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Book Review of A Touch of Midnight & Kiss of Midnight, by Lara Adrian

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I grabbed Lara Adrian’s A Touch of Midnight from the Amazon free list and Kiss of Midnight from my local library.

A Touch of MidnightDescription from Goodreads:
Savannah Dupree is halfway across the country from her Louisiana bayou hometown, a freshman studying at Boston University on a full scholarship. But academic excellence is only one of Savannah’s gifts. She possesses something even more remarkable than her quick mind and insatiable curiosity for learning. With a simple touch, Savannah can see an object’s past—a skill that puts her life in danger, when her studies bring her into contact with a centuries-old English sword and the secret hidden within the blade’s history: the vicious murders of twin boys by a group of fanged creatures borne of the worst kind of nightmare.

In all his three hundred years of living as one of the Breed, vampire warrior Gideon never dreamed he’d see the blade again that spilled his young brothers’ lives ages ago on that blood-soaked night in London. Ever since the boys’ deaths, Gideon’s been on a personal quest to rid the world of Rogue vampires, but now he can’t help wondering if the brutal slayings of his only kin was something more sinister—an act perpetrated by an unknown enemy. An enemy who is apparently living in hiding somewhere in Boston. There’s one certain way to prove Gideon’s suspicion, but it will mean using innocent, gifted Savannah to help uncover the full truth—a truth that will shatter everything she knows about herself and the world around her. And with danger closing in from all sides, the passion that ignites between Gideon and Savannah will tempt them to risk their hearts and lives for a love that might just last an eternity…

Review:
Pompous, overwritten, rushed and containing every cheap PNR cliché known to man. However, I think (though I may be giving it too much credit) that since this was published well after the bulk of the other books, it is intended for pre-existing fans of the series, whose well entrenched love of the Breeds would carry the day. Perhaps it has more meaning and resonance for such readers. This is the first of the Midnight Breed books I’ve ever read and I WAS NOT IMPRESSED.

Kiss of Midnight

Description from Goodreads:
He watches her from across the crowded dance club, a sensual black-haired stranger who stirs Gabrielle Maxwell’s deepest fantasies. But nothing about this night—or this man—is what it seems. For when Gabrielle witnesses a murder outside the club, reality shifts into something dark and deadly. In that shattering instant she is thrust into a realm she never knew existed—a realm where vampires stalk the shadows and a blood war is set to ignite.

Lucan Thorne despises the violence carried out by his lawless brethren. A vampire himself, Lucan is a Breed warrior, sworn to protect his kind—and the unwitting humans existing alongside them—from the mounting threat of the Rogues. Lucan cannot risk binding himself to a mortal woman, but when Gabrielle is targeted by his enemies, he has no choice but to bring her into the dark underworld he commands.

Here, in the arms of the Breed’s formidable leader, Gabrielle will confront an extraordinary destiny of danger, seduction, and the darkest pleasures of all. . . 

Review:
Blerghhhh. Let me just pause to clean up the vomit…ok, moving on. I absolutely, 100% do not understand why people love this series! It’s horrible. I picked this book up from my local library, but prior to reading it I read the freebie prequel A Touch of Midnight. Of it I said, “Pompous, overwritten, rushed and containing every cheap PNR cliché known to man…I WAS NOT IMPRESSED.” This one wasn’t rushed; I’ll give it that. But the rest of that sentence is true. It was also incredibly, I mean INCREDIBLY predictable. 

The dialogue was stiff and overly dramatic. There were numerous large, dull info-dumps. I knew what would happen at every stage of the game. A lot of hated PNR tropes were simply strung together and called a book and the plot was so thin cheesecloth would feel more substantial. 

What’s worse, I hated the characters. Lucan was just a selfish jackass and at no point did I feel he redeemed himself. And Gabrielle was TSTL. I mean, with the exception of the times they were in bed, she spent the whole book being angry, annoyed, or scared of Lucan. So…what exactly did she fall in love with? Then, of course, because she has to throw herself into stupid danger (can’t miss that tripe…excuse me, trope) she decides to leave all safety behind in a huff because she’s mad at Lucan. Dumb. 

