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on the edge of hunamity

Book Review of S.B. Alexander’s On the Edge of Humanity

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On the Edge of Humanity

I grabbed S.B. Alexander‘s Vampire SEAL novel On the Edge of Humanity from the Amazon KDP list.

Description from Goodreads:
Sixteen-year-old Jo Mason is lost in a world where traipsing from one foster home to another is normal. She hates her life, she hates school and on most days, she hates living. If it weren’t for her twin brother Sam, she may already be dead. 

Her normal world shifts one hundred and eighty degrees when she discovers her own blood tastes like candy and her eyes change colors like a mood ring. On top of that, her eyesight seems to be failing when she spies an otherworldly man sporting bloodstained canines trying to strangle a cop. The developments are shrouded when Sam goes missing between Anger Management class and History class. 

She’s called to the principal’s office to meet Lieutenant Webb London, a Navy SEAL who is part of a secret team of natural-born vampires. His mission is to protect the twins from an evil cartel, but he’s too late. With Jo now under his protection, his team searches for Sam. 

However, finding and rescuing Sam from the evil cartel may be the easy part. Jo learns she carries a dormant vampire gene that, if activated, could save him. As her normal world fades even more, pushing her closer to the edge of humanity, Jo must decide if her human life is more important than her twin brother. 

With time as her enemy, she struggles to make a life-changing decision for both her and Sam.

Review:
I have to be honest. Even though I can’t really fault the writing of this book I didn’t like it. I lost count of how many aspects of it I just personally didn’t like. That’s not to say others wouldn’t, or that it isn’t actually a good book, but I didn’t like it. Lets start and I’ll explain why.

First off, given the series title, Vampire SEALs, I was expecting at least a little vampire/military badassness. I read the description and knew that wasn’t going to be the main focus, but I expected some. There wasn’t any. This is a YA book about one scared little girl’s attempt come to terms with her situation. Major disappointment right there.

Next, Jo simply didn’t DO anything of substance. She asked a lot of ineffectual questions, whined, and vomited a lot. That’s about it. The realm of action was left entirely to the males. Even Ben, the token human, feeble as his attempts might have been, came out fighting. Jo just stood around and waited to be told what to do. This extended even as far as her own feelings. As an example, when she showed any anger toward her father he responded as such: “I lost both of you once and I don’t want to screw this up again. I have a chance to get to know my daughter and possibly my son. So call me selfish if you want to, but don’t ever, ever disrespect me again.” However, when Sam woke up equally as angry with dear old dad he was allowed to have a fist fight with him. People actually stood back and let them hash it out.

Sam was allowed expression and possession of his own emotions. Like a child, Jo was chastised or physically restrained anytime she expressed anything but compliance. This paternalistic infantilization was further enhanced by the constant act of putting a finger under her chin to force her to look up at someone. I think every male character in the book did it to her at least once. Everyone of them apparently has more control over where she looks than she does. I wanted to vomit myself.

I mentioned ineffectual questions. Jo asked questions constantly, good ones too a lot of times. But was almost never answered. Yea, I get it. She was dealing with a top secret organisation so some things would remain secretive, but I got seriously sick of being denied information. Because, of course, as a reader I was left without the information just as often as Jo was. (As a side note, Sam got all of his answers almost without having to ask and Ben seemed to often have things explained to him.) On the flip side, Jo also constantly asked herself questions along the lines of, ‘How did my life get here?’ There were so many of them I wanted to scream. Add the rhetorical questions, which are of course unanswered, to the ones the SEALs didn’t answer and you probably have half the book right there. It didn’t leave me feeling particularly satisfied.

Then there is the fact that the book started with an attempted rape. I wasn’t yet invested enough in the book to sit comfortably through that. I obviously made it through, but barely. It seemed to be a running theme that Jo attracted creeps and that Sam was constantly having to protect her from them. (Notice the continued helpless theme there?) But Jo somehow managed to hang tenaciously to her “I’m ugly” mantra, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

So to conclude, I disliked the book. I didn’t enjoy it, but those things that irked me so badly are almost all personal preference kind of things. I hate seeing female characters patronised. It almost always rubs me the wrong way. That may not be the case for someone else, so I’ll still give the book three stars.

Hunter Moon

Book Review of Cait Lavender’s Hunter Moon

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Hunter Moon

I grabbed Hunter Moon, by Cait Lavender, from the Amazon KDP list.

