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Book Review of Aftermath, by Cara Dee

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AftermathI grabbed Cara Dee‘s M/M romance, Aftermath from the Amazon free list.

Description from Goodreads:
Austin Huntley and Cameron Nash are like night and day. One is a family man, works in a nice office, drives an expensive car, and is content to be content. The other one is an antisocial car mechanic with a short fuse.

Some things don’t change. Others definitely do.

After surviving a five-months long kidnapping together, they struggle to return to normalcy, all while realizing that they’re more drawn to each other than they ever could’ve imagined.

Review:
I generally enjoyed this book. It wasn’t anywhere near as dark as I expected. I loved the narrator’s and the men’s voices (not to mention the characters themselves). The dialogue was believable. It was well edited and there were some pretty hot sex scenes. Yum. I seriously considered giving it five stars, based purely on my enjoyment level. But in the end, I decided it didn’t really deserve a full five. So, I’m going with a four star rating.

What held my rating back a bit was that some aspects of it weren’t very believable.  For example: the previously straight man, having his first sexual experience with another guy, takes charge and knows EXACTLY what to do, where everything is, and has no awkward fumbling at all. Really, wouldn’t’ he need at least a little direction or be at least a little nervous? Nope, he’s balls to the wall confident and competent.

The relationship seemed rushed too. I get that the men had been in close quarters together for 5 gruelling months, but it felt like they just woke up one morning and decided to love each-other and then both seamlessly did just that with no discussion or difficulties. It made for some great ‘Ahh’ moments, but should it really be so easy?

I loved Cam (Austin too, but Cam stole the how for me), but his Aspergers didn’t seem to contribute anything. Most of his behaviours could have been explained by the anxiety disorder, so a secondary diagnosis seemed surplus to requirement. 

I also thought that the author wimped out on the abductions a little. A sadist kidnaps 10 men, cuffs & cages them, beats the living daylights out of them, half starves them, but doesn’t molest a single one in any fashion. I’m not saying I wanted a rape scene in there anywhere, but (fiction being what fiction is) if 10 women had been kidnapped in this book they’d all have been ravished within an inch of their lives. Half of them would probably be impregnated and the reader would probably have had to sit through every agonising detail of it all.

The book does a good job of describing the men’s struggles to come to terms with the fact that they, 10 vibrant men, had been overpowered and abducted by a single madman. This was hard for them to accept, as it felt like a loss of manhood. But The fact that they only had to endure physical and mental abuse felt artificial, like there was some notable line of beyond this point go only the truly depraved that the author didn’t want to be associated with. But, honestly, she created a depraved bad guy. He needed to go there IMO, so that the characters could fully face the perceived loss of  their masculine position. Just my opinion, of course, and it does somewhat suggest that all violent offenders must also be sexual offenders, which is of course a fallacy, but in this case I think the book would have been stronger for it.

Lastly, I’m not a huge fan of the sappy hearts and flowers endings. This one definitely had one. Really, the epilogue had no other purpose than to cram the happily ever after down the readers throat. I could have done without it, or at least without it being quite so overpoweringly cheerful.

All in all, I’m well up for reading the next in the series. I loved the characters, I especially appreciated that at 33 and 40 they were full-fledged adults. I thought the writing was crisp and the story was sweet (even if not particularly plausible). Definitely not a waste of my time.

Eden’s Charms

Book Review of Eden’s Charms, by Jaclyn Tracey

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Eden's CharmsI picked up a copy of Jaclyn Tracey’s Eden’s Charms from the Amazon free list.

Description from Goodreads:
Part-time archeologist and full-time enchantress, Savanah St. James unearthed the world’s most sought after antiquity, Draq’s lair. About to open an exhibit in one of the most famous museums in London, Savanah thought she’d finally found her pot of gold until one man crashed into her–literally. And there in lay her problem. Savanah had an audacious knack for finding love in all the wrong places. 

Living the dream, Ethan Kitt had it all–money in his pocket, his own plane, freedom to travel the world, and a boss whose only request was blood once a week. Waiting in line at customs, Ethan’s dream of a woman in every port sank when he laid his eyes on the one woman who would whip his furry hide into submission. 