Plus, can I just vent a moment on how much I hate how common it is for heroines to doubt their own sanity. It’s just a cultural reaffirmation of the idea that women aren’t as strong in the mental department as men. She’s made to look emotionally and mentally weak so that she needs a strong smart man to make all her decisions for her. Ugh. Gross.

And, and, while on hated tropes…being seduced in her sleep, denies her volition and accountability of her own sexuality. Not to mention, seriously people, no woman would sleep through a man sneaking into her bedroom and performing oral sex on her. The first dip of the mattress would have most women up and screaming in fear, not pleasure. I hate this romantic trope so much.

Yeah, so, so, so, yeah, I have no more words for how much I hated this book.

Games of Fate

Book Review of Games of Fate (Fate ~ Fire ~ Shifter ~ Dragon #1), Kris Austen Radcliffe

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Games of Fate

I grabbed a copy of Kris Austen Radcliffe’s  Games of Fate from the Amazon free list. 

Description from Goodreads:
Rysa Torres’s stumbles through life an overwhelmed young woman fighting against her attention deficit disorder. She can’t get a handle on the world, no matter how she tries.

But when monsters activate a part of her she didn’t know she had, Rysa becomes the Fate at the center of an epic battle against a terrifying future—and a world consumed by fire.

When Ladon and his companion beast, Dragon, find Rysa, they see only the potential hell a young Fate might unleash into their lives. But Ladon quickly realizes Rysa is much more than the daughter of an old enemy—she is his key to forgiveness.

With the threat of a burning future distorting Rysa’s Fate abilities, she sees only two options: End her own life, or watch Ladon, the only man to see beyond her attention issues and love her for who she is, die. Will they accept the only future they see, or will they find the strength to break the bonds of fate?

Review:
I only occasionally use star ratings on this blog, essentially only when I can make a point with them. As I can now. I really want to give this book a low 2 star rating, because I really didn’t enjoy it. But I’ll drag it up to a 3 because a large part of what I disliked is the result of me not being the proper demographic for the book. Plus, the writing is honestly fine. (Though the book did feel overly long, some passages seemed to drag and deus ex machina solutions are never good, IMO.)

Before I get into the review, I’m going to talk a bit about myself. This is to centre me as a reviewer so others can understand where I’m coming from in my review…what type of reader I am. This should help others in deciding if my review would be pertinent to them or not. For those much like me, I hope it will be, but it probably won’t be for a lot of others.

I’ve not read a lot of New Adult books. Of the few I have read I found that they tend to encompass all the worst (most annoying) traits of Young Adult literature, except the heroine is in college instead of high school and they include sex, or worse, a lot of angst about if they should be having sex.

The thing is that I’m a woman in my mid-thirties who has been married for a dozen years. I can no longer relate to this whole internal agony over such a decision. It’s not that I don’t respect it as an important one, but whole plots that hinge on or are simply cluttered with an endless litany of yes, no, yes, no, maybe, I want, I don’t want, I crave, I don’t crave, I cry, I push him away, I pull him near, I give in, I regret, I make a big deal of my own decision, etc drives me away as a reader. So, from the get go, I’m always a little wary picking up a NA book. I always hope for the best. Why else would I bother? But I’m more often than not disappointed.

Despite my misgivings about it being NA, I had such high hopes for this book. It has dragons in it! Yes, fates too and they’re cool…but DRAGONS, my favorite mythical beast.

The plot is basically that a new Fate is born and a human/dragon pair rescue and fall in love with her. There’s a bit more to it, but not much.  The vast majority of the 300+ pages is dedicated to worshipping Rysa.

Now, I understand that the target audience is women in their early twenties who are likely in the stage of life when they are looking for someone to make them feel special. However, I eventually started gagging on all of Ladon’s obsessive appreciation of her and how he wanted to protect her, coddle her, make her happy, bla, bla, bla.

