Tag Archives: fantasy romance

Book Review: Whispers of the Deep & Song of the Abyss, by Emma Hamm

Emma Hamm was having a scratch-and-dent sale on her TikTok shop and Whispers of the Deep and Song of Abyss had been on my TBR for a while. So, I grabbed copies.

About the book:
One of the many engineers that keeps Beta, the city under the sea, running, Mira only wants to make her family proud and to prove herself worthy. She knows the mysterious city better than anyone and it’s her dream to help it flourish.

But then, on a solo job in an abandoned section of the city, she encounters a monster of legend. An undine. A dangerous merman from an ancient civilization, long forgotten.

Arges has fought his entire life for his people. With deadly creatures under his control, he plans to eradicate Beta once and for all to protect his kind and their peaceful way of life. But when a human woman saves him, she unknowingly creates a bond between them, one he can’t ignore. Even though her flaming red hair haunts his dreams, he needs her for information on the undine’s enemies.

So he steals her. Keeps her. Feeds her. Only to realize their bond is far deeper than captor and captive. He cannot let her go—but he cannot keep her under the sea. In a battle to determine if love can survive a war beneath the waves, it will be their decision that changes the tides.

Review:

I found this a little sloppy. Plotholes abound. Story trajectory is wobbly. There was a noticeable tendency to not capitalize the T in ‘the’ if it fell at the beginning of a sentence. (Odd, I know, but it happened SO OFTEN.) It’s not particularly spicy, with only 2 sex scenes, and leaping from 0 to DP between the two was a choice. There was some unneeded repetition, and the shift in social attitude that made the HFN/HEA possible had no real explanation.

All the same, I enjoyed the heck out of this. I liked the characters a lot and enjoyed watching them come to trust one another. Plus, the mermen species was interesting. I like a monstrous love interest. I’m happily leaping into book two.

About the book:
Like a songbird in a cage, Anya has spent her entire life as the General’s perfect daughter. He snaps his fingers, she jumps. He tells her to smile, she beams like she is made of the sun itself. But underneath all those games and glitter, she’s working to destroy her father and save the city she loves.

When an undine sneaks his way into her city, intent on kidnapping her, she lets him take her.

Daios is plagued by the decisions of his past. Souls haunt him, memories follow his every move, and all he knows is that perhaps stealing this woman will absolve him of his sins. If he can bring her back to his people, then they can destroy the city where his hatred was born. He’s certain this will be easy. But then he sees the General’s daughter, and he knows nothing will ever be the same again.

Broken and damaged, he’s certain no woman will ever love him. He shouldn’t even try to encourage the mating instincts that ride him hard the moment he sees her.

But when he realizes that she’s the same as he is, different from her people and on the outskirts of what others deem “normal”, he knows he’s a goner. Even if it means he has to risk everything to keep her.

Review:

I enjoyed this, maybe not quite as much as I did book one (it felt derivative and less creative the second time around), but I still thought it was a fun read. My one big complaint was that Daios had a very drastic and abrupt change of attitude toward humans that wasn’t really supported by the events of the book. In fact, it felt like it happened before he even met Anya. I liked him a lot despite that, and Anya, too. I appreciated the disability rep, the lack of magic fixes, and that despite being all alpha-like Anya was allowed agency and to make and enact her own decisions, even when he didn’t like it.

I am kind of starting to wonder if Hamm isn’t falling into the age-old fantasy trap of writing creative, imaginative worlds that somehow do not contain women, though. The 1st book had one or two minor female characters. This one has none besides the heroines that are not being set up for future love interests. So, basically, there appear to be no women in the sea. I’ll grant that there are not a lot of side characters in general, but still, it’s becoming noticeable.

All in all, I’m still looking forward to book three in November.

Book Review: The Stone Dragon and the Moonshine Molly, by K.C. Norton & Jordan Riley Swan

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I picked up a copy of The Stone Dragon and the Moonshine Molly by K.C. Norton and Jordan Riley Swan as an Amazon freebie. I’m not even sure I read the description. I just saw Dragons and such a great cover and went *click.*

It ain’t easy
running a speakeasy
in the dragon roaring ’20s.

Argyle Galloway always follows the rules, no matter the outcome. Without law and order to guide the Dragoncoat riders, the monsters and bugs swarming the Eastern Americas would destroy civilization. But when his dragon starts to shed its scales at the most inopportune time, he must hole up in a notorious speakeasy. The by-the-book Argyle is trying his best to keep on the straight and narrow. Yet he can’t resist the beautiful barkeep who pulls him deeper and deeper into the lawless realm of gangsters and rumrunners—even though she seems more dangerous than the dragon he rides…

Molly Walker wasn’t supposed to follow in her father’s criminal footsteps, but when he dies suddenly, she’s forced to take over his speakeasy or find herself living on the streets. She only intends to work the bar until she can find a buyer for it. Things spiral quickly out of control as clues surface, hinting that the robbery in which her father died might have been premeditated murder. Molly finds herself needing help from the stick-in-the-mud Argyle to solve the mystery, but she doesn’t know which is harder to do: figure out who killed her father while running his illegal bar, or keep herself from falling in love with the stranger who thinks she’s the biggest criminal of them all.

***

It’s the Roaring Twenties—speakeasies are around every corner, jazz is burning up Harlem, and the dragon population is booming. But it’s a lonely job for the brave Coat Wardens who patrol the skies of the Eastern Americas, as love is even harder to hold on to than the dragons they fly…

I’m a little torn about how I feel about this book and that is partially because I don’t think it entirely knows what it wants to be genre-wise. It’s a fade-to-black romance involving new adults (early to mid-20s, one of which is one class short of a college degree and one of which has just finished the draconic version of flight school), but the language the book is written in is a very young adult. I realize it’s the author trying to play up and into cliched 1920s-speak. But it makes the characters feel like children, which then clashes with the adult plot points.

The book is also a little ham-fisted in its portrayal of the characters’ characterizations, Argyle’s especially. This, again, makes that characterization feel very young adult (if not middle-grade) coded. It is as if the author is writing for an audience that cannot be anticipated to identify character traits if they are not very obviously signposted repeatedly.

Outside of my sense of genre confusion, I generally liked the book. I thought the description of the dragons was new and unusual. I liked the characters well enough. And I thought it came to a satisfying (if somewhat sad) conclusion.

Also, as a little sidenote here on my own blog where I can safely be a little snarky, I take issue with the part of the blurb that says, “speakeasies are around every corner, jazz is burning up Harlem, and the dragon population is booming. But it’s a lonely job for the brave Coat Wardens who patrol the skies of the Eastern Americas.” The book is set in Knoxville, Tennessee. I feel like the description sets you up for one thing and delivers another. I have no preference, but I did kind of go “Knoxville? I thought it was gonna be in New York.”