In the midst of being hunted by the most notorious vamp alive, Ethan and Savanah scour the Eastern coastline from New York to Louisiana trying to find a way to trust their instincts and each other in order to survive.

Review:

I’ll give this a 2.5 out of 5 stars. Based on my own enjoyment, I would probably rate it lower, but objectively it probably isn’t worth less. The problem(s) I had with it largely resulted from repeat confusion. Most notably, there are far, far, far, FAR, FAAARRR far, far too many characters.

Seriously, who are these people? There were about a billion characters in this novel. Then to muddle things further we had all the twins/relations with similar names..Jovan, Jonah, Julian. Olivia, Oliver. Savannah, Serina. Donovan, Duncan, Dylan, Devon. Xier, Xanter, Xavier. Then throw in a few nicknames for these people–Serri, Ands, Jules or Savvy, Doc, Jeanie, Vanah and Savage (the last of which I think are all the same person, BTW. If you weren’t confused enough by the glut of characters and their names Savannah has 4 or 5 nicknames (Doc might have meant Serina, since about 60% through it was casually mentioned that she had a doctorate) that are used interchangeably.) I was so lost on who was who.

What’s more, characters just KEPT showing up, some with almost no introduction. (All the way until 80+%, new characters were popping up and even after that we had all the new babies to contend with. I shouldn’t be meeting characters in the last 20% of a book. I just shouldn’t.) Many of these characters played very little role in the book, so why include them? They just clutter everything up.

Off the top of my head, without referencing the book (so excuse the spellings): Radcliff, Edan, Dylan, Devon, James, Father B., Kyle, Sydney, William, Molly and Duncan (and an endless supply of named background minions) could all be dropped from the plot completely, without effecting it at all. They contributed nothing. A number of others could be dropped or combined with very little change in the overarching plotline. The 12 (17 by the end I think) person family, all living in one home, could easily…should easily be thinned out. It’s too much to keep track of in one book. Raven’s husbands, for example, didn’t seem to do anything but follow Lucian and Andre about, so why not just send Andre and Lucian. Payton and Jonah seemed surplus to requirements.

In this little rant on characters, I have mentioned almost twenty names, twenty-five if you count nicknames. And that’s not all of them. I mean, the hero isn’t even on that list. So, have you been able to keep track? I wasn’t.

I was also confused about people’s species. At first, my very real bewilderment was based on mixing two or more characters up because their names were so similar. Honestly, I had Julian and Jonah mixed up for at least 30% of the book. So, when things like, ‘so and so doesn’t have werewolf strength like his brother,’ was said, I was thinking, ‘but I thought so and so was a werewolf. He’s not? Is he a vampire then? Why has he lived 100+ years?’

Similarly, one primary character was turned into a vampire at about the same time and I had thought him a vampire from the beginning. Apparently, there are vampires, werewolves, witches and (blood) donators and they can all give you virtual immortality (I think). But I never got a handle on who was what. I never even got a good understanding of the rules…or the world for that matter.

I also thought that there were a lot of inconsistencies. Ethan is unflappable and mouthy as hell, even when being held hostage, for example. But not five pages earlier he was so frightened of the same people that he pissed himself. That’s right, I just said the hero peed on himself in fear. How not sexy is that? I’ll give it props for probably being more realistic than most PNR books, but it’s fantasy. I don’t want my hero peeing down his own leg.

Additionally, the man is a straight up idiot. But then all of a sudden the reader is supposed to believe he has a Ph.D in Anthropology and Archaeology. There is no way that man has a Ph.D. in anything but skirt chasing and happy hours. Little facts like this were dropped regularly with no substantiation. He’s also apparently claustrophobic. This too was just causally slipped into narration with nothing to support or explain it.

Another inconsistency also happens to be one of my least favourite sex related tropes. The 114 year old woman who’s supposed to be sexually active but never had an orgasim and apparently doesn’t know to expect one. I HATE this trope. Anytime I hear a female character going on about ‘Something’s happening to my body. I’m shaking from the inside out.’ I want to throw my kindle at the wall. Plus, she might as well have been a virgin for as protective of her as her father is. It didn’t fit the otherwise open and adult relationship she had with her family.

