Tag Archives: challenge 2013

Rise of the Fallen

Book Review of Donya Lynne’s Rise of the Fallen

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Rise of the Fallen

I grabbed Donya Lynne‘s PNR Rise of the Fallen from the Amazon KDP list.

Description from Goodreads:
In the streets of Chicago exists an uneasy, centuries-old truce between vampires and their distant cousins, a race of shifters called drecks. Vampire enforcement agency, All the King’s Men (AKM), is charged with maintaining the truce, but when volatile enforcer Micah Black loses his mate and falls into the biological agony that results from the broken bond, he tests the boundaries of the truce by seeking out Apostle, a leader in the dreck community. Micah wants Apostle to kill him, a request Apostle is more than happy to fulfill. 

When ex-Army medic Samantha Garrett inadvertently disrupts the plot and saves Micah’s life, a chain reaction sets Micah’s heart on a collision course with Sam’s, but he will have to protect her from Apostle and her obsessive ex-husband, Steve, if they will have a chance at forever. Can Micah hold his emotions together to keep Sam alive?

Review:
So, I’m not gonna mince words here. This is a Black Dagger Brotherhood knock off. It is. There are a lot of them out there these days. All the King’s Men (AKM), like the Brotherhood is set against another paranormal species in an attempt to protect the human race. Here they may be called Drecks instead of Lessers, but it’s all the same. Unlike in BDB however, AKM don’t seem to actually encounter the Drecks very often. Not once in this whole book did one of the AKM go out to do the job one assumes the AKM was created for–to maintain the truce between the two species. It felt very much like the Drecks only existed in order to provide a reason for the AKM to exist.

The same could be said for Sam’s abusive ex-husband. He was purposeless. He shows up three times in the whole book and played no significant role beyond providing Sam a victimised past to be used to excuse her for being a stripper. I suppose readers are more accepting of a woman who works in the sex trade if she does it reluctantly than just because the money is good, or whatever. I found it unnecessary.

Despite the above complaints I did enjoy the book though. The sex scenes were hot. They incorporated a little bit of male dominance, without making the woman feel abused or overly controlled. That’s a thin and uncomfortable line for me as a reader. Lynne played the card without going over board. Conversely I did feel like Micah’s history as an actual Dom only served to artificially make him feel edgier. Again, it wasn’t needed. It was nothing more than a distraction. (Though I see it comes into play in at least one later book.)

My favourite aspect of the story was the loose adherence to heterosexuality. It’s always seemed to me that if you were a vampire who lived for hundred’s of years there wouldn’t really be much reason to stick strictly to the social mores of the time. Why not open your horizons up? Lynne allowed her characters this. Some are flat out gay, others just aren’t concerned with male/female, a partner is a partner. I liked that.

The series may not be the most original, but it passed an enjoyable couple of hours so I have no real qualms with the book.

Book Review of Beaird Glover’s Syd & Marcy

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Syd and Marcy

Author, Beaird Glover, sent me an e-copy of his novel Syd & Marcy.

Description from Goodreads:
Marcy practices to be a great actor, but she isn’t pretending to kill people. Is the murder an audition for Hollywood, or is it reality? When a ruthless detective is pitted against two self-centered scammers on the lam, it’s hard to tell whose side to be on. A femme fatale and her boyfriend are too wild to trust, but they just don’t know any better. According to the Old South, they must be punished. The frenetic ride takes off that is not only Syd and Marcy’s escape from Memphis to the backwoods of Mississippi—it’s also a darkly comedic escape to Southern Gen X nihilism in a black Mustang on a dark road getting darker. Featuring a conflict between the Old South and the New, and written in a facile and succinct prose, Syd and Marcy spirals frankly through the realities and illusions of a culture on the rails.

Review:
This is a hard book to sum up, but please cue the Nine Inch Nails and then fade into the banjos. This book is Natural Born Killers, meets Deliverance, with a slap dash of Holmes and Watson thrown in for good measure. It’s dark, gristly, violent and sometimes painfully uncomfortable to read. If it weren’t for the humour used to break up the disquietude I don’t know if it would even be tolerable. There’s sexual abuse, incest, human bondage, drug use, alcoholism, bigotry, racism, violence, violence, and more violence. There’s poverty, ignorance, social/economic inequality and a severe lack of formal education. But there’s also a seed of hope apparent in Syd and Marcy’s love for one another, Marcy’s concern for her younger sister, and Blaine’s willingness to be flexible. It’s well worth picking up.

In a sense the book reads a bit like a cautionary tale of cyclical violence and perpetual victimhood. Everyone is crazy. Everyone is hurting. Everyone is just trying to make do and everyone is essentially failing. Blaine is just about the only person who even remotely has his shit together here and even he has a crumbling marriage, rather lackadaisical attitude toward his job, and is sitting on a political powder keg. On the other hand there are a few gems of interpersonal understanding. Syd’s empathy for Marcy’s circumstance, behaviours and other ‘issues’ almost makes him a psychological genius. It’s also a little bit touching. Unrepentant murder he may be, but I couldn’t help liking him…a lot.

