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Review of S.P. Wayne’s Winter Wolf

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Winter Wolf

I grabbed S.P. Wayne‘s M/M romance, Winter Wolf, from the Amazon KDP list.

I would usually include a description at this point, but Winter Wolf‘s is so long it’s practically a short story by itself. So feel free to go here and read it on its Amazon page. I’m not cluttering this post up with it. Seriously, it’s unnecessarily long. Suffice it to say the novella is a sweet werewolf romance with an M/M pairing.

Review:
I’m just going to go ahead and get the biggest criticism out of the way first so that I can spend the rest of this review raving about the book. Winter Wolf needs an editor fairly badly. There are missing and misused words, and though less frequent, grammar mistakes and typos too. Plus, POVs shift at a dizzying pace with little to no warning, so it can sometimes be a little hard to keep up. I have definitely seen worse and it’s not really too hard to figure out what the author actually means, so the text is still readable. But there are too many examples to not point out it in any complete review.

I wish I used star ratings on this blog so that I could say, ‘if it’s bad enough to warrant a mention I often would consider dropping a star for poor editing, but not this time.’  That’s such a simple way to make the point. It’s also true. The story and writing (editing aside) are just too wonderful for anything but 5 stars. Wayne’s style is surprisingly evocative. I actually felt Axton’s skittishness. I ground my teeth for his self denials and my heart ached for his ‘mourning’ periods. He felt incredibly fragile. I didn’t connect as fully with Leander, but the story is told largely from Axton’s POV. There are no other characters.

Axton was also simply a great character. He was noble, honourable, and utterly vulnerable without being wimpy in any way. I loved watching him flounder and then find his proverbial feet. It was nice to see him turn the werewolf genre on it’s hierarchical head. Axton was definitely a beta, or maybe even omega type wolf. There was nothing alpha about him and I don’t remember the last werewolf book I read that wasn’t about an alpha wolf.

This is a really bittersweet story, with a writing style that perfectly matches the characters it describes. I highly recommend it. There seems to be a sequel on the way and I’m a little torn about how to feel about that. So often I’ve continued a series and felt it would have been kinder to the characters to stop at the first one, but I’d also simply love to see more of Ax and Lee. No doubt I’ll read it.

Book Review of C.E. Stalbaum’s The Last Goddess

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The Last GoddessI grabbed C.E. Stalbaum‘s The Last Goddess (The Shattered Messiah Trilogy, #1) from the Amazon KDP list.

Description from Goodreads:
When a man discovers the body of the long-lost Messiah, he fears her very presence might incite a holy war. When she wakes up, he is certain of it…

Nathan Rook never had much use for faith. As a soldier in the last war, he witnessed first-hand the devastation wrought by the ageless religious schism so deeply dividing his country. But when he discovers an ancient coffin and finds a living, breathing woman inside, he believes he may have stumbled across the greatest discovery in history – or the greatest hoax. From her ceremonial dress to her elaborate tattoos, the mysterious woman is the perfect incarnation of the Messiah, and she wields a power that defies the very laws of magic. There’s just one problem: she doesn’t remember anything, not even her own name.

As he strives to restore her memory, Rook realizes it might not matter if she is the genuine Messiah or not. Once word of her discovery gets out, every faction in the city will seek to claim her legendary power as their own. Together they struggle to evade a mad prince, a renegade general, and a power-hungry senator, but he has yet to confront the biggest problem of all: he is falling in love with her.

Review:
Accurate or not, let me tell you what I expected from this book after reading the description. I thought it would be something like a steampunk version of The Fifth Element. You see, Selaste would be Leeloo, Rook would be Korben Dallas, and there is even an arcane priesthood whose representatives could have been Vito Cornelius and his apprentice. Ok, so I was a bit off the mark. There is more going on here than in my favourite absurdist, Space Opera. For one thing, there is a lot of political intrigue. Understanding the numerous religious/political factions at play is imperative to follow the storyline. That makes the beginning of the book a little slow. There are a lot of terms and descriptions to get through. But once the story is able to get rolling it is quite interesting.

I’ll also tell you what my favourite aspect of it was. With a few notable exceptions almost none of the characters are solely black or white or strictly good or evil. There is some serious moral ambiguity here. For example, it’s difficult to decide who is really in the wrong between a mother/empress who is sacrificing the happiness of someone else by forcing her daughter into an unpleasant arranged marriage that essentially whores her out for the good of the nation, or the daughter who refuses to tolerate the unpleasantness of said marriage in order to save the lives of tens of thousands of people. Both are wrong, but sadly, both have seeds right in them, too. Or how about the military general who is an unquestionable warmonger but also a staunchly loyal and religious man who thinks he is doing the best thing for the people, avoids involving civilians, and never kills more than is necessary to win the battles? I think these grey characters are a real mark of the mature writer Stalbaum must be.

All of the main characters, or the main good guys, are a lot of fun. The banter between them is endless and often really funny. There are also a lot of really good quotables in this book. I highlighted more than a few passages, some because they are astute and some just because they are funny. Here are a few example:

In my experience, things rarely work out exactly the way you expect them to,” Rook warned gravely. “If they do, it usually means something is wrong.

The ability to destroy is a poor measure of power in the end.

You’ll never impress a lady with a claymore. They want to see skill, not a blade that’s bigger than they are.’” He grunted and lowered the sword. “I suddenly wonder if that was a metaphor for something else…

Fighting off a garrison of royal guardsmen,” Van muttered. “How depressing is it that this isn’t even in the top three crazy things we’ve done this week?