There is very little actual sex in the book, but about 85% of the book is CHEESY sexual innuendo, or sexual teasing, fantasies or challenges/promises. ‘Don’t worry Savage, I’m gonna bla bla bla as soon as we get home.’ The innuendo got old fast…like before the very, very long one on page one (and the subsequent pages) ended. I was grinding my teeth by the end.

How can anything happen if 85% of the book is dedicated to IQ melting euphemisms (seriously, his penis is referred to as a microphone at one point), you might ask. Well, easily it would seem. You see, all action is skipped over. Repeatedly, characters got drunk, drugged or passed out (Savannah has some neurological disorder that makes her faint at the drop of a hat) and then action from that missed time was related when they woke up. I don’t want to be told, ‘Daddy, Dracula attacked and took Ethan’, I want to see Dracula attack and Ethan BE taken. The end result was that the reader is given very little direct action. The ONLY things we get real time are Savanah and Ethan’s cringe-worthy flirting and family time. NO ACTION.

There were also a lot of little personal irritants, like “shook her head, yes” and “nodded his head, no.” That just drove me crazy. Her clitoras was referred to as her mons. They’re just not the same thing, sorry. I thought I might scream if I had to read ‘private lips’ one more time. Savanah was said to be in estrus, but wasn’t meant to be fertile.  Then there was the absolutely predictable ending with the super-sappy conclusion, in which everyone is unrealistically forgiven and accepted. Gag. These things might not bother others, but I got very close to reaching the limits of my patients.

I did like Ethan’s tendency to be completely anal about his cars. At first, I just thought it made him seem like more of a douche, but after a while I came to see it as one of the few true character developments in the book. So, there, I did like something.

The writing was basically fine. Names were used too often to feel natural. However, with so many characters the names are often necessary to know who’s talking to whom. However, I see this as a symptom of too many characters instead of an excuse for too frequent name usage. Other than that, it was mechanically passable and not horribly edited.

Another reviewer noted that this is the third book in a series. I discovered that after finishing the book, when I was checking to see if my impression matched that of other readers. (It doesn’t.) But I couldn’t find anything anywhere to say for sure that this is the case. (It’s not on the cover, in the description or in the title/subtitle, so no way to verify) I don’t know how normal readers are supposed to know then, seems kinda important.

Being third in a series MIGHT explain some of my confusion in reading this book, but I’m fairly sure it couldn’t clear it all up. It made me wonder if this wasn’t where the problem with the glut of characters came from though. Did the author feel the need to include every character from the previous books? It’s not necessary, really.

Anyhow, I’m glad to be done with it. I know others will enjoy it but I’ll not be seeking out the rest of the series.

Sorry, I know that’s long (almost 1400 words), but brevity was never my strong point.

Hunting in Hell

Book Review of Hunting in Hell (De La Roca Chronicles, #1 & 2), by Maria Violante

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Hunting in HellQuite some time ago, I picked up Maria Violante‘s Hunting in Hell from the Amazon free list. It’s a compilation of the first two books in the De La Roca Chronicles.  I don’t think it’s available anymore, but I notice that the first book is free.

Description from Goodreads:

PART ONE: HUNTING THE FIVE 

It’s a side of the southwest never glimpsed by mortal man – a heartless, barren outback riddled with ruthless demons. In its ignorance, humanity is powerless to stop these escapees from Hell and the havoc they create with their dark magic. Good thing De la Roca isn’t human. A gunslinger with no memories of her previous life, she has fought for the last three hundred years on the forefront of a supernatural war, relying only on her wits, her reflexes, and her own demonic powers – all to pay for her own release from Hell. The Angels wouldn’t send her in alone and unarmed, though; Alsvior, her gifted – if contrary – steed, and Bluot, a legendary revolver with an unquenchable blood-lust, have been with her every step of the way – alone with a series of terrible nightmares that might hold the keys to her past. Then, an Angel appears with a bargain that seems to good to be true – five final targets, and she is free from her penance. Quickly, she discovers that her old methods are not up to the task, and she’s forced to team up with a mysterious gatekeeper and another mercenary – both of which need her for their own plans. With time running out, she has to figure out who to trust and who to kill, and fast, before she’s demon-food. 

