Tag Archives: book review

dark and otherworldly banner

Book Review: Dark and Otherworldly, by Kristen Brand

1 Reply

Author, Kristen Brand sent me an ecopy of the Omnibus of Dark and Otherworldly for review.
dark and otherworldly cover

Leigh Morgan has one mission: to stop the fae who abducted her sister from ever kidnapping another human again.

Dredarion Rath wants one thing: to disgrace his older brother and prove himself the worthier heir to Otherworld’s throne.

When their paths cross, it changes everything, and neither Otherworld nor the human realm will ever be the same.

Three romantic urban fantasy novels; one darkly enchanting volume. The Dark and Otherworldly Omnibus includes:

dark and otherworldly individual covers

Poison and Honey
She hunts the fae. The last man she should fall for is a cunning fae prince.

Sting of Thorns
She’s been cursed by the queen of Otherworld. Now the only one who can save her is the man she betrayed.

The Cruelest Curse
When dark forces threaten Otherworld, she’ll have to join forces with her enemies to save the kingdom… and the prince.

my review

I wrote brief individual reviews as I finished each of these novellas. But I’ll make a few quick general statements before I get to them. First I liked this quite a lot. I loved the way Leigh and Dredarion grated on one another, but also came to respect aspects of the other.

Second, I know that my hatred of serials is a personal issue that not everyone shares. Many people will have no issue with this story being broken into 3 volumes. And at 519 pages it is too long to feasibly be published as a single book. But it is 100% a single story. While the author finds acceptable stopping points, none of it stands alone and I think it could have been edited down to fit into a single longish book. I just see no reason that it needed to be broken into 3 pieces. I wouldn’t have even chanced reading it if I hadn’t been offered the Omnibus and that would have been a shame because, as I said, I liked it quite a lot.

Third, I can’t write this review and not mention the giant elephant that is Leigh falling in love with her en-slaver and, because of that love, being willing to return and fight for the peoples who were still actively enslaving her own. By the end Dredarion may have changed his views, but no one else had. So, even by the end she loved and worked for the betterment of people who were enslaving her people. It’s hugely problematic and if it wasn’t in a fantasy setting it would have been wholly intolerable.

Since it is a fantasy I was able to suspend my disbelief enough to put up with it. But even then I noticed that the issue of slavery was more and more often euphemistically referred to as servitude as the series went on.

Now, moving on to my thoughts each individual novella.

Poison and Honey
I liked this a lot. I liked both Leigh and Dredarion and I liked what they appreciated about each other. I thought the world was interesting and both Leigh’s determination and Dredarion’s obvious blind spot around the enslavement of humans interesting. I did think the romance aspect moved too quickly and disliked that it ended on a cliffhanger, such that it’s not a complete story. And at only 136 pages, it had room to be. It did feel like it was a spin-off of something, with quite a lot of named, but otherwise unknown, characters showing up right at the end as if we should know who they are. But as far as I can tell it isn’t.

Sting of Thorns
In a way I think I enjoyed this second installment more than the first. All those unknown characters who showed up out of the blue at the end of Poison and Honey are finally introduced and I liked them all. Leigh and Dredarion are forced to get to know the real versions of each other and I enjoyed that, though I still feel their ‘love’ is unsupported. I just decided to roll with it like any other fantasy element. I did see the twist coming and it, of course, explains so much.

The Cruelest Curse
Honestly, this was my least favorite of the three. It brings the story to a satisfactory conclusion, but it lost the tension and delicious banter between Leigh and Dredarion. They became love-sick saps instead. Plus, while I was always bothered by the way the humans’ enslavement is glossed over as servitude, you really feel it here. I don’t think the word slave is even used. And when Leigh negotiated for better conditions for the humans, it included pay and the ability to leave a position, but not that humans wouldn’t be kidnapped anymore. Perhaps this is inferred, but I use it as an example of how the slavery aspect weakened as the series progressed. Despite all that, when I look at the series as a whole, I’m happy to have read it and will happily pick up another of Brand’s Books.

dark and otherworldly omnibus

Other Reviews:

Darkest Sins Blog

Whiskey & Wit Book Reviews

 

 

Book Review: The Sky People, by S.M. Stirling

Leave a reply

Several years ago, I picked a used copy of S.M. Stirling‘s The Sky People. Well, more accurately, I picked up a copy of the sequel, In the Courts of The Crimson Kings without realizing it was a second book and then went back, found, and bought The Sky People. I finally got around to starting the series.

the sky people stirling

Marc has been assigned to Jamestown, the US-Commonwealth base on Venus, near the great Venusian city of Kartahown. Set in a countryside swarming with sabertooths and dinosaurs, Jamestown is home to a small band of American and allied scientist-adventurers.

