Tag Archives: challenge 2013

Review of Bella Forrest’s A Shade of Vampire

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 I Won a signed copy of Bella Forrest‘s A Shade of Vampire from Layers of Thought. I included both the new and old cover just to be awkward. 

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Description from Goodreads:

On the evening of Sofia Claremont’s seventeenth birthday, she is sucked into a nightmare from which she cannot wake.

A quiet evening walk along a beach brings her face to face with a dangerous pale creature that craves much more than her blood. 

She is kidnapped to an island where the sun is eternally forbidden to shine.
An island uncharted by any map and ruled by the most powerful vampire coven on the planet. She wakes here as a slave, a captive in chains.

Sofia’s life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn when she is the one selected out of hundreds of girls to join the harem of Derek Novak, the dark royal Prince.

Despite his addiction to power and obsessive thirst for her blood, Sofia soon realizes that the safest place on the island is within his quarters, and she must do all within her power to win him over if she is to survive even one more night.

Will she succeed? …or is she destined to the same fate that all other girls have met at the hands of the Novaks?

Review (with mild spoilers):

If Edward Cullen had ever been forced to rule a hidden enclave of vampires he would definitely be named Derek Novak. No doubt about it. A Shade of Vampire is a quick little YA read that Twilight fans will love. The problem is that I’m really not a Twilight fan. So in order to give this book a fair chance I tried imagining how I would have reacted to it if I was still an angsty teenage girl. Certainly Sofia is described as a smart, slightly quirky, wall flower. I can relate to that. She’s secretly crushing on her popular best friend, who I THINK she lives with. I guess I can relate to that too. (Though the whole living situation was never very clear. Apparently she was abandoned, but I never could grasp the details. Maybe I’m wrong.) I had to wonder a little bit about the whole high school clique thing though. I mean if he’s popular and she isn’t how are they best friends? I don’t really remember cliques being so accepting of such social transgressions. In the end I decided that I can relate to Sofia’s life prior to the vampires, but not after. Once she is taken to the Blood Shade I could do nothing but shake my head.

Derek wakes from a protracted sleep and INSTANTLY falls for little ‘ol Sofia. What does he fall in love with? Well, I don’t want to give anything away, but it isn’t anything the other girls don’t have too. So, really the question still stands. Sofia, in turn, is either exceptionally susceptible to Stockholm Syndrome or has no sense of self-preservation, because she is feeling Derek in return. She is falling in love with his kindness, which, honestly, feels misplaced. Really there is a whole undercurrent of incongruous innocence in this book. It’s in small things, like the keeping of harems and constant references to playing with their beautiful slaves, or the leers Sofia is subjected to but the complete lack of follow through or sex of any kind. Example: the girls are all kidnapped when they are 17 because they mature and taste sweetest when they turn 18. Now, the whole blood letting/sex connection is pretty blatant, so the message is essentially that the girls will be ravished, but not until they conveniently (and coincidentally) come of legal age. Riiighhht. The novel is so sexually charged that this absence is conspicuous. I realise that as a YA novel it shouldn’t really have any, so maybe the suggestion needed to be pulled back a little. 

I have a guess about where the story will go from here and I’d be willing to read a sequel to see if I’m right or not. With the exception of the constant and annoying one sentence paragraphs (I was always told a minimum of 3 BTW) it reads fairly smoothly. (Though to be fair Derek’s dialogue is a little too smooth for someone who’s been asleep for 400 years. But since I wouldn’t really want to slog through the old English I’m more than happy to let that pass.) It was also interesting to be able to see both sides of Sofia and Derek’s interactions. Sometimes their actions held different meanings for the two of them, but were still meaningful to both. I thought that was very cleverly played. All in all I thought it was OK, but I’m well aware that there will be those who love this sort of story and they will, no doubt, really enjoy it.

Book Review of Nicholas Kerkoff’s Be’askaas – Tales of Death and Redemption.

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Be'askaas

Author, Nicholas Kerkoff, sent me a copy of his novel Be’askaas – Tales of Death and Redemption. I was relieved to discover that it isn’t, in fact, a series of short stories, but one novel.

Description from Goodreads:
Two young brothers are cast out into the hard world when their inebriated father loses the family farm. Their only option is to become apprentices for an elderly necromancer many miles away. It’s a disgusting occupation which society fears and despises. The poor rural kids know little of magic and even less about the world at large, but through a series of wizardly jobs and perilous adventures they begin to learn the true nature of power and the potential of their new dark art.

Review:
Honestly, I have a hard time sub-categorising Be’askaas – Tales of Death and Redemption. Yes, at its core it’s a fantasy novel. It has sorcerers, Earth witches, Niads, demons, necromancers, gods, dragons and zombies. No question about it. It’s a fantasy novel. But somehow it doesn’t have the whimsy I associate with the upbeat contributions to the genre, it isn’t epic (though there are a couple long treks), and somehow despite its subject matter I wouldn’t call it dark fantasy either. It’s…philosophical…maybe.

As the two young students, Rafe and Gywn, spend their first year in the company of the necromancer, Yulsef, they learn how little they understood of the world around them and some important life lessons. The reader, by extension, does too. I consider these lessons more important that the story that encompasses them; simple gems like knowledge complicates life. It’s much easier to live in comfortable ignorance than to separate yourself from the herd with true understanding. It’s really particularly genius that the characters are so young. Their minds are relatively uncluttered to start with. So while they spend a lot of time gaping in amazement, there is very little unlearning necessary.

