Tag Archives: challenges

Blood of the Beast

Book Review of Blood of the Beast, by Tamela Quijas

Leave a reply

Blood of the BeastI grabbed a copy Blood of the Beast, by Tamela Quijas from the Amazon freebie list.

Description from Goodreads:
There is a scent that fills the night, far more delicate than the beat of the heart, more fragile than the whisper of breath escaping human lungs.

The echo that fills the darkness is the scent of blood pulsating through the mortal body.

Commonly overlooked by those among the living, it is a sound fervently sought by those residing on the fringes of the world existing between the living and the undead.

Blood is what the beast craves.

Detective Valentina Kureyev had been assigned to one of the worst murder cases of the century. A serial killer haunted the streets of her city, depositing bloodless corpses throughout the section of town known as Little Europe.

She hadn’t a clue to the identity of the culprit.

The case was hopeless.

The terror was real.

As real as Demetri Daskova.

The Professor of Russian Antiquities had been targeted with the murderer’s special form of a calling card. Val couldn’t turn away from his offer of aide in the bizarre case, even though he whispered tales of ‘those that walked on the dark side of the moon’ and the beast that hungrily fed on human blood.

He was the primary suspect.

Review:
Good lord that was just horrible. I almost didn’t even make it through the prologue. But it’s the end of the year and I’d set myself an alphabet soup challenge (read a book by an author for every letter of the alphabet) and I only have Q, X,Y & Z left and I DNFed my Y yesterday. So, I wasn’t going to do the same with my Q. So I was trapped with it.

Eventually I just started reading passages aloud to my husband, because sharing the shocking horridness and strange, STRANGE over-use of the word quiver/quivering was the only way I could keep going. (Seriously, the word is used a lot, often in questionable ways.) The whole book is painfully wordy. No one has gold eyes, they’re golden hued eyes, etc. It contradicts itself. It is painfully dependent on tropes. There is no palpable chemistry between the characters. The female MC is pathologically angry and extremely unlikable (but all the men lust after her). The male MC was a jerk in the beginning and we’re never shown that he changed. It’s just supposed to be assumed. In addition to too many words, there are also misused words, missing words and anachronistic language. The villain is a cliche scorned woman (who spent one purchased night with the man she goes bad over) and the whole thing was just jumpy and clunky. But hey, the author’s name is Quijas, so it’s all good.

Blueberry Boys

Book Review of Blueberry Boys, by Vanessa North

Leave a reply

Blueberry BoysI received a copy of Vanessa North‘s Blueberry Boys from Netgalley.

Description from Goodreads:
Connor Graham is a city boy—a celebrated fashion photographer in New York. When his uncle’s death drags him back to the family blueberry farm, all he wants to do is sell it as quickly as he can. Until he meets his uncle’s tenant farmer. 

Jed Jones, shy and stammering, devout and dedicated, has always yearned for land of his own and a man to share it with. Kept in the closet by his church, family, and disastrous first love, he longs to be accepted for who he is. But now, with his farm and his future in Connor’s careless hands, he stands to lose even the little he has. 

Neither man expects the connection between them. Jed sees Connor—appreciates his art and passion like no one else in this godforsaken town ever has. Connor hears Jed—looks past his stutter to listen to the man inside. The time they share is idyllic, but with the farm sale pending, even their sanctuary is a source of tension. As work, family, and their town’s old-fashioned attitudes pull them apart, they must find a way to reconcile commitments to their careers and to each other.

Review:
Sooooo, I held off reading this book for a while because I often don’t mesh with contemporary romances. I need a little extra oomph to make romance in general work for me. But I’d seen so many wonderful reviews of this book that I gave in and requested it from Netgalley……and I should have stuck with my initial instinct. This wasn’t a winner for me.

Now, it was marvelously written. I liked the characters, both their personalities and their imperfections. I liked North’s treatment of Jed’s religion and its importance to him. And it was very sweet. But…but…well, I’m just gonna go ahead and say it. I was bored. It’s a fairly straightforward romance. There are a couple challenges to overcome, but no real twists. And the challenges seemed overblown to me. I mean Blandford was 2 hours from New York. Seriously, I know a man who commutes that distance everyday for work, so I don’t understand why this is such a barrier to a relationship.

Here’s the thing though, I suspect my boredom was at least in part the result of me not relating to the primary events of the book. I’ve never had to come out to family. I’ve never had to negotiate my sexuality and my religious beliefs, etc., etc. Perhaps if I had, I would have been grabbed more fully by this plot. Which is to say that those who this is familiar to might find a homecoming here that I didn’t. In this, I am perhaps just not the intended readership.

Outside of that, my only real complaints are that the attraction seems instant and based largely on being the only two gay men around and how neatly and easily it all wrapped up. [Slightly spoilerish] Jed decides to come out and then seek advice from the pastor immediately after the homophobic jerkface pastor leaves and the new conveniently liberal and accepting pastor comes in. (And there was no indication that this was purposeful.) Conner’s brother, who had been hostile his whole life suddenly decides to try and correct his ways. Jed’s homophobic family come around to accepting him in no time flat. It all just happened too easily and honestly it’s just a little too pat for me. Plus, it’s super sappy-sweet.

