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Book Review of Billy Wong’s Iron Bloom

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Iron BloomAuthor, Billy Wong sent me a copy of his novel, Iron Bloom (Legend of the Iron Flower, #1). It also happens to be free on Amazon and Smashwords.

Description from Goodreads:
Action-packed fantasy adventure with a powerhouse female epic warrior in the spirit of Achilles or Beowulf.

The tale of a mighty warrior torn between the power of the sword and her longing for a peaceful life.

A young woman with a kind heart and extraordinary constitution, Rose becomes a warrior to better the world. Despite the wealth and fame she wins as one of the greatest champions of her time, the bloody reality of her new life is nothing like her ideal dream. She yearns for a chance to escape the violence.

She finds that chance in Ethan, the leader of an altruistic pacifist group. But when a barbarian horde invades their kingdom, Rose knows that she can make a difference by taking up her sword again. Will her need to protect her homeland cost her the man she loves?

Review:

I received this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. I suspect he’ll regret that, as I didn’t much care for it. I apologise upfront for that. There are a few spoilers to follow, and it’s really quite a long review. You’ve been warned. 

To start with, I thought that the writing was really quite stiff and naïve, for lack of a better word. Things were just related, one after another. There was no sense of build-up, transition, or progress. I also thought a lot of the dialogue was unrealistic. 

But more than almost anything, what irritated me was the constant praise of Rose. She didn’t seem to have earned it, and it overplayed her charisma. In the beginning, she was almost instantly accepted as an equal by the captain of the guard, thanked and congratulated for things that whole groups of people accomplished, strangers constantly addressed her instead of the older guards at her side, and even when walking with senior soldiers the group was often referred to as hers,  ‘Rose’s four,’ for example. Later on, she easily walked into forts and was given a place among the respected. It felt very much like the focus of the story was artificially forced onto her. It also left the other characters essentially characterless since they only seemed to exist to give Rose someone to talk to.

She also seemed to be invincible (never even needing recovery time to heal). At one point, she was stabbed THROUGH the right breast and half gutted, but she still managed to tend to her dead friends’ bodies and walk away. Another time she took a mammoth spear THROUGH her chest. It nicked her heart and came out the other side, and still, she fought on, won, survived, and buried her dead. This inability to die kinda stole the suspense. It reduced the story to a series of battles with no apparent end goal. It was like reading a list of how many ways she could be injured and how many ways she could kill a man. It got old fast.

A character needs a challenge to overcome. I couldn’t find Rose’s. What’s more, her uncommon and largely unexplained mental and physical fortitude left those same battles flat and lackluster. How many times can you read about a woman winning fights before your eyes start to glaze over? I made it to the shrub battle at about 17%. In this example, the bush fought by muddling it’s opponent’s mind. This didn’t work on Rose, so she was able to simply hack it to bits and burn it. But there was no explanation or reason that the evil bush’s mind trick didn’t work on her. It was just one more miraculous win…and there were plenty more after that. 

I also couldn’t quite get my head around her being 15. Totally unbelievable. She acted and was treated like she was much older—drinking heavily and being accused of trying to seduce people and such. Besides, she wouldn’t even be fully physically grown at 15, so how was she besting all those adult men and monsters? An additional side point: that the woman on the cover, whom one would assume is meant to be Rose, is far, far older than 15. As a character, she needed to be at least in her mid-20s. Mid-teens just did not work. 

Now, I did appreciate that she was a strong female lead and remained so without having to also conform to modern standards of beauty. She was described as being large, stocky, and beautiful. I liked that Wong broke the mold on her. Plus, she wasn’t the only strong woman in the novel. High five from me for the warrior women. 

It’s just too bad Wong felt the need to counter it with a peppering of rape.  The first attempt came on page one…seriously, page one! After that, every bad guy seemed to be a rapist too. It got redundant. There are other ways to victimise women, even some that aren’t specific to women. You know, being a terrorist or a murderer is still being an evil bastard. No need to also label them a rapist to get the point across. 

I had a lot of complaints about this book, but my absolute primary complaint is, “Where was the plot?” There wasn’t one. I’m not trying to be mean. But the book starts when Rose goes off to join the RIEF (essentially the National Guard). It then follows her for a year or so of her life as she gets into fight after fight. She creates enemies for herself, like Lennox. She decided he was evil incarnate, visited the king to complain about him, and eventually killed him herself, all based on the third-party testimony that he encouraged the mercenaries and was a bad man. I saw no evidence that she witnessed his evil, so why dedicate herself to his extermination? She just randomly chose the battle and it was just one of many. He wasn’t her main nemesis or anything. She didn’t have one of those. 