The book is slow. I don’t mean in a ‘god, please let something happen soon’ kind of way. Plenty happens. Rather it is paced and methodical, so that was all good. I only had two true complaints. One, there are quite a few characters introduced in such a short book and often the POV would shift to these new characters before they were introduced. This threw me every single time. Second, I probably would have given the book five stars if it had a little bit more of an ending. I suspect there is a lot more to come. After all one year in the life of a 10 and 13 year old apprentice leaves plenty of room for more and the inkling of civil unrest sets the stage for future adventure. It’s just that this book feels unfinished. It’s only 118 pages long and ends abruptly, with no real wrap up. No real task accomplished or quest finished, either for that matter. There isn’t any real indication of why it should end when it ends. It just does. I was let staring at the phrase “to be continued…” with a distinct sense of dissatisfaction.

Treasure Tide

Book Review of Deniece Greene’s Treasure Tide (The Coins #1)

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Treasure Tides

I downloaded Denice Greene‘s PNR novel, Treasure Tides from the KDP list. At the time of posting this review it was still free.

Description from Goodreads:
Becki Stephens is living the dream in a beach house along the coast of South Carolina. A diving expedition leads to the discovery of more than sharks’ teeth when she discovers a crate on the ocean floor…Becki’s world is about to change in ways she never dreamed possible. Her crate holds secrets she may not be able to handle, and a man who steals her heart the first moment she sees him… walking naked through her living room!

Review:
Before I say anything more let me say that I liked the story of this book. I want that said first because I also have a boatload of complaints, but while I might grouse about certain things I don’t want them to overshadow the basic fact that I liked the book well enough. 

It had a fun premise and a couple interesting twists in the plot. It also had a lot of strong male characters who considered it important to protect the women in their lives. And who can’t approve of that? Most of those women were children, nieces and sisters but a few were of the mating sort. I appreciated this about Kurt, Landon and Royce. They took their fatherly roles seriously (even if they weren’t strictly fathers of the girls/women under their care). It was nice to know that the girls were so loved, but it got old quick. Contradictorily, I liked that they were the type to try and be paternalistic and overly protective, but hated that they were allowed to indulge in the behaviour at the same time.

The main heroine, Becky, would have been easy to relate to if her character hadn’t so persistently chipped away at any respect I had for her. I started out thinking she was a spunky woman. Then she went and fell into a passionate kiss with the frighteningly large naked stranger she found in her living room roughly 45 seconds after meeting him, told the same naked man he couldn’t stay the night and then relented because she was afraid of a little thunder and lightning. (Really? How very cliché.) She ruined perfectly strong coffee with unprecedented amounts of cinnamon creamer and whipped cream from a can (eww) and she allowed all of the men in her life to order her around.

I would ask why, but it was perfectly in keeping with the infantile persona applied to her. She stuck her tongue out at people, threw tantrums, cried at the drop of a hat, liked to play in fountains, jumped too quickly to conclusions, apparently loved sweets (since she was constantly buying or making them), and could relate far too easily with her 12,14, and 16 year old cousins. At one point her mother was even supposed to have described  her as  ‘reaching for her independence.’ She’s 22! If she hasn’t yet reached for and found at least a little independence there’s a problem. If I’m honest all of the women were a little weak, weepy, and in need of male protection–even when described as strong. Eventually it started to feel just a little condescending.

In the end I gave up liking Becky. Joanne fared a little better. I liked her alright, at least she was portrayed as victim instead of a child. But still, there it was, the fragile broken women in need of a big strong man to protect her. Then there was Natie. She didn’t need to be protected at least…nope, she needed to be rescued. But that’s apparently a story for another book. Other that being a lead in for a sequel she seemed to have no purpose in this book what-so-ever.

None of that is my main complaint, however. What irritated me most of all was that just about everything in this book was said at least two times. To call it repetitive just doesn’t seem accurate enough. Everything from narrative descriptions of the team Royce heads, to explanations of familial relationships, to Becky’s hatred of mornings, to Royce and Becky’s instant lust/instant hate/instant love/instant hate/instant comfortable couple holding hands on the porch swing like they’ve known each other for 20 years is repeated ad nauseam. (And that’s just on the first day.) It does smooth out 50 or so percent of the way through, but by then I was just about ready to give up. 

Lastly, there were some formatting and editing issues. I’m always reluctant to mention formatting in case it’s actually my device that is at fault instead of the file, but in this case there didn’t seem to be any sort of paragraph identification. Neither indentations nor hard returns between paragraphs were regularly present. That made it a little hard to read at times and I don’t think my Kindle could cause that. 

I want to conclude as I started. I had a lot of grievances with this novel, but it was still a fun story. I did like some of the characters. Yes they were almost all male, but that means that there were characters I liked. Landon especially seemed to resonate with me, as did Trevor and the ‘gentlemen’. (I don’t want to give anything away.) Plus it’s set in Charleston, SC, a city with a lot of interesting architecture and history. You gotta love that. It’s also a really clean read. There isn’t anything any racier than a deep kiss.