So, not a winner for me, but I suspect a home run for other readers

The Subs Club

Book Review of The Subs Club & Pain Slut, by J.A. Rock

Leave a reply

The Subs ClubI received a copy of J. A. Rock‘s The Subs Club and Pain Slut from Netgalley.

Description from Goodreads:
A year ago, my best friend Hal died at the hands of an incompetent “dom.” So I started the Subs Club, a private blog where submissives can review doms and call out the douche bags.

A perfect example of the kind of arrogant asshole I mean? The Disciplinarian. He has a pornstache. He loves meat, stoicism, America, and real discipline. And he thinks subs exist to serve him.

But . . . not everything about him is awful. His Davy Crockett act just seems like a cover for his fear of intimacy, and part of me wants to show him it’s okay to get close to people. And, I mean, sue me, but I have fantasized about real discipline. Not role-play, but like, Dave, you’re gonna be thirty in four years and you still work in a mall; get your ass in gear or I’ll spank it.

Not that I’d ever trust anyone with that kind of control.

I’m gonna redefine “battle of wills” for the Disciplinarian. Or I’m gonna bone him. It’s hard to say.

—Dave

Review:
Sorry, this is a little bit of a discombobulated review, but I can’t decide how to rate this book. In some ways, I really liked it (it was funny and witty and subversive), but in others, it fell flat for me. And I’m not certain how much of that is the book and how much is that a lot of it just isn’t my kink. I get the pain aspect and thought some of it was hot, though it surpassed my comfort margins. But I can’t blame the book for that; it’s a subjective complaint. As is the fact that I don’t really care for the discipline kink.

[Slight spoiler] But I think the book also felt a little heavy on the BDSM safety lectures and negotiations. This was problematic for me because I kind of thought it was a bit of a ripple in the plot. David started The Subs Club to keep subs safe, instead of going to the existing panel discussions because the people who come to the discussions were the same-old, same-old and the people who were problematic don’t come. But the happy conclusion to this was that he got to lead a regular panel discussion. OK, yeah, there was the new reporting path created too, but I have a hard time thinking the owners of the club hadn’t been open to that to start with. So, it seemed like an unfortunate concession in the end, which it may have been, but it still left me less than satisfied. But again, am I just being overly critical because that aspect of the book didn’t grab me enough to stop overthinking it? I don’t know.

Having said that, outside of David’s ‘this is how it should work’ mental mastication (which, though heavy, was much less didactic than a lot of such books), I enjoyed Dave’s insistence on his right to safe words, hard limits and to be treated as a person with agency even as a submissive. Really, in some ways, this is what the book is about: how to maintain the passion and spontaneity, and danger while also remaining safe, especially when your confidence has been shaken.

I’ve seen a number of reviews refer to David (Pornstash-David) as Ron Swanson. I’ve never even seen the show, but I’ve seen enough memes to get the picture, and I couldn’t help but picture him that way. It worked, and I liked him a lot. I thought he and sub-David were funny together. I enjoyed the side characters and look forward to reading their books in the future. I loved sub-David’s inner monologue, and though I’m not at all familiar with real-life BDSM, I liked that mistakes were made, mold existed, toys had to be sterilized, negotiations happened etc., etc., etc. I liked that this felt like less of a fantasy BDSM book than most. Though, that’s just as likely to be the effect of a talented writer that can hide the fantasy element of the story as anything else.

pain slut coverDescription from Goodreads:
Honestly, I’m ready to take a step back from the Subs Club. Making the kink world a safer place for subs is the sort of bandwagon I’d have boarded as an idealist in my early twenties, but now I’m a pragmatist in my late twenties. I prefer to focus on adopting and raising a child.

But unexpected factors inevitably derail my plans. Like Drix Seger—attractive and the first genuine sadist I’ve encountered. If I were not in the process of renouncing my masochistic ways and becoming the normal, responsible potential father the adoption agency wants to see, Drix and I might do well together.

But he has a foolish name and belongs to a cult of vampyres, and I am quitting kink. So why does Drix’s infatuation with blood and biting make me so hot I can’t think straight? And why, when he looks at me, does he seem to see something beyond a basket case with a stick up my ass?

Can I start a new phase in my life without leaving part of myself behind? Please send help.

—Miles

Review:
The writing is this book was as good as any I’ve read from Rock. It was well-paced and had interesting characters and themes, but it was way past my comfort level. In fact, I’d say it probably hit my hard limit. I just could not get down with slapping people in the face and punching them in the stomach during sex. I had way less problem with the knife play than that. (And that’s likely just me.) Then, during that last climactic ménage scene, I kept thinking, “Miles should probably just be dead by this point.” I really felt like Rock just threw everything they could think of into it, and it eventually started to seem like a grocery list of tortures. (I thought most of the Scenes felt a little like this.)

I appreciated what Rock had to say on safety in BDSM communities, the interaction of different kinky sub-cultures, being more than your kink and negotiating vanilla society and authority as a kinky person, but this was not a book I was ever comfortable reading. But for those who are more tolerant of extremes in their erotica, this will probably be a real winner.