I believe the Quentin Tarantino comparison has been made in previous reviews, but it’s apt. Not only because of the extreme and often unexpected violence, but also because of the thread of dark humour left in it’s wake. Imagine if Q.T. took a swipe at doing a remake of Lord of the Flies…scary huh? And while Lord of the Flies might seem like an odd comparison to make, since no one is stranded on an island and almost everyone is old enough to be considered an adult, I think it does actually make sense.

Like Golding’s classic exploration into the precarious balance between humans’ natural inclination to dominate over others and to settle into structured civility as well as the fluid nature of personal morality, Glover’s work presents the reader with psychotic killers you can relate to, crooked cops saving the innocent at the expense of other innocents, and abhorrent abuse at he hands of perpetrators who probably had no better chance in life than their victims. It’s hard to know exactly where the moral line should be drawn. But they’re all still just normal people in abnormal circumstance, much like Piggy, Ralph, Jack and the rest were just normal boys before finding themselves alone and unobserved in the wild. Even more frightening is the unspoken inference that all of this could be happening anywhere near you, at anytime if you just chose to look a little deeper. These are the people who fall through the cracks and are ignored by society’s invisible rule abiders, that would be us sheep BTW.  [I didn’t mean that to sound anywhere near as pretentious as it does on a second read, but the comparison still stands.]

It’s hard not to root for Syd and Marcy even as they made bad choice after bad choice, even as they killed and unintentionally tempted others into making similarly morally repugnant choices, leading to more disastrous circumstance. It’s hard to condemn two such guileless killers. They left chaos behind them wherever they went, but had no real ill-intent. It’s this dissonance between the reader’s emotional response to the characters and the logical brain’s advised response to them that makes this such and interesting read. Or at least that’s how I felt about it.

Cry Baby Hollow

Book Review of Aimee Love’s Cry Baby Hollow

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Cry Baby Hollow

I grabbed Aimee Love‘s Cry Baby Hollow from the Amazon KDP list recently.

Description from Goodreads:
There are things we all know about werewolves:
-The only way to become a werewolf is to be bitten by one.
-They only come out on the full moon.
-They can only be killed with a silver bullet.
-They are not real.

But when Aubrey Guinn comes to Eastern Tennessee to help Vina, an aging family friend, werewolves are the furthest things from her mind. She is preoccupied with more mundane concerns, like keeping Vina’s ingrate step-children from putting her in a nursing home, avoiding the advances of her handsome but dim witted neighbor, and keeping her mailbox away from the good old boys baseball bats. It isn’t until Aubrey finds the body of a local boy, gruseomely murdered, that she begins to see that life in the country is anything but slow, and werewolves are far from what Hollywood had led her to expect.

Review:
Cry Baby Hollow was a surprisingly good read. I say surprisingly because there are so many werewolf books on the market these days and almost all of them seem to be small variations of the same story. This one is not one of those. For one it isn’t about some dimwitted heroine falling hard for another testosterone crazed alpha wolf. Thank you sweet baby HeyZeus for variety. I would hesitate to even call this paranormal romance, except that it does have paranormal creatures in it and there is some romance. Either way it’s a lot of fun, if a little slow at times.

Ms. Love has created an interesting story, with engaging characters and some true regional humour. I can say that too. I happen to be from Tennessee. There was a lot of genuine southern culture depicted here, but there were a few inevitable stereotypes too. Sadly, there’s often a grain of truth in even them so I can’t fault the book for that.

I did have a few gripes though. While I loved Aubrey’s sharp tongue and quick wit, it didn’t always feel realistic. Old women like Vina can get away with being so acerbic, younger ones haven’t earned the social right yet. On more than one occasion I laughed at some cut down or defiant act of Aubrey’s (’cause they are funny and fist pumpingly “right on”), then thought, ‘what a bitch.’ She was just too quick to jump onto the offence. Plus, since you are given so little of Aubrey’s history upfront it felt a little like all of her considerable skill came unearned. Of course she’s supposed to have spent 10+ years in the Navy. No doubt she worked hard for them, but you don’t feel it.

I loved, loved, loved Joe, but there’s a fairly drastic change in his personality about halfway through the book and I was a little disappointed in that. It was predictable really, but I still much preferred his Good ‘Ol Boy self to his cleaned up self. I also wondered why he knew the area so much better than Aubrey if he’d been vacationing there for 10 years, but she’d been visiting her whole life. Seemed a little backwards.

Lastly, some important events were strangely glossed over: almost anything bedroom related, Aubrey’s days in the hospital which marked a sharp change in the tone of the book, her first training with Vina and pals that allowed her to fight on an even playing field with the baddy. All of them are game changers to the plot, but none of them are given to the reader. Their absence tended to make the events following them feel like abrupt shifts even when they really weren’t.

These are all fairly minor complaints in the grand scheme of things though. I have no hesitation about recommending Cry Baby Hollow book. It’s well worth reading.