PART TWO: HONOR IN HELL 

Can anyone be trusted? Betrayed by both Laufeyson and the Mademoiselle, and sent on a quest by an angel that might actually be her enemy, the demon mercenary De la Roca bolts into Hell with murder in her heart. Her simple mission for revenge quickly spirals out of control. Between the Consortium of power-hungry angels, the serpentine Oracle, a strangely absent God, and the knowledge that her mount just happens to be a man under a curse, just about everyone around her has a secret – and most of them are trying to get her killed. Unless, of course, she can kill them first.

Hunting the FIveReview of Hunting the Five:
I’ll give this a tentative two stars (on a 5 star scale). I hate to do it, because in some ways I was really enjoying Hunting the Five. I say, ‘was enjoying’ instead of ‘enjoyed’ because it just ends in the middle, with no conclusion or wrap up. I was still enjoying the read and waiting for the whole thing to finally make sense…then nothing. Actually, having just typed that I can feel myself getting more irked and wanting to drop that rating to a one star. I hate books that do this (especially in serial novellas that could just as easily have been a single novel).

I won’t even call it a cliffhanger, it isn’t. A cliffhanger infers some aspect of a story ends even if some threads are open still. That isn’t the case here. It just ends. This is literally the first 18 chapters of one story. Why on Earth would I want just the first 18 chapters of a story and not the rest? Anyone? No? Yea, I’m at a loss too. Pissed off reader right here.

But as I said, despite being confused, I was enjoying the book. I liked De La Roca. I liked her horse. I liked what I think her mission was going to be. I think I was going to like the book once the pieces came together. You’ve read books like that, haven’t you? Books that made little sense, but if you stuck with them suddenly gelled together masterfully, providing the reader a gratifying Ah-Ha moment. That’s what I was expecting here. I was working toward it in eager anticipation. So even though I read some of the fight scenes (such as the one with Munnin) and didn’t really know what the hell happened (it was really brief and hardly sketched out), was a little iffy on the world (I initially thought it was the wild west, then microwaves and cars were thrown in, so guess not) and never figured out what the Mademoiselle and Laufeyson’s betrayals were supposed to be, I was still looking forward to each next chapter in the hopes that it would be the one to pull it all together. But no.

The writing itself is pretty good. Based on just the writing this deserves far more than two stars. But everything is kept shallow. At no point did I feel the author had provided me a solid…well, a solid anything. Everything was just hinted at. In fact, my initial thought was that the chapters felt like separate vignettes instead of a smoothly flowing piece of writing. This left everything and everyone feeling disjointed and jerky. It also left a lot of moments in which I reached the end of a section and only vaguely understood what had just transpired.

Anyhow, I have part two (not book two, mind you, part two). Here’s to hoping it’s A) not another ‘cliffhanger’ B) clears up some of the confusion left from this book. C) continues the pretty prose.

Honor in HellReview of Honor in Hell:
What’s with authors writing serial novellas that don’t end? Drives me nuts. It cheats the reader out of something fundamental to the reading experience. It sure as hell doesn’t leave the reader with anything resembling a warm, happy feeling.

Anyhow, this book was less confusing than the first one. I was much more easily able to follow what was going on. It also pulled a lot of the threads that were left waving in a mysterious wind at the end of part one together, so that the reader can actually follow the plot. The writing was still really good and it’s well edited. Too bad it’s just the middle third of a book.

Sorry, I’m too busy being annoyed at having just dedicated two days to reading two novellas, without reaching any conclusion and no indication that I ever will to bother writing anything more about this book. Why would I want to invest two days to something I’ll never be able to finish? (Because there isn’t a third book and by the time there is I’ll have forgotten about what I read here…and refuse to read it out of spite and fear that even then I might not reach an ending.) It was waste of my time, no matter how engaging or well written it might be.