The whole book was like that. ‘Oh, I’ll go fight this person. Oh, I’m being attacked by this person.’ But there was no villain of importance, quest to be accomplished, or challenge to be overcome; nothing to mark a transition of progress or show Rose to have accomplished something important to the story. The book really is just a series of random battles that occurred in one random year of her life. That’s not a plot. 

Then there were the ogres and other monsters. They seemed to come out of nowhere but were not an integral part of the story. They seemed to just add complication, since they popped up for about 30 pages and then were never seen again. So, is the story a high fantasy novel or not? 

I have to be honest, and no offense to Mr. Wong, but if this hadn’t been a review request, I probably would have dropped it at about 10%. I found finishing it a struggle. Everything was very simple and one-dimensional, coloured with a painful sense of naiveté. Kings who state “you seem like a person with only good intentions” when confronted by the fact that she killed a lord. Really, a king is going to let her off because she had good intentions. Really? 

Now, I think Wong had a good idea in here somewhere. Rose was called God-Touched, and her story pretty accurately shows the double-edged nature of such existences. Isn’t it part of Greek mythology that the Heroes were never allowed a happy ending? That’s Rose. She tried so hard to do right, only to have it crumble again and again. This is an interesting concept. It could have been built on and turned into something substantial. But, like so much else in this book, it was eclipsed by the endless and often pointless battle scenes. I have no problem with gore, but like romance novels with too much sex, sword (and I suppose sorcery) novels with too many battles only cripple themselves. 

Now, other people have loved this book. It has a lot of good reviews out there. So, I’m not trying to trash it. But it did almost nothing for me. **Sorry**

Review of Melanie Walker’s Bliss (The Custos)

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BlissI grabbed a copy of Bliss (The Custos #1), by Melanie Walker from the Amazon free list.

Description from Goodreads:
London Chase has set her mind to a new start as far from Texas as she can get but lands in Vegas under the protection of a sexy but deadly Vampire, Cacius Troy. Her Father and a brother she has never met are looking for London dead or alive and are willing to stop at nothing to bring her back to Texas. Her blood holds the key to unleashing Bliss on a nation not prepared for its affects. Now she must choose between the growing passions and love for her Vampire savior, or the Father she always wanted to please.

In the fight for London, Cacius falls deeply in love with the spoiled rich girl and one night of passion ignites a fight to the death to save her from their clutches. He has never gone into a battle with so much at risk knowing her life is on the line Cacius will fight dirty and cause hell itself to tremble if anything or anyone gets in his way.

Passion will unfold as danger thickens and forces Cacius and London to face their biggest fears and trust one another to the death, or un-death as it may be.

The streets of Vegas are no stranger to sin, but when a drug intended to change the life of rape victims lands in the hands of the Vampires. All bets are off.

Review: **Spoiler Alert**
This book had potential. There was a point in the beginning when I thought I might really like it. But that time passed, and I was never able to reclaim it. I’ll grant that Cash was both manly and open about his feelings. It’s a heady mix. I found him an appealing leading man.

London was also a strong female lead.  I liked that about her. But while I appreciate that she had a mind to give Cash a piece of, she was practically psychotic about it. She flipped from docile to furious with almost no provocation, often then childishly acting out on impulse. For example, taking unknown drugs provided by a known enemy, who was already making sexual overtures and suggesting the drug would make her ‘want to party’ and then, not surprisingly, turning into a panting, nymphomaniac, porno princess; all simply because Cash had said not to, in what she perceived to be too authoritative a tone. That’s pretty much approaching ‘too stupid to live’ territory. What did she expect to happen? Plus, the whole begging every man present to fuck her was just about too tacky for words. Though Cash’s response to it all was pretty good, that’s about when I really gave up trying to like this book, but I hung in there and finished it. 

I did like the side characters—Preacher, Leucious, Bastion. I think I even liked where the plot was going. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like it ever really got there. It got completely sidetracked by London and Cash’s deluge of self-affirmations. I lost count of how many times they told themselves (and each other) they loved the other, or how sure they NOW were that he or she was THE ONE, or how perfect the other was, or how sexy, or how dirty (in the good way), etc. It was ENDLESS, as was the sex.  I like a good erotic scene as much as the next reader, but the sex definitely got in the way of the story here. What’s more, by the end, London was orgasming, literally, on command. It started to feel mechanical—push the button, cue the orgasm. Not sexy anymore. 

