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Clutch

Book Review of Clutch (I am Just Junco #1), by J.A. Huss

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Clutch Some time ago, I grabbed J.A. Huss‘ Clutch off of the Amazon free list. I read it here as book eleven of my Taking Care of my Own challenge.

Description from Goodreads:
How long can you lie to yourself before it all comes apart?

In 2152 the avian race is on Earth looking for something stolen from them decades ago – their genetics. At the center of the search lies the Rural Republic; a small backwards farming country with high hopes of military domination and a penchant for illegal bioengineering.

19 year old Junco Coot is the daughter of the Rural Republic’s ranking commander. She’s the most foul-mouthed, wildly unpredictable and ruthless sniper the Rural Republic has ever trained. But when her father’s death sparks a trip into forbidden places, she triggers events that will change everything she knows to be true.

As an elite avian military officer, Tier’s mission is to destroy the bioengineering projects, kill Commander Coot’s daughter, and return home immediately. There’s just one problem. Junco isn’t who she claims to be.

With no one to trust, not even herself, Junco must confront the secrets of her past and accept her place in the future, or risk losing herself completely.

Review:

What I liked:

  • The actual story, it was an interesting one.
  • The voices, Junco and Tier are both wonderfully sarcastic. There is a lot of good repartee between them.
  • Junco’s badassness in the last 1/3 of the book. I do love a kickbutt female warrior.
  • The fact that Junco was smart enough not to just take everything at face value.
  • The actual mechanical writing. It was very good, as was the editing.

What I didn’t like:

  • Tier’s ‘Darlin’ habit. It made him sound like an old man. In fact I can’t say I liked his accent at all. The use of ‘ya’ instead of ‘ you’ really ground on my nerves after a while. Plus, I think it undermined his gravitas.
  • The lack of worldbuilding. I have a very vague idea that there was an American succession of some sort, but nothing beyond that and no idea how (or when) avians fit in.
  • The fact that Junco did a personality 180. I liked the badass she became, but after seeing her flail about for the first 2/3 the book it was a bit abrupt and unbelievable.
  • As much as I love a badass warrior woman, Junco’s badass attitude became just too much for me.
  • The events that led to both the revelation of memories that allowed her to revert to her other personality and caused her to start the whole chain of events in the first place is pretty major and completely glossed over.
  • The lack of character depth, none of the characters were well fleshed out.
  • I was confused on some of the tech. How does a construct work, for example? It seemed too sentient, not to mention aware of the outside world and able to pop up in Junco’s mind without her ‘logging in’ or whatever.
  • The subtitle, I understand the Clutch reference, but since this isn’t set online or anything what’s up with the Dot Com?

Overall impression:

I liked it, enjoyed reading it, but A LOT was left unexplained or only vaguely sketched out. I know I’ve seen at least one write up in which the author says there are no answers in this book (or in book 2, 3 or 4 even) but that’s not even what I’m talking about. The cliffhanger wasn’t painfully abrupt. I thought it reached an acceptable breaking point.

I just mean that the whole world, plot, everything just seemed to hang together on gossamer threads. So, while I followed it I didn’t sense that it was solid; if that makes sense. I needed to know more about the whole Charlie situation, the voices in Junco’s head, who/what avians are, what happened to America (and the rest of the world presumably), why Tier would disobey orders for Junco, what was his f*** up that sent him to Earth in the first place, was his apparent affection for Junco  supposed to be love, etc. It felt a little weak.

Despite all that, I did enjoy the book. I looked into buying book two and might have if it was super cheat. But I held off for fear that Junco would turn into one of those heroine’s who can miraculously do everything, survive everything, recover from everything, outsmart everyone, etc and do it all with a sarcastic smirk in the process. (As much as I love a badass woman, I hate those characters.)

I haven’t read the second book, so I’m not saying that’s the case, but I sense that it could be. Hope I’m wrong. All in all, an interesting start to the series. I’m definitely up for more of Ms. Huss’ writing.