It’s not that I mind it in and of itself, but it was ennnnddddllllesssss. And being coupled with Rysa’s cliché, no man looks at ME that way, no one’s ever told ME that I was pretty, I’m ugly, awkward, a spaz, etc pushed it into annoying overdrive.

Then there was the ex-boyfriend issue. Apparently, he was a selfish and unconcerned lover, as many young college-aged men are wont to be. But is bad sex really worth counselling, low self-esteem and a hesitancy to trust any other men? Seems a little extreme. The guy certainly deserved to be slapped something fierce, but it hardly equates to grievous harm.

If she’d been raped or abused I could see it, but being so emotionally damaged over something so slight makes her seem very, very weak. It makes it feel like she has no emotional armour or resilience, which is one of the most important parts of a heroine’s strength. I simply don’t like to waste my time with female leads of the victim variety and a woman who is so easily injured and has NO CONTROL OVER ANYTHING, even what’s in her own head is nothing but a victim. She’s no fun to spend time with or root for.

Additionally, there is no downtime in the book. It’s run, cry, confusion, on a constant stream. It’s too much. The only exceptions are when Rysa repeatedly just lets bad things happen to her because she suddenly and inexplicably can’t think straight, or can’t remember, or can’t control herself, or someone else can control her mind. Victim. Victim. Victim. Blerg.

Irritating me more even than all that, was the subtext of her sexuality.  Whenever she was conscious she pushed Landon away, but whenever she was unconscious, she was literally crawling all over him, rubbing, kissing and seducing him. As if to suggest that any “good girl” couldn’t possibly also be sexually forward and secure in her own desires. In order to be that, she has to be unconscious and devoid of responsibility.

I mean she had to be punished with bad sex and emotional damage for daring to have sex in the past! If I really wanted to drag this point out, I could break the events down further to show how they reinforce this same idea. For example, the one time she pseudo-initiates sex, it is immediately followed with tears, fear and guilt because some horrible realisation crashes down on her as a direct result of allowing herself to “impulsively have sex with Ladon.” However, the one time her frail sensibilities are essentially overwhelmed by his intense passion they get their happy night together.

This is a trope I see a lot of and HATE. I’m not a prude but I must ask, is this really the message we want to still be sending young women approaching their own sexual maturity? That in order to enjoy, or even personally want sex they have to abdicate all responsibility for it and they’ll be (deservingly) punished if they don’t? I’d hoped we’d grown beyond that.

There was also the small matter of the insta-love, or at least baseless love. Since the action essentially never stops, there is no point at which the characters could slow down and have a conversation. They were never given the chance to get to know one another, so what was their love based on? I especially felt this lack of development in Ladon/Dragon’s extreme loyalty and dedication to her and her safety and happiness.

Now I can’t blame all of my dislike on being too old to appreciate the genre tropes. And honestly, that’s most of what I dealt with here. I also spent a lot of time gagging on the incredibly descriptive, purple prose used to describe Rysa’s experiences or visions. And while I understood that she was tied to chaos, I was quickly annoyed with the pages and pages of confusion and discordant havoc. There were a lot of times that I simply couldn’t understand what was supposed to be happening or had simply reached my limit of ‘it’s all crazy and unexplainable because of her ADHD.’

Speaking of her ADHD, I thought that it was over emphasised, even before she went all Fate, vision-laden über ADHD. It just felt like one more way to weaken her so that Landon could more fully protect her.

The book also has the same problem a lot of such books have. Rysa is essentially psychic, but for more than half the book she somehow still manages to misread every obvious signals Ladon throws her. And there are a lot of really obvious ones and very very few contradictory ones. The man wants her with every fiber of his being, practically from the moment he meets her and he’s pretty clear on that. But still Rysa, who can see the past, the present and the future and knows they’ll end up together in some way at some point continues to think of herself as nothing but an unwanted burden to him. Um…either she’s REALLY dumb, which we’re told she’s not or this is a giant fault line in the plot to keep the angst high and the story rolling along.

