Tag Archives: Indie

Bonds of Attraction and Livia Royce’s EMMAncipation

Book Review of Alana Davis’ Bonds of Attraction and Livia Royce’s EMMAncipation

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Since neither of these books really rang my bell I thought I might combine them into one post. Both came from the Amazon KDP list. You can find Alana Davis’ Bonds of Attraction (still free) here, but Livia Royce‘s EMMAncipation seems to have been removed from Amazon.

Bonds of AttractionDescription from Goodreads:
“It was always strictly business. I had never slept with a client. I wasn’t about to start now.”

Julie Facet runs the hottest matchmaking agency in Los Angeles, but she doesn’t quite believe in happily ever afters. Despite the file cabinets full of clients she has found matches for, she isn’t interested in anything beyond simply satisfying her own physical needs. When Julie meets the wealthy Leon Christensen, her professionalism is pushed to the brink. Leon is charismatic and cocky, and does everything he can to get under Julie’s skin. Not to mention that he owns the Poison Ivy, a nightclub that’s designed for every sexual proclivity and uses his own sexuality to push women away.

Will she able to find a suitable partner for Leon, who prides himself in his no-strings-attached relationships?

And what will Julie do when she discovers that her feelings for Leon extend beyond the professional?

Review:
I really like this book’s cover but there are probably readers out there that will enjoy the book itself a lot more than me. Me, I couldn’t figure out where Julie’s attraction came from. Leon was a dick to her from the first moment they met, and that’s really putting it lightly. Then she spends most of the book building elaborate sexual fantasies about him that have nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with the reality of the man she’d met. (By the end I was skimming, if not skipping them.)

Suddenly she ‘has feelings.’ What? She may have fallen in love with her fantasy, but the real deal (who she’d spoken to 3, maybe 4 times) was still calling her a whore and propositioning her in increasingly horrific ways. Unattractive doesn’t start to cover it. I imagine we’re supposed to understand he’s wounded and emotionally damaged. Our soft feminine urges to heal the injured male should be kicking in. Um…no. Just no. And when I thought Julie was finally gonna wise up and walk away he suddenly decided to bear his soul and the hearts and flowers start popping out all over the place. I think I got whiplash from trying to follow his sudden change of heart!

Now, I’ll credit the book with having a lead female that is comfortable with her body, even though it’s curvy and not a stick and with portraying a woman who is unashamed of her own sexuality. That really was refreshing, as was the fact that she wasn’t gagging to give up her control and cater to all of his BDSM fetishes. In fact, the subtext seemed to be that Leon craved the bondage because of his unhealthy self-image and within the confines of a safe, loving relationship a rather more vanilla scene still filled the bill. There are so many Shades Of Grey clones out there that it was nice to see female sexuality as something other than the weak-willed desire to submit and male sexuality as predatory. Don’t get me wrong, there is a little of this but it’s nowhere near as strong as it often is.

I’ll also admit that I might not have hated Leon as much if we were given any of his thoughts, feeling, opinions, etc. But the book is in first person, from the perspective of Julie and the reader isn’t given a single insight into Leon that isn’t mitigated through her. He feels very much like the creepy, life-sized cardboard cutout that she hangs in the corner and dreams about. He has no depth at all.

Add writing like this, “When my eyes finally adjusted to the darkness of the, shock stabbed my heart.” Or instances like the time I counted the word ‘car’ used 8 times in two brief paragraphs and I start to loose the will to read on. These latter matters I really could and would overlook. But I found the interactions between Julie and Leon really quite repulsive. Nope, there wasn’t a lot in this book that attracted me. I expect others to like it and fully acknowledge my opinion to be nothing more than that, but this was definitely not for me.
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Book Review of K.T. Swartz’s Juliet Harrison Novels

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I grabbed K.T. Swartz‘s first Juliet Harrison novel, These Chains That Bind, off of the KDP free list. (It’s still free, BTW.) I then bought the second two, Debtors Remorse and Carry Me Home.

These Chains That BindDescription from Goodreads:
Juliet Harrison can whip up one mean protection spell; Ezra Jacobs can snipe a man from a mile away. They might just be Columbus’ best detective duo… if only they’d stop arguing.

What do FBI agents, a bad-ass ex-marine, and a Mob Errand Boy have in common?

They’re all after one very annoyed Juliet Harrison.

Add to that a friend with an unrelenting ghost problem and a dangerous necromancer on the loose, and Juliet may not survive long enough to help the one person she can’t live without.

Review
I’m gonna start with a little OCD rant that I’ve made before. But it bothers me every single time, so I’m just gonna get it off of my chest. That cover is the wrong damned shape. There I said it. This is a book, not a CD. It needs a vertical rectangular cover so that it fits the standard and looks right when stacked with the rest of my digital books. Doesn’t it bother anyone else? It looks completely unprofessional to me, or at least very homemade (and not in a good way.) OK, moving on to the book.

I spent almost all of this book convinced that I wasn’t actually reading the first of the series. All my googling couldn’t come up with any prequel, so I suppose it must be number one. But there are a lot of rather important events referenced more than once that felt very much like the subject matter of a previous book. Carol’s death, for example, or whatever happened with Eli and his ex-wife, which is apparently how he and Juliet met.

