Tag Archives: challenge 2013

Book Review of K.T. Swartz’s Juliet Harrison Novels

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I grabbed K.T. Swartz‘s first Juliet Harrison novel, These Chains That Bind, off of the KDP free list. (It’s still free, BTW.) I then bought the second two, Debtors Remorse and Carry Me Home.

These Chains That BindDescription from Goodreads:
Juliet Harrison can whip up one mean protection spell; Ezra Jacobs can snipe a man from a mile away. They might just be Columbus’ best detective duo… if only they’d stop arguing.

What do FBI agents, a bad-ass ex-marine, and a Mob Errand Boy have in common?

They’re all after one very annoyed Juliet Harrison.

Add to that a friend with an unrelenting ghost problem and a dangerous necromancer on the loose, and Juliet may not survive long enough to help the one person she can’t live without.

Review
I’m gonna start with a little OCD rant that I’ve made before. But it bothers me every single time, so I’m just gonna get it off of my chest. That cover is the wrong damned shape. There I said it. This is a book, not a CD. It needs a vertical rectangular cover so that it fits the standard and looks right when stacked with the rest of my digital books. Doesn’t it bother anyone else? It looks completely unprofessional to me, or at least very homemade (and not in a good way.) OK, moving on to the book.

I spent almost all of this book convinced that I wasn’t actually reading the first of the series. All my googling couldn’t come up with any prequel, so I suppose it must be number one. But there are a lot of rather important events referenced more than once that felt very much like the subject matter of a previous book. Carol’s death, for example, or whatever happened with Eli and his ex-wife, which is apparently how he and Juliet met.

These are not small matters. Carol was apparently Juliet’s long-term girlfriend, who was shot, possibly protecting Juliet. That’s a big deal. That’s important. That was still greatly affecting Juliet in this book, but never fully explored. Then Juliet spent roughly a third of this book helping Eli overcome the aftereffects of whatever transpired in the mysterious past event. That’s a lot of time to spend wondering what exactly it was that transpired.

I was really, really bothered by this. Either fully explore it or leave it out, but to just throw it out with no background and no follow-up is painful to read. Honestly, about 15% through the book, when I was so completely confused by these previous events and just realising they were never going to be explained, I almost gave up. I almost thought that if the author was such a poor storyteller that she didn’t recognise this as a GIANT plot hole, I shouldn’t hold out much hope for the book. I persevered, though, and I’m glad I did, because eventually the book moved away from its own history and developed a story of its own. It’s a darned good story too.

It’s the characters that make it I think. Juliet and Ezra have a wonderfully strained relationship. (Again, wish I knew the history of it. There is apparently 6 years worth.) He doesn’t speak much, but he’s a man of action. Juliet’s normal life would give most of us grey hair and it was a lot of fun to watch her navigate a world full of ghosts and poltergeists. I rather enjoyed the FBI agents as well. There was a lot of humour in Charlie and Juliet’s exchanges.

The plot itself seemed to be split into thirds: helping Ray and his friends, helping Eli, and trying to avoid GW. The whole Ray situation wraps up nicely. The Eli situation kind of wrapped up but really had no beginning, and I suspect it will crop up again in future books, and the GW situation had no end since it’s carrying over into book two. You can maybe see why I was never wholly convinced I really was reading book one.

On the whole, however, I found the writing quite refreshing, and there was a good amount of humour in it. I especially liked Juliet and Ezra’s constant jibes and insults. It was a bit of a running gag. I did notice a couple of repeat phrases, though. I think about a hundred people must have had the corner of their lip twitch, for example. I liked it enough to buy books two and three, so that should tell you something.
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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.