Lastly, I was left wondering about all the characters who were introduced and then dropped. What happened to Gavin, Marcus and Harold? They all just kind of disappeared.

I did like that there is an effortless gay couple. By effortless, I mean that no big deal was made of it. It was as unworthy of extra attention as any het relationship and I appreciated that. I know that mentioning it at all counters that same easy existence, but I can’t compliment it if I don’t and I’d like to see more such inclusions in fiction, which requires that people make it known that they like finding it.

All in all, not a winner for me personally. But I’m owning up to the fact that it really might be me, not the book that was the problem…Or, at least, the pairing of me and this book. I know a lot of people really like the heavy-handed romances. To each their own.

Veiled

Book Review of Veiled, by Victoria Knight

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Veiled

A representative of Laudanum House Publishing, contacted me about reading and reviewing Victoria Knight‘s PNR, Veiled. When I agree, they sent me a copy. As far as I know it wasn’t an ARC, though I’d be happy to find out I’m wrong about that. 

Description from Goodreads:
Until now Saul relied on the solitude of the forest to hide his true nature from prying eyes. But now a nameless evil has arrived, shaking his world to the foundation. With a trail of death leading right to his doorstep, he must join forces with the most unlikely of allies to save not only his existence, but also the lives of those he holds most dear…

Review:
From time to time, I write a review that turns out to be closer to an essay than any kind of mere critical analysis of a couple hundred page book. This will likely be one of those times.

You see, I don’t always take notes when I read. Usually I can depend on my memory to remember what I want to talk about. However, when I start finding a lot of those kinds of things (good or bad, but honestly usually bad) I start a notes page. It’s not usually a good sign for a book or it’s author…I took a lot of notes while reading this book.

I’ll start, though, by saying that the book does have an interesting premise. And I have to give some serious props to Ms. Knight for creating a heroine who truly wasn’t wimpy or limp-wristed in any manner. She was also a girl who knew what she wanted and went for it. I appreciate this a lot. It’s a little on the rare side and I’m always delighted when I stumble across it.

However, my praise pretty much ends there. To start with, the writing (the actual words chosen, writing) is far too wordy. I know that statement is a little vague, so here’s an example.

Saul was dashing back towards Lester before his better judgement could so much as utter a sound within his head. His rage took the better of him. He didn’t even feel silly running down the street with a bag of groceries in one arm, while intentions of pounding a drunken jerk’s face left him robbed of his good judgement.

Grammatically it’s a passable passage. But there are just too many words in it to allow it to flow smoothly. Over and over this wordiness kept me from really sinking into the story.

Neither was the situation improved by the stiff dialogue that used names far too frequently and felt very staccato; the repetitive use of certain words or phrases, ‘primal’ and ‘he could tell’ come immediately to mind; the giant info-dump at about 25%; or the odd chapter headings.

I don’t usually pay any attention to chapter numberings, but at some point I noticed that I was reading what I thought must be a Chapter 2 for the fourth time. I don’t know. I think each chapter had numerical sections, but it’s never explained so I was just basically confused at all times about it. That’s definitely not standard.

Even these things I probably would have looked over. But the ever-increasing list of contradictions was another matter entirely. Here are a few examples. Saul unlocks a door and when he relocks it, the reader is told it’s the first time the door has been locked in over 100 years. Saul says that he is 106 years old, but also that they (presumably he and his family) lived in Romania for 200 years. Jason’s father is said to have died 5 years earlier of a heart attack and then shows up. Kara gets out of the bathtub and goes to bed, only to be back in the bathtub in the next scene. (At least she’s consistent in liking a drink after her soak though–a beer the first time around and a glass on white wine the second.)

