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Review of The Circus of the Damned, by Cornelia Grey

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Circus of the DamnedI received an ARC of Cornelia Grey‘s The Circus of the Damned from Netgalley.

Description from Goodreads:
Magician Gilbert Blake has spent his entire life conning drunkards in the seediest pubs in the darkest towns, careful to hide the true depths of his power. But when he spends a little too much time in Shadowsea and the infamous slumlord Count Reuben gets wind of his abilities, hiding within the Circus of the Damned may be Gilbert’s only chance at survival.

But there’s more to the Circus than meets the eye. Every time a performer dies, a new one must take his place, or the entire circus suffers the consequences. And while the handsome ringmaster Jesse isn’t one to coerce unwilling performers into giving up their souls to the devil, a recent death in their ranks makes Gilbert exactly what they need.

Yet the longer Gilbert stays with the Circus, the more danger he seems to bring them. Being with Jesse is more than Gilbert could have hoped for, but as Count Reuben’s men continue to search for Gilbert and the Circus loses another performer, they all face running out of time long before the Devil claims his due.

Review:
CUTE! Just so stinking cute. This is the first Cornelia Grey book I’ve had the pleasure of reading, but you can bet your last flimsy dollar I’ll be on the lookout for more. Thumbs up.

Gilbert’s open appreciation of Jesse was a pleasure to read and Jesse wasn’t anything like I expected. I expected him to be the heavy, creepy circus master, but none of it worked out quite like I expected and I’m not complaining. Actually, I expected the whole thing to be dark, but it isn’t. It’s almost light and fluffy in a YA sort of way if you overlook the cursing and sex. But again, I’m not complaining. I enjoyed the heck out of it.

There was a quietly bisexual lead falling in love with a beautiful man, a cast containing a satisfying variety of age, gender, color, even species (I think), a few yummy, but in no way smutty sex scenes, some evocative writing, interesting side characters (though there are a lot of them), some light steampunk elements and a HEA ending. Plenty to recommend this novel to any number of readers.

My only complaint is that I never really felt like I got to know the characters in any depth. I got to know what was happening around them and what they did, but not them and I really wanted to. But that’s a relatively small criticism for something I enjoyed as much as I did this one.

Bound By Blood

kinda/sorta a Review of Bound By Blood, by Tara Manderino

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Bound By BloodI downloaded a copy of Tara Manderino‘s Bound By Blood from the Amazon free list. I read it as the final book in my Bound By Blood reading challenge, in which I set out to read 5 books titled Bound By Blood.

Description from Goodreads:
In his two-hundred and fifty years as a vampire, Alex only observed, never intervened with any of his progeny, yet what else can he do when a little girl of his lineage is kidnapped? When he meets Lisa, the child’s nanny, his protective instincts kick into gear, yet he finds he must expose her to ever increasing danger as they search for the missing child. To protect Lisa from perils she is unaware of, he harbors her in his own home.

With Lisa’s help, Alex is able to determine who has the child. Learning why she was abducted rocks him on his heels and sets off a transcontinental search that leads to ancient myths of the Cardinal’s Ruby; the stone in Alex’s ring.

Alex and Lisa have one shot to save the child, but will they be able to stop the impending destruction raining down?

Review:
I’m afraid I gave up on this at 40%. I just wasn’t going to be able to make it any farther. (And I hate not finishing a book.) It’s like Manderino went out and read the 50 most popular PNR novel and then took the 50 most common scenes and crammed them into a novel. As a literary experiment, it might have been interesting, but as an attempt at a readable novel it failed.

For example, how many PNR books have you read in which a man can’t get a woman to be quiet so he kisses her? Yep, that’s in here, except it makes even less sense than normal (and lets be honest, it almost never makes sense anyway). Here they’re running down a sidewalk, in a hurry, both mad and he actually even has a free hand he could cover her mouth with if just stressing the importance of quiet didn’t work for him. Plus, it REALLY came out of nowhere.

