fury

Book Review – Fury: The Awakening, by R.E. Sargent

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I picked up a freebie code for a copy of Fury: The Awakening (The Scorned, #1), by R.E. Sargent. I’m considering this a bonus Awakening. It doesn’t actually meet the specifications of my Awakening Challenge, since the name isn’t simply Awakening. But I had chores to do today and wanted to listen to an audio book, so I figured I might as well stay on theme.

Fury- The Awakening

Stephanie Duran hoped for the American dream – a husband, a family, a house with a white-picket fence – but every man she ever trusted betrayed her. Forsaken by her last lover, Stephanie finally understands that the American dream will never be her reality. Devastated and emotionally destroyed, she pours all her anger-fueled energy into remodeling her new house – the one part of her dream she could control – when an unexplained phenomenon bestows upon her the mysterious power to right wrongs before they happen. Suddenly empowered and in control of fate, Stephanie finds herself immersed in a world of strange events and discovers too late that she has unwittingly unleashed pure evil.

my review

Fury: The Awakening….or Fury: Birth Of a Failed Vigilante as I would rename it. Good lord, I was pretty much bored for the entirety of this audio book. By the end, I was listening to it at 1.5x normal speed, something that pretty much destroys the listening experience (which would have been fine otherwise) and also something I generally never do. But I just wanted to be done.

The book started strongly, with the main character finding out her fiance is cheating on her and responding appropriately. But after that it took a sharp left into blands-ville. She buys the house and the reader sits through chapter after chapter of her fixing everything up. *Yawn*

Then the Quantum-Leap style time/space hops start and the reader sits through the endless tedious details of her figuring everything else, going on hops, learning to shoot, fight, etc, and then going on one last big hop before everything comes to an end. There’s no over-arcing story line to make this interesting. It’s just a progression of this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened until the end.

And the reader never even learns the story behind the original owner of the house or how the house because the gateway (or whatever) it apparently is. It’s all just dropped. All in all, the writing is fine (though the author sucks at writing female-female dialogue) but I was, as I said, bored by the story.

fury sargent

 

the lowest realm

Book Review: The Lowest Realm, by Amy-Alex Campbell

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I received a $5 Amazon credit for completing the New Year Kindle Challenge. I posted on Twitter that I was going to use the money to buy books written by my followers. As you can see from the subsequent tweets, that didn’t garner very much attention…any at all really. But I still did as promised and bought two books, Through the Black Mirror, which you can find reviewed here, and The Lowest Realm, by Amy-Alex Campbell.

about the bookthe lowest realm

Life on an offshore oil rig is grueling hard work. For Nika the hard work, isolation and discipline is ideal.

On the eve of flying back to the mainland for a two week break, disaster strikes, and Nika is thrown into darkness.

When he awakes in a strange world, with no memory of his past, he finds himself in the presence of monks, who offer to help, on one condition. Nika must deliver an urgent message to the king, and in return, the mysterious monks will help him recall his memories and find a way home.

Instead, Nika is sent on a long journey with his new friend Freyne, and the spoilt Princess Iryna, to fulfill a prophecy that will restore balance to the world.

Nika must adjust to more than just a new world; as his body undergoes a transformation he does not understand, he must also deal with being hunted, forbidden love, mancery, and gods he’s never heard of.

This wasn’t horrible, but it was just exceptionally tedious. It’s almost 400 pages long and very very little ever actually happens. But I can tell you what every building in every town looks like, what color the napkins at the dinners are, about every single bath and change of clothing the characters make as they travel, and travel, and travel. Plus, the author really missed their chance to make a ‘it’s bigger on the inside’ joke about Freyne’s pack. He pulled everything from a spit and small mortar and pestle, to towels and changes of clothing out of that thing.

So little happens, in fact, that the author had to add some casually institutionalized homophobia (with threats of castration and dismemberment) and near-rapes of female characters AS FILLER. Both could be removed from the book without making any changes to the plot. ZERO. It was 100% unneeded, and for me at least, unappreciated.

Additionally, I found many of the characters shallow and poorly drafted. The female characters were especially cliched, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, even random women met along the way. CLICHED.

Having said all that, Campbell had a sweet story to tell about found family and sacrifice. As I said, not horrid, I’m I’m awful glad to be done with it.

the lowest realm

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Book Review: Awakening, by Amanda M. Lee

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I picked up a freebie code for an Audible copy of Awakening (Covenant College, #1)
by Amanda M. Lee floating around the internet somewhere, probably from FreeAudiobookCodes. I listened to it as part of my March Awakening Challenge.

awakening Amanda M Lee

College was supposed to be all about booze and boys. For Zoe Lake, though, it’s all about monsters and mayhem.

An incoming freshman at Covenant College, Zoe is excited to meet her roommates and attend her classes. There’s only one problem: Covenant College isn’t all it’s purported to be.

First off, there are attractive — yet mysterious — men skulking around every corner. Then there’s that persistent professor that thinks he knows some secret about her past that even she isn’t aware exists.

Then there are the rumors. You know the ones. The ones that say Covenant College is home to more than just humans — but vampires and werewolves, too.

Not only is Zoe going to find herself in the middle of madness — but she’s going to have to try and pass finals while she endeavors to solve the mystery of what a monster really is.

my review

The writing and narrations were fine, but the main character is so unpleasant I couldn’t enjoy the book. I’m not one who thinks all heroines have to be polite and pleasant, but Zoe is like someone took a Mean Girl and centered a book around her. She’s not just rude and abrasive, she’s needlessly cruel, shallow, and narcissistic. She even says she’s a narcissist at one point and all I could think was, “Being self-aware doesn’t make it any more tolerable.”

She’s also cliched in a hundred ways. She’s ‘not like other girls,’ can fight well ‘because she hung out with more boys than girls growing up,’ effortlessly good at everything, sarcastic even in the face of death, pretty, wears Star Wars, Marvel t-shirts and Chucks. She’s a self-centered walking cliche.

I did appreciate that she is unabashedly and unapologeticaly sexual. But I could have done without the roommate constantly calling her a slut for it. (Just as I could have done without the virgin character simultaneously being bashed for being a virgin over and over again and being solely focused on ‘losing her v-card.’) It was an unpleasant.

Zoe does step up and save the day more than once. But honestly, every-time she did I rather thought it out of character for her. There’s a scene at a frat party where an inebriated girl is being ‘cut from the herd’ by two guys and Zoe feels uncomfortable about it, but decides not to intervene (given the rest of the plot, this girl was almost certainly later raped). That was a reaction that fit the Zoe Lee crafted far better than the times she steps in to help.

I’ll also note that the use of date rape drugs and the subsequent rapes are included as pretty cheap plot devices and dismissed almost jokingly in the big climactic finish. No one is caught or punished, nor is there any indication that it’s stopped. It is treated as unimportant to the ‘real’ plot. Leave that crap out then, IMO.

awakening amanda m lee