Sheep’s Clothing

Book Review of Sheep’s Clothing, by Elizabeth Einspanier

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Sheep's ClothingBook ten of my Taking Care of my Own challenge: Sheep’s Clothing, by  Elizabeth Einspanier. After seeing Ms. E.’s post on ReviewSeekers, I got it free from Amazon and at the time of posting it was still free.

Description from Goodreads:
It is the year 1874.

Doc Meadows, frontier doctor working in the small town of Salvation, has always considered himself a sensible man, and has not believed in monsters for a long time. When injured half-Indian Wolf Cowrie staggers into his practice one night, however, he brings terrifying news–a vampire he hunts plans to settle in Salvation and turn it into his own private larder. Now Doc has to overcome his skepticism and fear in order to face down this new threat to his town, before Salvation becomes just another ghost town in the territories.

Sheep’s Clothing hearkens back to early depictions of vampires as bloodthirsty, charismatic monsters, borrowing more strongly from Dracula than more common modern interpretations.

Review:
I found this an enjoyable old-school vampire book, the kind where vampires are soulless evil beasts, bent on human destruction. The inclusion of a skinwalker, instead of a werewolf was an interesting twist on the age-old vampire/werewolf divide (as well as an ingenious way to position the story in the Wild West) and I liked Doc and Wolf. (I was especially amused by their particularly descriptive names.) All in all, a success in my opinion.

The very description says the book takes a lot from Dracula and it’s not kidding. Little things like the two women traveling with Russeau being referred to as his ‘brides’— not his wives or his women or his companions, but his ‘brides,’ just like Draculas’. I see this as taking language from a previous story instead of just mythological bases, like the need to sleep on home soil, for example. For me it was a little too much. It made it feel much more like fan-fiction than a separate vampire tale using original material. This was a shame but a relatively small matter.

Additionally, while I appreciated seeing a more traditional vampire, the whole ‘brides of Dracula’ thing was my least favourite aspect of Stoker’s book. (Ok, the worship of Mina’s apparent purity and basic flawlessness was my least favourite part, but beyond that, the oversexed, volition-less, singleminded female servants of Dracula were my next least favourite part.) Unfortunately, that carries over here too. The women are ‘his,’ ‘bound to him’ and apparently serving no purpose beyond shadowing him and fulfilling any ‘bride’ duty an immortal might feel the need to keep a couple complacent women about for. Meh. But again, a relatively small matter.

What wasn’t a small matter for me, was that people accepted the existence of vampires with startling ease. I actually liked that in 1874 the uneducated masses didn’t even know what a vampire was. But not a single person (even the man who had just been told he was now nothing more than a reanimated dead, severed head) freaked out at any point. Seriously, these people were calm and collected at every turn. Unrealistic doesn’t begin to cover it. This was a fairly massive detraction for me.

I also thought that it lacked some character development, especially in Wolf. He’s on a pretty drastic mission, for an important and personal reason but we’re just told bla, bla, bla and move on. I didn’t ‘feel’ him or his pain at all and I needed to have. Russeau was also defeated really easily in the end.

The writing is really good, though. The use of regional accents gives it a little flare without going overboard to become annoying and it’s well edited and readable. Well worth picking up.

Book Review of Shannon Mayer’s Celtic Legacy series

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I grabbed all three of Shannon Mayer‘s Celtic Legacy books from the Amazon free list. They also represent book 6, 7 & 8 of my Taking Care of My Own Challenge.

Celtic Legacy

Description:
The bonds of family are stretched to the breaking point as legendary monsters, a deadly prophecy, and soul swallowing fears threaten to destroy them. Magic, secrets, sensuality and mind numbing terror all rolled into one to keep the pages flying.

Review:
Even having finished this book, I’m undecided about how I feel about it. There seems to be an interesting plot developing. It’s well written. The dialogue seems natural and it flows fine. Though there are a few editing issues, most notably a whole passage that seems to have been pasted in twice.

But…BUT I hated the wimpy coward Quinn was portrayed as, even while she was supposed to be a prophesied saviour. It made her feel inept, like she couldn’t do anything unless there was a man there forcing her to do the right thing (the thing she wanted to do, but couldn’t on her own). Meh, that SOOOO doesn’t do it for me. Though, in fairness, I’ll give it props for being a little more realistic than the heroine who fearlessly rushes into danger.