At another point, she shot at someone and is certain she hit them twice, a second person confirms a third hit too. Then later it’s referred to as she hit him once and the second person confirmed a second shot. The numbers aren’t adding up. Later still, she is sitting with a steaming cup of coffee only to get up to go get a bitter cup of coffee. That’s a lot of times for a reader to stop and scratch their head in confusion.

The book was also repetitive, but didn’t always quite line up with itself. For example, we’re told more than once about vampire physiology. At one point, we’re told they can stay out direct sunlight, but after a full day it would alter their DNA (or some such). Then in another passage we’re told much the same information except the vampires will get sick after an hour or so.

Typos, missed words and the occasional homophone can slip through even the most thorough editing regime. I understand that. But these sorts of inconsistencies (especially so many of them) are a fairly clear indication that the book simply wasn’t read and reread often enough or by enough people before going to press. I find this far more unforgivable, further, I’m as inclined to blame the publisher for this as the author.

There were also some basic ‘but, huh?’ kind of questions. For example, Saul can smell Nikki in a car as she pulls into the driveway (it’s long enough to just see the road at the end from the house). The baddie can smell Saul all throughout the woods and smell sex from outside the cabin. So, how come Saul never smelled that baddie who’s been lurking around his land for days?

Then there were the drastic and basically unfollowable leaps of logic. For example, Nikki sees a 20 year old, grainy black and white newspaper article that has a man that looks like Saul in it. Her first thought isn’t that there may be an older relative (brother, cousin, etc) but that it’s Saul and he hasn’t aged. Who thinks that FIRST?

Besides, she’d only ever seen him twice before. Once when she passed him in a grocery story months earlier (and she didn’t even know who he was until later) and then she’d recently caught a glimpse of him in a passing car window. It’s not like she’s intimately familiar with his appearance to start with.

There is also no real world-building or character development. Everything and everyone is fairly unidimensional. As an example, Saul is easily able to walk around with a human face, only transforming to his frightening vampire appearance when fighting.  But the baddie (who presumably also could remain in human guise, no reason is given that he couldn’t) never did. He spent all of his time wearing the transformed face of a monster…you know, so he’s easily identifiable as evil. He had no other character traits.

What made the matter worse was that the characters really needed some backstory and depth. None of Saul’s years were felt by the reader. He could have been any other man in his mid-thirties. Nikki, even more, she seemed to possess no fear. Seriously, she seemed to lack any sort of instinct for self-preservation and this oddity is never explained. Yeah, there’s a little hint that she’s supposed to have had a bit of a tragic past, but it doesn’t really explain her complete disregard for her own personal safety.

I really needed to know what made her that way, because lacking any explanatory information, I just have to assume she’s too dense to know better. And a lack of willingness or ability to keep oneself alive is my number one qualification for Too Stupid To Live. Plus, it’s 100% unbelievable in a character. Seeing her waltz into Saul’s home and basically offer herself up was laughably…just wrong basically.

I especially needed this character depth in the face of the fact that she’s a rebellious 19-year-old. 19! (Though, whom she and all her cliché piercing are rebelling against is a mystery, since her mom is dead and her dad is locked up for offences unrevealed.)

The story would have been far more believable if Nikki was older. At 19 she barely scrapes by as a YA heroine, but there is too much sex for this to be a YA or even an NA book. So I ask, why is she 19 or why is all the sex there? It didn’t contribute anything to the story. She’s also very forward and experienced for an unpopular 19-year-old, with just the one friend, who she’s pointedly not attracted to. All-in-all, I was left feeling that the genre was muddled and the book could have done with either choosing to go YA to match its heroine or ageing it’s heroine to match it’s parental advisory rating.

Honestly, I could go on. I could get into the nitty-gritty of little things like “only a few minutes after Nikki left Saul finally got out of bed.” Well, if it’s only been a few minutes it doesn’t rise to a finally type scenarios, now does it? But I won’t. I think I’ve made my points. This could have been a good read, but it just wasn’t. And I really hate having to say that kind of thing.