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Shifting Shadows

Book Review of Amanda Kelly’s Shifting Shadows

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Shifting ShadowsI downloaded a copy of Amanda Kelly’s Shifting Shadows (Sparks Collide, #1) from the Amazon KDP list.

Description from Goodreads:
Party boy and werewolf, Jay Dellarson is stunned when his uncle hires a human to be his newest assistant. Kira Franklin is a sheltered girl with a mysterious past who’s finally taking charge of her life. When Jay and his pack begin to spend more time with the new girl in town, things start to unravel. Kira fights to keep her secrets hidden but when she finds out the truth of the town’s inhabitants it puts her in greater danger than ever before. While discovery of the werewolves’ secrets is dangerous, it’s discovery of Kira’s secrets that could place everyone in the middle of a vicious war.

Review:
This was an alright read if you like the kind of thing. It is told in first person, which I generally dislike. To complicate things it is told in first person from the perspective of two people. I found this really distracting and annoying. Now, I did appreciate being able to see both character’s POVs, but I’ve found myself constantly having to double check the chapter headings to remember who was currently narrating.

I really, really liked that this was not a case of insta-love. I found the romance a lot more realistic for the time it took to develop. But this was definately one of those books where the heroine manages to charm everyone effortlessly and by the end it starts to feel just a little too kumbaya for my taste–with everyone throwing wonderful affirmations around. This always strikes me as an underdevelopment.

The book seemed to throw the magic in all of a sudden. One moment Kira is going along as a normal girl unknowingly hanging out with the werewolves, the next she is suddenly off doing her thing. (I don’t want to give a spoiler, but suffice it to say there is no build up and so the reveal seems very abrupt.) I also didn’t quite grasp the seriousness of her situation. I understood she was in hiding because of the war. But she wasn’t anyone special to it, not a princess or the daughter of a leader or an active participant. She was just one girl so I saw no reason for her to be any more hunted than anyone else. Therefore all of her and her family’s precautions seemed really over the top.

It also ended without ending. I know that this is the first of a series, but my absolute, number one, literary pet peeve is…I would call it a cliffhanger, but that’s not right. A cliffhanger infers an actual conclusion of some sort while leaving some thread open for continuation. Nothing in this book concludes. There is one red herring event that substitutes an ending, but that’s just a cheat. The perpetrator of the mysterious attacks that plaque the whole book is not only not revealed it isn’t even addressed because it is still open and in the air.

I think this probably counts as New Adult as opposed to YA since the characters are all in their mid-twenties, but there isn’t any sex. I’m still figuring out what falls into that genre. I enjoyed the read.

The Feathered Lover

Book Review of Tabitha Levin’s The Feathered Lover

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The Feathered Lover

I picked up a copy of Tabitha Levin‘s The Feathered Lover for free from the Smashword’s seasonal sale. It will be free using code SW100 until the end of July. 

Description from Goodreads:
It’s 1943 and Ruby Kelly just saw one of the wild men with wings for the first time in her life. He’d been captured, tied up, and was now being held in the stables at the same Inn she was staying.

She had to get a closer look. She crept downstairs toward the stable window. His chest was smooth and bare, and it glistened with sweat from his recent struggle. Butterflies erupted in her stomach when he looked her way. Did he see her?

Now she had two options, free him and risk the wrath of the thugs who caught him, or pretend she never saw him at all.

Neither would be easy.

Review:
This was an all right read, I suppose. I can’t say it did much for me though. The whole thing just felt wrong. (If that makes any sense.) Starting with Zan. He felt very child-like to me. Everything from his insta-love which reminded me of a kid’s tendency to become obsessed with anything new, to the language divide that left him speaking like a halting toddler for much of the book, to Ruby’s tendency to compare him to a pet, to his occasional tears. As a result I had a really hard time seeing him as the sexy male lead he was supposed to be. That’s a real problem in a book with as much sex as The Feathered Lover. There was a lot of it. I don’t have any real issue with this much of the time, but here it started to clutter up the plot. Everywhere they went–endangered, held hostage, trying to have a conversation was apparently appropriate for a quickie before moving on.