But there are flies in this ointment – and not only the Venusian dragonflies, with their yard-wide wings. The biologists studying Venus’s life are puzzled by the way it not only resembles that on Earth, but is virtually identical to it. The EastBloc has its own base at Cosmograd, in the highlands to the south, and relations are frosty. And attractive young geologist Cynthia Whitlock seems impervious to Marc’s Cajun charm.

Meanwhile, at the western end of the continent, Teesa of the Cloud Mountain People leads her tribe in a conflict with the Neanderthal-like beastmen who have seized her folk’s sacred caves. Then an EastBloc shuttle crashes nearby, and the beastmen acquire new knowledge… and AK47’s.

Jamestown sends its long-range blimp to rescue the downed EastBloc cosmonauts, little suspecting that the answer to the jungle planet’s mysteries may lie there, among tribal conflicts and traces of a power that made Earth’s vaunted science seem as primitive as the tribesfolk’s blowguns. As if that weren’t enough, there’s an enemy agent on board the airship…

my review

I thought this was an interesting science fiction read. Specifically, I thought the small earth-related news clips at the beginning of each chapters interesting, as well as the discussion around what finding other inhabitable planets would do to earth-side politics. I found this almost more engaging than the daily drama of the rest of the book, honestly.

I did like the idea of the dinosaur-age earth-like planet being settled by humanity. I liked the characters (though none of them are particularly deep) and the how-did-this-happen evolutionary mystery. I don’t think anyone will be surprised by much of what they find here though. While the political and social set-up is intriguing, the actual events of the plot I found painfully predictable, especially the rather abrupt ‘and it all worked out’ ending (prior to the epilogue which is a lead-in to book two). I also thought it rambled a little in the middle and there was a whiff of ‘bringing enlightenment to the noble savages’ to it. But it wasn’t overpowering. There is a man and his dog though, and that made up for a whole lot.

As I said, I also have book two (In the Courts of The Crimson Kings) and do plan to read it. But I don’t think I’ll dive right into it at the moment.

The Lords of Creation photo

Other Reviews:

SFsignal – Review: The Sky People

Review of The Sky People by S.M. Stirling

cold read banner

Book Review: Cold read, by Renee Joiner

Leave a reply

I borrowed an audio copy of Renee Joiner’s Cold Read through Hoopla.

Cold Read renee joiner

His future is in her hands….

Tasia Jackson is a psychic working occasional cases with the police department and the rare one-off for an old friend at the FBI. Her real business is super-secret because even the government doesn’t know just how powerful and dangerous she is and what she can actually do. Her FBI friend Daniel Cordeiro probably has his suspicions, but he’s never voiced them until she gets a strange vision of him pleading for her help.

Daniel’s latest case is a run-of-the-mill missing persons, but it’s personal this time. It’s his missing person, his sister, and he’s desperate to beat the 48-hour clock imposed by her kidnapper. So, he goes it alone and gets himself in deep trouble. His hail-Mary hope is Tasia and the powers she is afraid to fully use. He can only pray she hears him when he calls….

Can Tasia tap into things she knows are better left alone in time to save innocent lives, or will her dangerous magic do them all more harm than good?

my review

I wouldn’t say this was bad, just thin. There’s a plot, but there’s not much to it. There’s a world, but it’s not overly robust. There’s the bare bones of a romance, but it’s not particularly developed. There’s a mystery, but it’s not elaborate. I think this would have really benefited from an additional 100 pages and the extra meat that would have allowed the author to give the book.

I thought Kate Poels—the narrator—did a passable job. But the accents are pretty inconsistent. And lastly, I like the cover a lot (it’s what convinced me to pick the book up), but it doesn’t accurately represent the story. The heroine shepherds the life energies of the dead and has visions/prophetic dreams. She doesn’t read tarot cards or use any circle based or academic magic (as the books on the cover would suggest). I don’t suppose it’s a big deal, but it did lead me to expect something entirely different than what’s actually in the book.

All in all, I’d probably read another Joiner book, but she’s not making the favorites list based on this showing.

cold read photo