These are not small matters. Carol was apparently Juliet’s long-term girlfriend, who was shot, possibly protecting Juliet. That’s a big deal. That’s important. That was still greatly affecting Juliet in this book, but never fully explored. Then Juliet spent roughly a third of this book helping Eli overcome the aftereffects of whatever transpired in the mysterious past event. That’s a lot of time to spend wondering what exactly it was that transpired.

I was really, really bothered by this. Either fully explore it or leave it out, but to just throw it out with no background and no follow-up is painful to read. Honestly, about 15% through the book, when I was so completely confused by these previous events and just realising they were never going to be explained, I almost gave up. I almost thought that if the author was such a poor storyteller that she didn’t recognise this as a GIANT plot hole, I shouldn’t hold out much hope for the book. I persevered, though, and I’m glad I did, because eventually the book moved away from its own history and developed a story of its own. It’s a darned good story too.

It’s the characters that make it I think. Juliet and Ezra have a wonderfully strained relationship. (Again, wish I knew the history of it. There is apparently 6 years worth.) He doesn’t speak much, but he’s a man of action. Juliet’s normal life would give most of us grey hair and it was a lot of fun to watch her navigate a world full of ghosts and poltergeists. I rather enjoyed the FBI agents as well. There was a lot of humour in Charlie and Juliet’s exchanges.

The plot itself seemed to be split into thirds: helping Ray and his friends, helping Eli, and trying to avoid GW. The whole Ray situation wraps up nicely. The Eli situation kind of wrapped up but really had no beginning, and I suspect it will crop up again in future books, and the GW situation had no end since it’s carrying over into book two. You can maybe see why I was never wholly convinced I really was reading book one.

On the whole, however, I found the writing quite refreshing, and there was a good amount of humour in it. I especially liked Juliet and Ezra’s constant jibes and insults. It was a bit of a running gag. I did notice a couple of repeat phrases, though. I think about a hundred people must have had the corner of their lip twitch, for example. I liked it enough to buy books two and three, so that should tell you something.
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Book Review of Chosen, by Denise Grover Swank

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THE CHOSENI grabbed a copy of Denise Grover Swank‘s Chosen (The Chosen, #1) from the KDP free list.

Description From Goodreads:
Everything Emma Thompson owns fits in a suitcase she moves from one roach infested motel to another. She and Jake, her five year old son who can see the future, are running from the men intent on taking him. Emma will do anything to protect him even when it means accepting the help of a stranger named Will. Jake insists she needs Will, but Emma’s never needed help before. And even though she’s learned to trust her son, it doesn’t mean she trusts Will.

Mercenary Will Davenport lives in the moment. Hauling Emma to South Dakota should have been an easy job, but his employer neglected to tell him about Emma’s freaky son and the gunmen hot on her trail. Instinct tells him this job is trouble, but nothing can prepare him for Jake’s proclamation that Will is The Chosen One. Who must protect Emma from the men hunting her power. A power she doesn’t know she has.

Will protects Emma and Jake on a cross-country chase from the men pursuing them, while struggling with memories from his past, his apprehension of Jake, and his growing attraction to Emma. Will’s overwhelming urge to protect Emma surprises him, especially since it has nothing to do with his paycheck and possibly everything to do with the tattoo Jake branded on his arm. Rich and powerful men are desperate to capture Emma, and Will must discover why before it’s too late.

Review:
Entertaining enough while it lasted. I liked the premise of the book, and Jake, Emma, and Will are all interesting characters. I think I could have really, really liked it if it hadn’t compromised itself in so many ways. These may be personal likes and dislikes, but hey it’s my review. Others may not be as bothered by some of this.

I liked that Emma was a strong female character. Unfortunately, she spends about half the book injured in some fashion. And when injured she seemed to become completely disabled, which kind of negates all that awesome self-sufficient badassery. I liked that she was so protective of her son, Jake. Unfortunately, Jake was practically a cardboard cutout for much of the book. He was the prop that gave her a reason to be hunted. He’s important to the story. I would have liked it if he did more than sleep in the back seat for most of the book. I did really like Will. He seemed to accept all the supernatural mumbo-jumbo with amazing ease, which didn’t seem very realistic. But I enjoyed his slow acceptance of his feelings and all of his self-recriminations. Definitely an interesting addition, the question of ‘Do past bad deeds make you a present bad person?’

For much of the book, the writing and dialogue are pretty good, but then, at other times, it gets really choppy. Mostly due to the overuse of names. How often do you really say someone’s name when speaking to them? It begins to feel unnatural after a while.

The First half of the book is almost nothing but car chases and gun fights. I wouldn’t have had a problem with that if the second half of the book had made up for it, but it didn’t. The problem is that the romance just comes to fruition, you just figure out the prophecy, just figure out who is chasing them, just get started at just about everything and then the book just ends. Major, big-time pet peeve right there. I can’t even call this a cliffhanger since nothing really wraps up before the book ends. Of course, I knew going in this wasn’t a stand-alone book. I can see the ‘The Chosen, #1’ right there in the title. But that doesn’t mean it has to be without ending. The plot over the whole series looks like it could be an interesting one, but when considering just this one book on its own, it feels a bit unfinished.