I did like Ruby. She had a stubborn streak a mile long and I appreciated that. She prattled on a bit, having long one-sided soliloquies regularly. I had a little trouble understanding her insta-love with Zan though. She crossed the species/social/legal divide with him based on nothing but one meeting in which she didn’t think him capable of intelligible speech and possibly dangerous. She’d been taught Voltane were wild animals after-all. So what does she do? Well, seamlessly give her virginity up to it of course. What else?

I had to wonder why exactly it was illegal to be in the presence of the Voltage to start with. Was this a species or environmental protection, basic xenophobia or racism, etc. I didn’t understand the social intention, so I had a little trouble understanding the implications of Ruby’s actions. Plus, for being feared and held separate Ruby and Zan seemed to find a lot of sympathisers with almost no effort. I get that this was meant to infer that the society was ripe for social change, but it also felt very convenient to the plot. I also thought that trying to situate the whole thing in an alternation 1943 complicated matters. I didn’t see the relevance.

The writing was fairly simple, but it was clean, perfectly readable and only had a few editorial mishaps. In the end I was left wondering what I had just read, but I imagine that the book will really appeal to some. It was a pleasant change to encounter a hero who wasn’t a bulging alpha with an alarming tendency to aggress on questionably willing heroines. Props to Levin for being willing to move away from the canned PNR.

Book Review of Maggie Secara’s The Dragon Ring

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The Dragon RingAuthor, Maggie Secara sent me a copy of the first and second of her Harper Errant series, The Dragon Ring and King’s Raven. I’ve only read the first so far, but I figured I might as well go ahead and review it.

Description from Goodreads:
Reality TV host Ben Harper has a problem: he owes the king of Faerie a favor. So now he has to track down the three parts of a Viking arm-ring, and return them to their place in time. This takes him through the wolf-haunted forests of Viking Age Wessex, the rowdy back streets of Shakespeare’s London, and a derelict Georgian country house. Partnered with caustic, shape-changing Raven and guided by a slightly wacky goblin diary, Ben must rediscover his own gifts while facing his doubts and the queen of Faerie’s minions, who will do anything to stop him.

The Dragon Ring, the first in the Harper Errant series, is a time travelling epic adventure which takes you to Old England, and beyond.

Review:
The Dragon Ring is a bit like a grownup Harry Potter, with bawdy ballads and raunchy riddles. There’s a magic book or two, endless magical music, self-regulating clothing, time travel, mystic doors, mythical beasts, prophetic icons, bewitchments, bespelling, and even an imaginative curse on occasion. And poor Ben Harper is stuck right in the middle of it all.

Image a young Alan Titmarsh, or better yet, Justin Ryan or Colin McAllister contracted by the King of Faerie to save the world. Not the likeliest of heroes I’ll admit, but Ben does a decent job of it. He seems to have an amazing knack for simply accepting the absurdities that come along with the unexplainable magic in and around the land of Fae. If he hadn’t been American, I would blame it on that much-touted stiff upper lip. As a reader, I had a little harder time of it. Some of the ‘it’s magic, just accept it’ felt a little too convenient for me. Most especially when considering the diary that miraculously held ALL the answers.

I was extremely disappointed in the treatment of Mellis’, Ben’s wife, character. Her role was important as a motivator to Ben, but she seemed to be pointedly left out of much of the book. She might as well have been a cardboard cutout. Then, in the mere 10 or so percent at the tail end of the book that she was active for, she managed to fall and twist an ankle (though I give her credit for not whinging about it) and lose an important artifact. As enamored as Ben was with her, I would have liked her to have a little more depth.

The narrative style is marvellous. There is a lot of humour in it. The writing is tight and elegant. It strikes the right tone for a book about Oberon and Titania. The book does feel a tad like it goes on forever and a day, though. Plus, it isn’t the sort of book that builds to a peak and then settles back down before ending. It kind of builds to a plateau and then continues on until the end. Ben is given his tasks, and then he systematically goes about completing them until he is finished. It’s very much a ‘quest to collect the magical shards’ kind of story.

I’d especially recommend the book for music lovers. There are a lot of music references and melodies play an important role in the story. Additionally, thespians and Renaissance festival regulars will likely have little trouble relating to Ben and his personality. All-in-all an interesting read. I have the sequel, King’s Raven, which I also look forward to reading. (Speaking of Ravens, Raven was my all-out favorite character in the book.)