Tag Archives: fantasy

Dark Moon Rising

Book Review of Dark Moon Rising (Stella Brock, #1), by Ashley Dunson

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Dark Moon RisingI downloaded a copy of Ashley Dunson’s Dark Moon Rising from the Amazon free list.

Description from Goodreads:
Stella Brock hunts the things that go bump in the night. It isn’t a glamorous job, but it keeps the lights on…usually. Now, the hunter has become the hunted and the source of all childhood terror is hot on her trail. She’ll need the help of a sexy elf and an arrogant jaguar shifter to avoid being caught by one of the most notorious monsters of all. If only she could control darkness beginning to rise within herself.

Review:
Wow, I got so much more than I bargained for with this one. I really enjoyed it. Stella was a great lead character, who managed to be tough without being unfeeling. She also successfully walked that tenuous line between being pleasantly, sarcastically irreverent and being suicidally confrontational. Dark Moon Rising is a fun read and I’d be happy with it for that alone, but it’s not flawless.

While I enjoyed the book and the events of the book, there didn’t seem to be any overarching plot beyond, here are Stella and her friends and these are the things they do in response to a series of seemingly random stimuli. Again, it’s fun but it felt anchorless. There was no single challenge Stella and her cohort needed to overcome or identifiable point in which their adventure could be seen to have been complete. I don’t mean it’s a cliffhanger, it’s just (I think) part of one series-wide plot instead of having its own. The result is that the ending felt sudden, even if it wasn’t.

It’s also one of those books in which every powerful paranormal male all but falls at Stella’s feet, despite her attempts to dissuade them. Now, unlike a lot of other such books, there is a reason for that here and it is an integral part of the story. But it still started to feel redundant after a while.

Lastly, the book could do with a little more editing. It was odd, I noticed very few misspelled or misused words. (There were some, but not a ton.) But every few pages a word just seemed to be missing. Here’s an example: “Do have any idea how that fascinates us?” Obviously, that’s supposed to be, Do YOU have any idea how that fascinates us? More often than not it was a ‘to’ or an ‘a’ missing though, small words that don’t change the meaning or context of a sentence but cause the reader to stutter over an otherwise smooth sentence.

So, in the end, if you’re looking for a little fluff to pass an evening with and you’re willing to overlook a few flaws, this is worth picking up.

Murder Most Witchy

Book Review of Murder Most Witchy (Wendy Lightower Mystery #1), by Emily Rylands

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Murder Most WitchyI downloaded a copy of Murder Most Witchy, by Emily Rylands from the Amazon free list.

Description from Goodreads:
The Lightower family has been hunting down paranormal phenomena in the small town of North Harbor for generations. Unlike the rest of her family, Wendy Lightower has never dreamed of chasing evil witches or unearthing magical secrets. Her greatest ambition in life is to be a full-time librarian and leave her witchy roots far behind her. But when a murder is committed in her very own library, Wendy cannot ignore that there is no natural explanation for the killing. If the killer is to be caught, she must call on family and friends alike to solve the magical murder. 

When she chose books over boogeymen and libraries over lycans, Wendy thought she would finally be able to live a ‘normal’ life. Now, her library is no longer the sanctuary she imagined it to be, and there may just be a killer hiding in the stacks.

Review:
This was cute but a little on the slow side. While I never quite achieved boredom, it never grabbed me either. The murderer was obvious from the beginning, though thankfully not as obvious as the red herrings might have been. Unfortunately, even they were so obvious as to be too obvious and therefore easily dismissible.

The characters were fun but not deeply developed and a little on the cliché side. The outline of a love-triangle felt unsupported and annoying (especially since I couldn’t figure out why she even considered one of the men). There was no significant world-building. So, while it was entertaining it all felt very much like fluff.

The writing itself was straightforward, though the occasional abrupt shift in POV was jarring. There did seem to be a need for some further editing. I caught a lot of small mistakes, little things like the ‘witch trails’ instead of witch trials. Perfectly readable, but also distracting.

All in all, not a bad book but not great either. Kind of a witchy, cozy mystery. I’d read the second if I found it free, but I’m not rushing out to buy it.

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.