sexuality as predatory. Don’t get me wrong, there is a little of this but it’s nowhere near as strong as it often is.

I’ll also admit that I might not have hated Leon as much if we were given any of his thoughts, feeling, opinions, etc. But the book is in first person, from the perspective of Julie and the reader isn’t given a single insight into Leon that isn’t mitigated through her. He feels very much like the creepy, life-sized cardboard cutout that she hangs in the corner and dreams about. He has no depth at all.

Add writing like this, “When my eyes finally adjusted to the darkness of the, shock stabbed my heart.” Or instances like the time I counted the word ‘car’ used 8 times in two brief paragraphs and I start to loose the will to read on. These latter matters I really could and would overlook. But I found the interactions between Julie and Leon really quite repulsive. Nope, there wasn’t a lot in this book that attracted me. I expect others to like it and fully acknowledge my opinion to be nothing more than that, but this was definitely not for me.
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Book Review of Chosen, by Denise Grover Swank

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THE CHOSENI grabbed a copy of Denise Grover Swank‘s Chosen (The Chosen, #1) from the KDP free list.

Description From Goodreads:
Everything Emma Thompson owns fits in a suitcase she moves from one roach infested motel to another. She and Jake, her five year old son who can see the future, are running from the men intent on taking him. Emma will do anything to protect him even when it means accepting the help of a stranger named Will. Jake insists she needs Will, but Emma’s never needed help before. And even though she’s learned to trust her son, it doesn’t mean she trusts Will.

Mercenary Will Davenport lives in the moment. Hauling Emma to South Dakota should have been an easy job, but his employer neglected to tell him about Emma’s freaky son and the gunmen hot on her trail. Instinct tells him this job is trouble, but nothing can prepare him for Jake’s proclamation that Will is The Chosen One. Who must protect Emma from the men hunting her power. A power she doesn’t know she has.

Will protects Emma and Jake on a cross-country chase from the men pursuing them, while struggling with memories from his past, his apprehension of Jake, and his growing attraction to Emma. Will’s overwhelming urge to protect Emma surprises him, especially since it has nothing to do with his paycheck and possibly everything to do with the tattoo Jake branded on his arm. Rich and powerful men are desperate to capture Emma, and Will must discover why before it’s too late.

Review:
Entertaining enough while it lasted. I liked the premise of the book, and Jake, Emma, and Will are all interesting characters. I think I could have really, really liked it if it hadn’t compromised itself in so many ways. These may be personal likes and dislikes, but hey it’s my review. Others may not be as bothered by some of this.

I liked that Emma was a strong female character. Unfortunately, she spends about half the book injured in some fashion. And when injured she seemed to become completely disabled, which kind of negates all that awesome self-sufficient badassery. I liked that she was so protective of her son, Jake. Unfortunately, Jake was practically a cardboard cutout for much of the book. He was the prop that gave her a reason to be hunted. He’s important to the story. I would have liked it if he did more than sleep in the back seat for most of the book. I did really like Will. He seemed to accept all the supernatural mumbo-jumbo with amazing ease, which didn’t seem very realistic. But I enjoyed his slow acceptance of his feelings and all of his self-recriminations. Definitely an interesting addition, the question of ‘Do past bad deeds make you a present bad person?’

For much of the book, the writing and dialogue are pretty good, but then, at other times, it gets really choppy. Mostly due to the overuse of names. How often do you really say someone’s name when speaking to them? It begins to feel unnatural after a while.

The First half of the book is almost nothing but car chases and gun fights. I wouldn’t have had a problem with that if the second half of the book had made up for it, but it didn’t. The problem is that the romance just comes to fruition, you just figure out the prophecy, just figure out who is chasing them, just get started at just about everything and then the book just ends. Major, big-time pet peeve right there. I can’t even call this a cliffhanger since nothing really wraps up before the book ends. Of course, I knew going in this wasn’t a stand-alone book. I can see the ‘The Chosen, #1’ right there in the title. But that doesn’t mean it has to be without ending. The plot over the whole series looks like it could be an interesting one, but when considering just this one book on its own, it feels a bit unfinished.

Alaskan Fire

Book Review of Sara King’s Alaskan Fire (Guardians of the First Realm #1)

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Alaskan FireI grabbed a copy of Sara King‘s Alaskan Fire from Amazon’s KDP list. 

Description From Goodreads:
Blaze MacKenzie is a freakishly-tall heiress who just discovered that her ‘parents’ actually found her abandoned as an infant in some bizarre human sacrifice in the woods. Along with that nasty little bit of information came a six hundred thousand dollar check, a strange golden feather, and the ability to move to the Alaska Bush and begin her dream-life living off the Grid.

Unfortunately for Blaze, life in rural Alaska isn’t as peaceful as she expected. Among her many startling discoveries is that her sexy new handyman, Jack Thornton, has already ‘claimed’ the territory that her new lodge is sitting on …

Further complicating matters, Jack makes it clear to Blaze that there are a good many things that go bump in the Alaskan night, and when a pack of werewolves goes rogue and starts killing or turning everyone along the Yentna River, Blaze and Jack find themselves in a fight for survival in this magic-soaked Land of the Midnight Sun.

Review:
I generally enjoyed Alaskan Fire. I found Blaze and Jack endearing. I found the two of them together hilarious…vulgar, churlish, and occasionally infuriating, but all in a really funny way. They curse like sailors, call each-other names, sass each-other constantly and basically fight for 400 pages. But they also support and protect each-other at the same time. The bathtub scene was especially sweet, if a little disgusting.

Between Blazes’ size and strength and Jack’s comparable shortness and large swath of helplessness, I found the whole reversal of gender roles a nice addition. So was the fact that Jack was a wereverine instead of a werewolf. It’s interesting that King decided to make her male lead the less glamorised species. I don’t know that I’d read a book about what Blaze is either. (I’m trying not to spoil it.) So it was something different.

I did occasionally want to gag at Blazes’ tendency to revel in being protected when she was so obviously a capable woman. It felt very much like she was choosing helplessness over competence at times. I had similar feelings about the sex scenes (though there really weren’t many of them) and how much she wanted to be dominated…and how often the reader is reminded of how ‘male,’ masculine,’ ‘manly’ Jack is. Surely there are more creative ways to say Blaze thought his strength was attractive.

The book did seem to go on and on…and on and on and on. The book is roughly 550 pages long and there really isn’t any more to the plot than your average PNR, which is usually between 250 and 350 pages. I actually started to laugh toward the end as I passed ending after ending, only to find another chapter leading to what could have (really probably should have) been the conclusion. By which I mean scenes that would traditionally be the end of a PNR book. There are four or five of them consecutively. Plus, after the first appropriate place to wrap up, the book’s feel changes dramatically. It went from angsty and angry to hearts and flowers almost instantly.

The feeling of endlessness was also exacerbated by the fact that throughout the book any and everything took forever and a day to actually happen or happened more than once–the second and third escape attempt, for example. There were large chunks of downtime–the whole Brad and the rain section, almost all of the farming/building scenes, etc. And there was A LOT of ranting on about heritage breeds and such. Now I completely agree with the message in all of it, but it was played just a little heavy handedly…or maybe repeated too frequently.

All-in-all I’m glad to have read it, would happily read the sequel, Alaskan Fury, if it fell in my lap, and will keep my eyes open for more of Sara King’s writing. I think the book could do with a fairly ruthless pair-down to tighten the plot up, but I still enjoyed it.

Addendum: You can see my review of book II here.