Or how about the ‘the only way I can keep you safe is if you come to my house’ trope? Yep, that’s here too. But it shows up after the characters have known eachother for less than 24 hours, only in professional capacity and there has been no credible build-up of…well, of anything (friendship, lust, love, trust, anything). The two had hardly even spoken. The reason these scenes are familiar is that they pop up a lot, but to see one book with so many of them (even at only 40% through) makes the whole thing feel horribly unimaginative.

Everything is flat. There is no emotional resonance in anything. Alex tells Lisa he’s a vampire…no reaction. He flies with her across the room…”nice trick,” she says. But even worse than that, is the whole attempt at a romance. The book pulls all the expected shticks. He can’t stop thinking of her. He’s enamoured, but doesn’t know why. Bla Bla Bla. But the thing is that their meeting is dull. There is no build-up in their attraction, but neither is there any dun dun dunn big deal meeting. So, Alex’s attraction to her (or love or lust or whatever, it’s not even clear because it’s so poorly executed) feels completely out of left field, unsupported and hollow…FLAT, like everything else in the first 40% of the novel.

Alex is supposed to care so much that his great-great…granddaughter has been kidnapped, but he doesn’t seem to actually be all that concerned. She’s referred to as ‘the child’ throughout the book, he walks away even after discovering where she is, he never asks what she’s like, etc. Again, it’s just FLAT.

The heroine is Too Stupid To Live and does all the expected stupid things that heroines do in such books. She runs off on her own after being told how dangerous it is because she didn’t get her way. She disbelieves everything she’s told loooong after her disbelief is no longer believable (come on, the man picked her up and levitated across the room and she didn’t bat an eyelash and still didn’t believe he was a vampire when he told her). She makes rescue attempts on her own instead of calling anyone for help, etc. Honestly, it’s the TSTL aspect of the book that finally made me give up. When she ignored all reasonable warnings about the danger and AGAIN ran out on her own to try and rescue Sandy I gave up.

But nothing was helped by the fact that there are no transitions between events, no character development, no world-building, and names are used too often in dialogue. The book needs a copy edit and I just can’t take anymore.

I normally wouldn’t review the book since I didn’t finish it. But since it was the fifth book in my Bound By Blood challenge, not reviewing it would leave my challenge incomplete and that would have haunted me.

Bound By Blood lupton

Book Review of Bound By Blood (The Garner Witch #1), by P.A. Lupton

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Bound By BloodBook four of my own little personal Bound By Blood book challenge, where I set out to read all five books on my shelves called, you guessed it, Bound By Blood, is by P. A. Lupton. I grabbed it some times ago as a freebie on Amazon.

Description from Goodreads:
FBI agent and psychic, Brianna Reece, descends from an ancient and powerful bloodline of witches, only she doesn’t know it. But now that legacy has come back to bite her—literally.

In the shadows of night in Denver Colorado, a serial killer is hunting women, and FBI agent Brianna Reece is hunting the killer. Unlike any case she’s worked before, Brianna can’t ignore the prickling at the back of her neck when she glimpses the resemblance she shares with the victims. The investigation begins to touch even closer to home when it is revealed that all of the victims were also psychic.

Complicating matters further, Brianna is captivated by the FBI’s prime suspect Nathan Donovan. Though she senses he is hiding something from her, the attraction she feels for him is compelling, and unlike anything she’s ever experienced. Through a chance twist of fate, Nathan learns of Brianna’s ancestry and is forced to divulge secrets to Brianna that will change her life forever.

When she learns that the killer is an evil vampire, and he’s now set his sights on her, Nathan alone holds the key to awakening her dormant powers. Now he must race to teach her how to control her emergent gifts before she becomes the next victim.

Somewhat spoilerish ranty review
This is one of those books that when someone asks you how it was you stop, think really hard and can still only come up with “meh, it was OK.” And it is. It’s OK. It’s not good by any stretch of the imagination, but I can’t quite call it bad either. And I can’t come up with any one big issue I have with it, just a myriad of small annoyances that eventually put me off as a reader.