Now, I did think that there was a fairly severe kink in the timeline. I realise, of course, that this was misdirection on the part of the author rather than an actual breach in consistency. But my brain had a really hard time catching up on the reveal. The flip side of that same statement is that I obviously didn’t see that particular twist coming. I liked that. All in all, I enjoyed the book. There is a lot of action, some fun characters, and more depth than I expected.

Transit of Ishtar

Book Review of Natalie Gibson’s Transit of Ishtar

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Transit of Ishtar

Author, Natalie Gibson, sent me a copy of her paranormal erotic novel, Transit of Ishtar. You can see my review of the prequel, Ishtar Bound here.

Description from Goodreads:
Nathalia Lovejoy should be dead, she can remember committing suicide, but she wakes up in a ancient tomb. Her voice destroyed, she must rely on a new source for her magical ability, telepathy, in order to communicate with her savior. Nathalia has a real distaste for men. Lucky for her, Eiran Kafziel is not a man. He is a demigod, a halfbreed, unlike anything she has ever known. He found her in the moment of her death, repaired her body, gave her his holy blood, forever changing her into a Sinnis. She must come to terms with the fact that she is attracted to him, even loves him. 

Along the way she discovers a whole world of mythical creatures living among humans. She battles her own hunger for violence and releases a demon from his 500 year prison. Can she become the weapon against that newly freed evil and save the world from his plans, or is she better suited to be his dark queen?

Somewhat spoilerish Review:
I have to be honest. While a fine story, I didn’t like Transit of Ishtar as much as its prequel, Ishtar Bound. It was a very different book. It really gets the Sinnis series rolling and while Ishtar Bound was relatively self-contained this one felt very much like the start of something bigger. There were a lot of explanations that will, no doubt, carry through the rest of the series. On the up side of that, a number of the questions I was left with at the end of the last book were answered here. That was nice. I appreciated that.

There was also a lot more sex. After finishing Ishtar Bound I commented that I didn’t think it earned it’s erotica stripes. This one does, no doubt about it. It wasn’t really my type of sex though (and that’s my one main hang up on this one). I know that sounds weird. We all have preferences about different things. In this case, I’m not a huge fan of the overly dominant male sex partner. I have no problem with the alpha male or even male dominance in sex, but there is such thing as too much. And for me it’s the type where he allows his partner almost no freedom and whose behaviour if phrased differently would plainly be abusive. I just don’t find that sexy.

Natalia really could have just been a blow up doll at one point for as much control she had and conscious contribution made. It makes whole scenes feel like a rape even when they aren’t, no matter how many times the reader is reminded that she is enjoying it (and that’s on top of the actual and inferred rapes in the book). But I have a particular problem with it when the woman involved was until that point a staunch femi-nazi lesbian. I mean she HATED men and would have never allowed herself to be so dominated by one. On more than one such occasion I wanted to snarl on her behalf. It didn’t at all fit her personality. Having sex with a man at all was a stretch, but then to enjoy rough, dominated sex just wasn’t reconcilable.

I also had questions about what I’ve deemed ‘the Michael question.’ Nathalia was fairly clearly presented as a sexual as well as physical victim of Michael in Ishtar Bound. She was even forced to play some sort of relief game, where she had to get him off before passing out from asphyxiation while he strangled her. But she’s still a virgin (her hymn is intact), is shown in this book to have never gone down on a man before and doesn’t appeared to have been raped in any other fashion. So, I’m left wondering what exactly it is that he actually did. I ask because Natalia was simultaneously, or rather intermittently presented as having both a history of sexual abuse and being completely naive about male/female sex. I’m fairly sure that at least in this case the two are mutually exclusive.

Then there were the prehensile wings, which Eiran often used as an extra set of hands. It was just plain strange. I couldn’t help imagining all that old Japanese anime full of tentacle rape (or shokushu goukan according to Wiki). It was a little bit too much for me and that’s before I even address the vibrating penis.

Here’s the rub though. Even as I cringed and occasionally snarled it was still pretty hot, the teaser for book three even more so. It’s apparently a m/f/m and m/m/f grouping. But the whole thing is beginning to feel like in order to up the anti each book is moving farther and farther into the extreme. The first book had a purposefully dominant male/female pairing establishing a mutually loving relationship. This one had a previously reluctant female lead with a unremittingly dominant and almost cruel male (though only during sex). The next moves into threesomes, bisexuality and BSMD. I’m afraid to ask where the fourth will go. Snuff? [BTW, I’m not in any way comparing those, just pointing out that the themes seem to be escalating.]

Complain as I might I still have to give major props for an original story and wonderful writing. I’m even tempted to give book three a shot, ’cause the teaser really was steamy and I like m/m pairings. But I am a little afraid that two men and one woman just means two men to use the one woman. There was already a little of that in the preview, with the whole ‘cage our little birdie’ bit and seems to be the president in the first two books. Though I really don’t think that is the intended message in any of these books, that’s how the sex in them all so far feels to me and I find it off putting. In fact, it’s my only real, though major, criticism of the novel. And it’s one others may not share.

I am 100% aware that my opinions are just that, my opinions. Others may or may not agree or feel the same. I like the story set up in this book for the rest of the series, I generally like the characters and, though I find the tone distasteful, the sex is hot (even if I admit that begrudgingly). You’ll have to decide for yourself if it’s the sort of thing you’ll like or not.