Description from Goodreads:
Bawling cattle tore Shelby Flint from her bed. With lawyer fees to pay in her struggle to keep her ranch from the clutches of her greedy cousins, she couldn’t afford the loss of even one calf. When she sees a large wolf circling her cows, she aims and fires. While the wolf escapes, Shelby can’t seem to get away from her troubles when a marijuana grower sets up shop on her land, sabotaging her property and eventually coming after her. Adding to that, a handsome game warden is poking his nose into her business and working his way underneath her skin. Shelby will have to fight harder than she ever fought before to keep from losing heart and everything she ever loved.

Review:
I really quite enjoyed Hunter Moon. I found Shelby’s prickly cowgirl persona appealing. I liked her sarcastic narration (even if it was largely in first person). Cash was sexy and protective without falling over into overbearing territory too often and I adored his exposed, vulnerable moments. The side characters were colourful, the writing easy to read, and it was really quite clean. There was a lot of sexual tension, but no actual sex. All-in-all a satisfying read.

A lot of page-time was dedicated to describing what Shelby owned, especially in the beginning (vehicles, animals, guns, guns, and more guns). I found this distracting, but at the same time I also appreciated that it made it apparent that she was of a normal socio-economic strata. She lived in a trailer instead of a quaint cabin. She had more than one car/truck, but they were as old as her. She owned a ranch, but wasn’t making bank with it. She seemed normal in this respect. I sometimes feel like normal is a rare bird in fantasy. (Who wants to read about the norm after all?) But in this case I liked it. It made her more relatable. Which was good because I couldn’t really relate to the gun crazed cowgirl that she was the rest of the time. I liked her, but couldn’t relate to her.

I did feel like the three primary threads (romance, mystery, and family/legal drama) didn’t really weave together. I kept waiting for them to and had even decided how it was most likely to happen, but it never did. However, they may come together later in the series. In once sense this is good. I would be calling the plot out as predictable if it did, but as it stands the whole family/legal drama seemed unnecessary. It didn’t seem to contribute to the story much.

The book ends on a cliffhanger. [I’m getting so tired of reading books that don’t end.] It’s not as precipitous as some I’ve come across, but there is obvuously more to come. I looked into buying the sequel as soon as I finished this one, which is solid evidence I enjoyed Hunter Moon. The problem is that the next one, Cowboy Moon, appears to be a prequel instead a sequel, is very short, AND is also a cliffhanger. Serial cliffhangers are something I avoid. As much as I enjoyed this book and would like to know what happens to Shelby next I don’t know that I’ll read anymore.

Ace harper alexander

Book Review of Harper Alexander’s The Queen, the Jack, and the Master, #1 & 2

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I downloaded Harper Alexander’s Ace and Ace of Hearts (The Queen, the Jack, and the Master, #1 & 2) from Amazon’s KDP list.
Ace

Description from Goodreads:
“There will be crime on your hands, and treachery on your heels. A cruel, cruel world on your shoulders, and no flowers on your grave. And the joke, well…unfortunately, bless your heart, the joke will be on you. Only you. For there is a presence of hostility whose fangs are sunk deep into your future. There are gnashing teeth on your heels and around every bend. There is a price on your destiny. The bounty hunters among the angels will be after you. There is no stealth, Lady Spade. There is only running. So I suggest you run.”

If she had been so lucky, Ace might have received just such a warning. But the entirety of the point, here, is that she’s not. She has been chronically hapless from the web of the womb. Cursed with relentless, ruthless misfortune. Her very own entourage of bad luck, its signature everywhere, its shadow widespread and swift. The only compensation for this forsaken fate, destiny’s sole remedy: the fact that she is gifted and lucky at cards. Grossly lucky.

But survival is far from sympathetic. And not all games are as easy as cards on a table.

Review:
I couldn’t log into Goodreads last night for some reason, which means I couldn’t see my TBR list [the horror]. I was forced to pick something from my kindle essentially at random. I chose Ace. It starts with an A so it was early in the list. I was too lazy to keep looking. Decision made, end of.

I started it largely without reading the description. I’m sure I did when I downloaded it, but who know when that might have been. I didn’t know what I was getting into and this isn’t one of those books that tells you the plot on page one. Once I figured out what was going on, however, I started to really enjoyed it. The writing is sharp and theres’s a certain snappiness to the narration that I liked a lot. I kept on enjoying it until…

If I used star ratings on this blog I would say that I was set on giving it a full five stars right up until the last page, when it just suddenly and unexpectedly ended. There was no tapering off, no conclusion of the plot, no closure with the characters, just a harsh, ragged ending. It was as if someone had ripped several pages out (except that i was reading the Kindle version). It’s 338 pages long, so it’s a complete book, not one of those teaser novellas that are all the rage right now. But there is NO ending. This is not a stand alone book. I hate that! It’s my current number one literary pet peeve. I would almost drop it all the way down to three stars out of simple irritation, but that really wouldn’t be fair. But really, who wants to finish a book and not know the ending?

