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Sleeves

Book Review of Sleeves, by Chanse Lowell

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Sleeves

Sleeves, by Chanse Lowell came from the Amazon free list. (At the time of posting it was still free.)

A friend of mine said to me recently that he was beginning to think that bulging biceps are to women what lush breasts are to men. Hmm, maybe. But for me it’s a well-muscled back. Keeping that in mind, you can probably imagine that this cover appealed to me. I hardly even read the description if I’m honest, just grabbed the pretty picture and went with it.

Description from Goodreads:
Kel isn’t at all the animal locked in a cage that he appears to be. Secrets keep him there, hidden from those who hunt him. But what does a man do when he needs physical contact to survive, but can’t stand the burning pain that comes with another’s touch? He’s found a way to get a small fraction of his needs met at the nightclub, Sleeves. What happens when he lets in an unknown woman with a healing hand? Casey can see past the vulgar mouth to the affection-starved man hiding inside. When she does, all hell breaks loose, and the past finds him. Will he be able to avoid the agency, or will they add Casey to their twisted experiments? She entered the cage with him, and now it seems there’s no way out.

 Review:
A previous review referred to this book as a ‘Hot Mess.’ And while Hot Mess isn’t a phrase that I’ve ever found myself tempted to use, I find it describes this book aptly. It’s not that it’s necessarily a bad book, it’s not, it’s just all over the place and full of holes the reader has to overlook to enjoy the story. They are overlookable, but it would be a little ridiculous to pretend they aren’t there.

To start with and probably most importantly, it’s never said but I’m gonna have to assume that Casey has some sort of preternatural power of super-empathy, because nothing in the book makes any sense otherwise. If she doesn’t then she just fell in love with a man who, in their single 30 minute interaction, forced her to jack him off in front of a crowd while calling her a slut, bitch, whore, cunt, and probably more I’ve forgotten. She in turn told him he was a beautiful, sweet man. (WTF!?) So unless she can magically see through his shit, to his kernel of true-self she is either really, really stupid or masochistic.

What’s more, her main strength seems to be in her ability to accept any verbal abuse thrown at her with aplomb and willingly offer up, “anything you need, baby.” Now, I get that this is supposed to show how much she loves Kel and maybe how brave she is. But what it mostly says to me is that she must be one of those women who is so desperate for a man that she will do, become and take anything without complaint. It makes me wonder if she really has any sense of self herself. And while we kind of find out what warped Kel (and I say kind of because it’s not a complete explanation) we don’t really find out what whacked Casey out. Which suggests that we’re not supposed to see her behaviour as inappropriate. (WTF!?) We do get a little of her sob story, but I couldn’t see how it would result in her willingness to accept Kel’s shit (and it is shit) so openly.

I did really like her ability to banter though. She didn’t have Kel’s foul language, but she had no problem slinging a one-shot back at him on occasion. This verbal sparring between the two of them was by far the best part of the book. And it’s good.

Kel in turn swung wildly from angst, clingy teenager to angry, dangerous alpha man with a tenuous grasp on sanity and back again, over and over. Now I’ll give you that when he was in his charming, boyish charm phase he was about as cute as they come. In these moments I really loved him. I even kinda liked his weird clingy, needy side. It was creepy as hell, but still kinda cute. Unfortunately his angry instability was truly scary and his inability to go two sentences without calling Casey some foul name often curled my toes…and not in a good way.

The thing is though, even though his language was deplorable and Casey didn’t deserve to be called all the names she did, it generally just boiled down to a whole heck of a lot of dirty talk. Because the actual sex was pretty clean. It never actually crossed into abusive, as his verbal description would suggest. Plus, even as he was playing Mr. Dominance he never failed to worship Casey and be honest about how much he needed/wanted her, which made it quite obvious that all of the mastery he held in their sexual relation was given to him by her. I found this dynamic damned sexy. 

This book is in desperate need of a little world building. It’s set in 2023, so I accept that there should have been some social evolution and scientific advancements. But the reader isn’t ever told what these might be. Everyone did seem to accept the whole ‘a secret organisation experimented on me and is currently hunting me’ with awe-inspiring ease. Not a single person raised an eyebrow at the fact that Kel had some strange sensory issue going on and apparently displayed regular feats of strength on stage, not to mention some truly horrific social skills. 

I also have to wonder if another thing that isn’t said, but must be true, is that people are…I don’t know, educated in their sleep or something. I mean Kel was apparently kept in a cage with a filthy, blood stained mattress and little else. So if his basic hygiene wasn’t worth taking into consideration I can’t imagine his education was either. But somehow he was a genius–able to create mysterious genetic cures and micro technologies. How did he learn these skills?

I think the best way to describe this book is what happily ever after would look like if two damaged nymphomaniacs found each-other. The actual sic-fi aspect of the story is a…well, a Hot Mess. It’s never explained what the secret organisation was actually trying to accomplish with Kel, for example, or what the mysterious ‘serum’ does to a person, or how the cure reverses it, or why Kel needs touch, or what will happen if he goes without it, or why it hurts, or why he treats women so badly. But the sex is a lot of fun, and for all their many faults, Kel and Casey are too. 

Shadow Love Stalkers

Book Review of Claudy Conn’s Shadow Love: Stalkers (Shadow Vampires, #1)

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Shadow LoveQuite some time ago, I grabbed a copy of Claudy Conn‘s Shadow Love: Stalkers (Shadow Vampires, #1) from the KDP free list.

Description from Goodreads:
What do you do when your father wants to turn you into a vampire and the man who offers you protection has his own, dark agenda?