Things like the fact that the heroine, a psychic FBI agent, follows no procedural protocol at all and never suffers any consequences. In fact, her boss doesn’t even seem to exist. She starts investigating the case before she’s officially assigned to it, or even started her job for that matter. Then she’s immediately on the ball and working cases as if she’s worked there for years, even though it’s supposedly her first day. No need to meet the co-workers, get assigned a desk, learn the ropes, etc for Reece apparently.

But even more than that, she is assigned her first case as a member of the Denver FBI office and then it miraculously ends up all being about her. It’s not even like the killer comes after her. It really feels like she’s been randomly assigned a case, all ‘Yo, Reece, you’re up in rotation. Next case is yours,’ like and then suddenly it’s a personal vendetta against her and her family. Um, until a week earlier, she didn’t even live in the state and the murders had been going on for months (years, but no one knows that yet), so how realistic is that little twist? I think the author swapped plots about halfway through the book.

Plus, I never understood some of the basic groundwork of the plot. For example, if your whole family was being hunted down would your first thought be to scatter (disperse your power base) and bind the powers of your children, while not tell them about the dangers. Yep, that’s logic–if we pretend the danger doesn’t exist and make sure you can’t defend yourself if by chance it does, we’ll all be safe in the end. How does that even make sense in the first place?

Then there is the incredibly schmaltzy love. A lot of the book is dedicated to Reece and Donovan fawning over eachother. It’s an insta-love and it’s all so saccharine sweet. They go from I’m intensely attracted to you but you’re a suspect in my case, to I’ll love you forever, move in with me, in no time at all. Too fast, to forced, too much of the same. I got sick of all the kissing and fade to black sex.

Then there is the history of sexual assault that seemed to contribute nothing to the plot. This is a person button for me. A history of rape (or attempted rape in this case) can be important to a plot. I’m not arguing it can’t, but when it’s not an integral part of the plotting why include it? It neither elicits sympathy from the reader nor proves the woman’s resilience or strength. It was essentially pointless as far as I can see.

Then there were the multiple deus ex machina events. Every time Reece found herself in danger (including her attempted rape) she got out of it by developing some new, never suspected or attempted power that she miraculously wields to the detriment of her attacker.

Well, isn’t that convenient. Almost as convenient as the fact that she’s able to keep conscious and taunting her nemesis after he’s drugged her, stabbed her repeatedly (almost gutting her at one point) and beaten her about the face. It is, however, admittedly less convenient than the fact that her attempted sexual assaulter was still able to chase her through the woods and catch her after she kicked his knee to the side and broke the bones. I’m fairly sure that even with the adrenaline and endorphins of shock, someone with a broken leg wouldn’t be chasing her down and still trying to rape her.

Then there was her ridiculous bravado in the face of otherwise certain defeat. This is another personal annoyance for me. Why do some characters get to mouth off to authority figures who would squash anyone else for being so impertinent and get away with it? Granted, the bad guy isn’t an authority figure, but she never shut up with her snarky comments, even when he tortured her and still he never killed her. Then she meets the all powerful council who literally could squash her like a bug and, knowing nothing of the rules or etiquette, mouths off and challenges them, again with no consequences. Suicide by mouth, I call it, but always, somehow, with a stay of execution. I don’t get it or like it.

Then there is the classic, “Hi, I’m the villain you’ve been chasing. Let me monologue my ill-intent for a while.” And that same villain was fairly predictable in the end. No big surprises there. The villains’ need to go on and on about themselves is almost as bad as the endless and obvious info-drops throughout the book.

I will say that, with the exception of a too frequent use of names in dialogues and a few too many adjective and adverbs in the speech tags (this rarely works well for a first person narrative) the writing was pretty good. I have the re-edited version and though I noticed a few missing words and spaces, it wasn’t as badly edited as some of the early reviews say. I probably wouldn’t even bother mention it if it hadn’t been an obvious issue in the earlier edition.

So, for the right reader, one who doesn’t mind a lot of affectionate down time with the characters, for example, this will probably be a real winner. For me, it wasn’t.