Lack of satisfying conclusion aside, I liked almost everything else about this book. (Except for the fangs explicatives. It was a cute idea, but there were just so fanged many of them.) It did take a startling long time to figure out where the plot was going. I don’t just mean that it’s such a intriguing mystery I couldn’t figure it out. It felt a bit like it was drifting. Characters have to find their quest, or obstacle to over-come and it took a long time (most of the book actually) for Ace to find hers. If in fact she did. Given the lack of ending it’s hard to know if the final escapade was THE ONE or just another one. That’s part of what made the abrupt ending so harsh. It felt like she had JUST, finally gotten started. Be that as it may, I enjoyed her crazy, unpredictable, curse-ridden journey, even when I didn’t know what it was supposed to be accomplishing. (OK, I’m letting it go now.)

The whole thing had a strange Douglas Adams feel to it. It’s a completely different genre, of course, dragons instead of space ships, lack-luster primitives instead of depressed robots, but the random nature of events felt similar. So did the humour. Ace’s non-plus acceptance of her curse and the unexpected places it took her is very reminiscent of Arthur Dent’s hapless trek through the galaxy at the behest of good old Ford Prefect. I laughed aloud more than once.

Ace, herself, is a strong female lead. Very little makes her loose her cool…very little but one, Mr. Cheater. Cheater gets on her very last nerve on a regular basis and I loved him. He was calm and collected, mysterious and dangerous, witty and just a little sexy too. I want more of him. There were very few meaningful side characters in the book. Palo is the only one I can even think of. But Ace encountered quite a few that popped in and then out again. They may or may not be of any importance.

All-in-all, I generally enjoyed the book, but there is just so much unfinished business that I feel very unsettled about it. (OK, so I couldn’t quite let it go.) What about the pirates, the crazy gypsy lady, the old woman and her amazing mansion? I want to know. I’ve got the sequel, Ace of Hearts. I’m really hoping it clears things up because I genuinely want to go back to loving this story.

ace of heartsDescription from Goodreads:

Following her die-hard pattern of survival, Ace has taken to running again, leaving abandoned companions to tie up the loose ends of failed commitments. She has at last become a victim of involvement, however, and it is not so easy, this time, to up and leave everything behind. Scarcely free of it all, she is pulled right back into its complicated midst – and this time, people of authority are making demands.

As if it’s not enough knowing her frightful sense of bad luck is catching up to her – and therefore those around her – Ace’s involvement begins to weigh on her in ways not anticipated. Learning of the dark secrets of others actually leaves her with a conscience pertaining to sides she has chosen in this detour of engagement, and an evolving tactic of her gift with cards is drawing those she plays games with closer to her.

So close, she just might be developing the treacherous likeness of feelings for them. And this time, running is not an option. From the dawning humanity inside her, or the misfortune that now has the grounds to be more cruel than ever, threatening to descend on those that have come to mean something to her.

Review:

Ace of Hearts is every bit as good as (and as frustrating as) its predecessor Ace. It is just as well written. The narrative is just as sarcastic and indicative of Ace’s personality. Its plot is just as twisted and original and the characters are just as wonderful. But it is also just as incomplete. All of the threads are just as loose and all of the questions I had at the end of book one, plus some are still left unanswered. Thus, I am just as peeved now as I was then. (Then being the end of book one.)

Like the first book I probably would have given this one five stars if it actually ended. The ending isn’t quite as abrupt as in Ace, but there still isn’t any conclusion. The whole book, the whole freakin’ book builds up to one moment…and then it ends just before it happens. Honestly, what the bloody fangs is that? This means that I have now invested the time to read roughly 650 pages about characters I generally like and a plot I’m invested in seeing the end of without ANY payoff. This is exacerbated by the fact that there isn’t a third book yet and even if there was I don’t know how long the series is going to be. This means that I am left waiting for the continuation of the story and worried that even once it (Queen of Hearts I think it’s called) is out I’ll be left in the same boat again. This does not make me a happy camper, or reader. I know this issue may not bother others as much as it does me, but as much as I’m liking the story I don’t know if I’ll be continuing it. It’s starting to feel just a little masochistic to do so.

It’s such a shame too. The author is a truly talented writer. There is a lot of wit in this book, a lot of heart-felt emotion, and a couple really interesting characters. If, by chance, you are the sort who doesn’t mind the possibility of a never-ending story-line I highly recommend this series. I think I might be dropping it however.