Shawna Rawley has no choice but to run. Pentim Rawley, one of the most evil vampires who has ever lived, has just discovered that she is his daughter. Now he’s obsessed with finding and turning her. She doesn’t want Pentim to find the people she loves and use them to get to her. She doesn’t want him to find and turn her. She has only one ace up her sleeve. The human in her may be at risk, but in addition to being half vamp, Shawna is also a white witch!

Chad MacFare has an offer for Shawna he thinks she can’t afford to refuse: he’ll protect her from Pentim and his minions. But Shawna doesn’t trust the sexy immortal. She knows he has his own agenda-he wants to kill her father, and he wants to set her up as bait…

Review:
This book was OK. I thought it started off quite rough, but did eventually smooth itself out. I enjoyed the H & h (though I did want to slap Shawna on more than one occasion). Oddly, my favourite character was Dammon. He was just a side character (and apparently the H of the next book in the series), but I quite enjoyed his calm demeanour.

Though I generally enjoyed the book, I am not without complaints. I hate making this criticism, because I think it is horribly over used, but a lot of the book is told instead of shown. I think a full 10% goes by in the beginning before the reader gets a single sentence of dialogue that isn’t in someone’s memory. The reader is also told repeatedly how skilled Shawna is, but we don’t really see her fight or defend herself at all. We’re also treated to quite a lot of internal dialogue as both Shawna and Chad tell themselves how sexy the other is.

Though I imagine it comes into play in future books I also didn’t see the importance of the Dracula connection. It is set up in the prologue and he shows up once in the book, but doesn’t seem to have an active role in the plot. I was left wondering, ‘what’s that all about?’

I also felt that the two dangers to Shawna didn’t seem to line up. She’s supposed to be running for her father and that’s the basic framework of the story, but a good 75% of the book goes by before there is any real threat present to her by him. Most of the action centres around a demon she randomly encounters when she moves to Scotland (and amazingly and coincidentally moves in next door to Chad). This demon has nothing to do with the whole father situation and really felt very out of left field to me.

I also never understood Chad’s attitude toward Shawna. If you were meeting a woman for the first time (and all subsequent encounters with her) and needed to convince her to trust you to protect her while she endangered herself for the greater good, would you’re chosen method be antagonism and smug arrogance? He keeps trying to get her agree to his dangerous plan, but never gives her a straight answer to anything and purposefully goads her at every turn. Yes, it made for some amusing verbal sparing, but compromised his own goal repeatedly.

I will happily say this isn’t a case of insta-love. At least not on Shawna’s part. It is however a stunning example of sex = love. Shawna doesn’t trust Chad and he only admits to lusting after her. Then they have sex and voila, sudden boundless, eternal love exists. I got a little whiplash I think.

Then, after 250+ pages of supposedly running from her sociopath father (that we almost never see) the whole book wraps up in about a page and a half. The climax was a little underwhelming I have to admit. Despite all of the above, I did enjoy most of the book. It took a little while for me to settle into the story. But once I did it rolled along well enough and it presented an interesting new birth of vampires myth.

honey house

Book Review of Laura Harner’s Honey House

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Honey HouseI swiped a copy of Honey House, by Laura Harner from the KDP free list. As of the time of posting it was still free.

Description from Amazon:
Former con artist Katherine “KC” Carmichael inherits the Honey House, a Bed and Breakfast located in the tiny town of Juniper Springs, AZ, a hot bed of the paranormal tourism industry. It doesn’t take her long to discover that both the town and the House are keeping secrets. KC realizes something doesn’t add up when the local sheriff throws her in jail for breaking the town’s full moon curfew. She soon discovers werewolves and witches are real, and she wonders what other fairy tales might be waiting to come to life. With multiple murders and men to distract her, KC needs to discover her own hidden magick in order to survive.

Review:
I very much like Ms. Harner’s storytelling style and Honey House is no exception. I enjoyed the ebb and flow of the story. I liked those characters that I got to know well (KC, Owen, Gregory, the house even) and I liked the murder mystery.

Unfortunately I also thought that some other important characters, most notably Quinn, felt very hollow. Part of this is the result of the book being told from the first person perspective of KC. She doesn’t know much about Quinn, so neither does the reader. Fair enough. But he rarely speaks, has little facial expression, and his past (and any present not in the presence of KC, really) is left a mystery. This meant I developed very little feeling for him. Too bad too. He’s the love interest du jure and I really wanted to like him. I might have if I had gotten the chance to get to know him.

I also wondered at the inclusion of the secondary drama. I don’t want to spoil anything, but it felt very much like an excuse to expose KC’s very, very tragic past. A past that I could have done without knowing since it isn’t really explored beyond disclosure.

There are also a number of small questions left unanswered throughout the book. Someone from the Paranormal Romance Guild mentioned in a previous review that this is one of Ms. Harner’s trademarks. I haven’t read enough of her work to know if that’s true (Though I think I might like to), but I find it a little annoying. They aren’t things that effect the overall story arc, more like little side issues. For example, in one scene Owen asks Quinn why he didn’t bring KC to his house. Quinn responds, ‘you know why.’ Owen accepts this as an appropriate answer. The reader, however, doesn’t know why. I could hazard a guess or two, but they would be just guesses. I wouldn’t have any way of knowing if I was right or not. Or, the two rather large identity questions that KC decides to let go with a mental shrug and ‘what’s it matter’ attitude, at the end. The story concludes just fine without these details, but my basic curiosity answered her with, ‘um, quite a lot actually.’ I don’t like loose ends all that much.

Despite these small criticisms I very much enjoyed reading the book. Ms. Harner has a way of making her narratives comfortable. This would be a great book to read while doing something relaxing, like laying in a hammock or basking in the sun. I suppose I’m calling it a great Summer read.

As an aside, I’m a bit bothered that Quinn (that’s who I’m assuming the male on the cover is supposed to be) is blond in the book and has dark hair on the front of the book.