I also didn’t feel like I got to know any of the characters very well…at all. The reader isn’t given any opportunity to learn about them, their past, or their personality, especially Bres and Luke. They are essentially characterless. Thus, Quinn’s eenie-meenie-minie-moe routine between the two elicited no emotion from me. I didn’t care who she chose, as I knew neither one of them.

I was a bit bothered by the fact that she was suddenly ‘with’ Luke and determined to stay loyal, when I couldn’t say when they made any sort of commitment to one another. A kiss is the most they shared. Further, she just seemed to gravitate toward whichever man she was physically nearest at the time, as if she had no actual volition of her own. All of this with no real, definitive explanation beyond, ‘the prophesy says it’s so.’

Similarly, since I didn’t feel like I knew any of the characters I didn’t feel like I really grasped why anyone did anything and therefore the plot felt a bit like a group of random people running about doing random things. Now, I’m not calling it plotless, far from. But you just never really know anything anymore than you know anyone…if that makes sense. If I didn’t have a basic understanding of light and dark fae I probably wouldn’t have even understood the plot in to begin with.

I’m also a bit confused about the intended audience. Quinn is 25. I’m not under the impression that this is supposed to be a YA book/series, but at times it felt very much like it is. Things like a kiss being given enormous importance or juvenile questions like, “Do you want to be my boyfriend?” Wha…what? Really?

Lastly (and this is a complaint I seem to make a lot lately), I don’t understand why it’s broken up. This is not a stand alone book, but as each is only ~150 pages, there is plenty of room for them to be comfortably combined.

All in all, despite my apparent negativity, it’s an interesting (if rushed) start to the series, but I won’t really know what I feel about it until I see how the series comes together. On its own, all it is is an interesting beginning and, honestly, that’s not really enough.

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Description:
When evil begets evil, a choice is forced on Quinn, the one person who can see the danger. Does she save the ones she loves, or does she save the world from Chaos?

As the realms of Fae and human collide, Quinn’s future has never looked so grim, or so damn impossible.

Review:
This book picks up exactly where book one ended, further making me question why they are broken into three volumes. While it’s quite action packed (Quinn spends the whole book running from one task to another) the reader is still denied any real depth of character. I also found myself wondering how Quinn managed to continue to best better fighters with skills she has only just acquired and had no time to practice or perfect.

The different threads of the story do start to come together here. And though I found the final twist quite obvious (and wondered how no one was supposed to have seen that one coming) it was still gratifying to get there. (I wonder if I’ll feel the same way about the obvious ending I think I see coming too.)

Again, writing and dialogue seem fine and the editing was better than in book one.

16055884Description:
With Chaos free in the world, Quinn finally faces the truth. She must kill the one she has spent her life trying to protect in order to save the world. But with leader of the Tuatha against her, her own brother seeking her blood and the world in upheaval, Quinn may not see the day that prophecy has claimed will come to pass.

At least, not without a sword that no longer exists.

Review:
Dark Fae picks up exactly where Dark Isle ended and it continues in much the same vein as the previous books. Quinn is sent around on mini-quest after mini-quest, sacrificing herself and saving those she loves. Without doubt, Quinn’s love is the strongest aspect of this book. However, I’m not entirely certain we see why her sister deserves it so much. Additionally, Quinn continues to win battles despite being out manned, out skilled,  and overpowered. I question the believability of it.

She did finally develop a backbone, though. That was appreciable. I liked seeing her strike out on her own, make her own decisions and act on them.

Like the previous books, I still didn’t feel like we got to know the characters well. I kept waiting, but it just wasn’t to be. I also thought the story wrapped up really predictably. EVERYONE had a happy ending. Even most of the evil characters were somehow excused and forgiven. For me, it was a little too schmaltzy, but I have a pretty low schmaltz threshold to start with.

All in all, it was a satisfying ending to an interesting series. The whole thing could do with some fleshing out, but I still enjoyed it.