By the final climactic scene, I’d pretty much forgotten what they were fighting for, and the easy win didn’t reestablish it in my mind. The Custos just pretty much walked in and walked out again. That easy. It was a real lost opportunity. 

Lastly, editing: OMG, I have to talk about editing. But I also have to admit to a certain amount of confusion. You see, I downloaded my copy of this book way back in April (2013). The Amazon description currently reads, “This version was edited professionally and updated to Kindle on 7/27/13. Any errors remaining in the book are mine alone.”

So, though my version predates the re-edit, it SHOULD have been updated by Amazon. However, the book I’ve just read is possibly the worst edited, self-published book I’ve ever seen. It was full of typos, homophones, incorrect or missing punctuation, inconsistent tense, and just randomness. For example, every time the word ‘next’ was used, it was capitalized. No idea why. Worst of all, though, was the skull-razing constant use of ‘I seen’ instead of ‘I saw.’ I mean, even the most basic automatic grammar check should have caught that. So, I’m left wondering if the problem was that my copy was never updated for some reason or, heaven forbid, it was the ‘corrected’ version. I just don’t know. I suspect the former. It would make a whole heck of a lot more sense. But I have no way of verifying it beyond checking for pending updates, which my account says there aren’t any.

So, though I know others seem to really like this story, and I’ll admit that there were some funny bits, the heavy-handed attempt at emotional manipulation and excessive sex-talk (by which I mean characters who talk about what they’re doing as much as actually doing it), and the virtually abandoned plot left me struggling to make it to the last page. 

Perfection Unleashed

Book Review of Perfection Unleashed, by Jade Kerrion

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Perfection UnleashedAuthor, Jade Kerrion sent me an ecopy of her Sci-fi novel Perfection Unleashed.

Description from Goodreads:
Two men, one face. One man seeks to embrace destiny, the other to escape it. 

Danyael Sabre spent sixteen years clawing out of the ruins of his childhood and finally has everything he wanted–a career, a home, and a trusted friend. To hold on to them, he keeps his head down and plays by the rules. An alpha empath, he is powerful in a world transformed by the Genetic Revolution, yet his experience has taught him to avoid attention.

When the perfect human being, Galahad, escapes from Pioneer Laboratories, the illusory peace between humans and their derivatives–the in vitros, clones, and mutants–collapses into social upheaval. The abominations, deformed and distorted mirrors of humanity, created unintentionally in Pioneer Lab’s search for perfection, descend upon Washington D.C. The first era of the Genetic Revolution was peaceful. The second is headed for open war.

Although the genetic future of the human race pivots on Galahad, Danyael does not feel compelled to get involved and risk his cover of anonymity, until he finds out that the perfect human being looks just like him.

Review:
I have to admit that there was more to this book than I expected. Not only was there an interesting science fiction plot, there were also some interesting social questions raised about the morality of genetic modifications, as well as a mild romantic subplot and plenty of action. I’d argue too much adventure, it’s a subjective thing, I know.

While on one hand nonstop action is a good thing, it’s never boring, but it also means that the reader is never given a moment to breathe. The main character, Danyael, is hit with one thing after another until he is so exhausted he’s about ready to pass out. This is actually how he feels from the first page to the last. I mean, three completely unrelated baddies came after him one after another (more if you count the attacks on the group he was with as opposed to him specifically)!

This constant fragile, borderline helplessness made him feel very child-like, which tended to counter his badass alpha empath status, though it did make him really easy to empathise with. I liked him a lot. I liked his cronies. I loved the strength of friendships represented without being tarnished by unrequited love, or lust, or some past betrayal. Pure, strong friendships can feel hard to come by in fiction sometimes. I really enjoyed finding one here. I also liked the opposing military factions, though I strongly felt X-Men’s influence in the two mutant factions. I just really wish there had been a few less irons in the literary fire.

The repetitive plot additions left me feeling exhausted too. There were just too many invested parties vying for Danyael in some fashion or another. Really, what’s the likelihood they would all come to culmination at the same time? It left the book feeling rushed as it leapt from one crisis to another. Despite this one rather significant complaint, I really enjoyed the story and the characters in it. I have to admit being irked at the cliffhanger ending I’m not a fan of them, but I’d be interested in picking the sequel up at some point.