Tag Archives: Paranormal romance

Games of Fate

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

6 Replies

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

1 Reply

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.

Kindred

Book Review of Kindred, by Nicola Claire

2 Replies

KindredI grabbed Nicola Claire‘s PNR, Kindred from the Amazon free list. It’s still free. I suspect it’s perma-free.

Description from Goodreads:
Vampires, shape shifters, ghouls and magic users abound in a world where the Norms, (those humans without paranormal abilities) are ignorant of the creatures of the night and the supernatural species that live alongside them.

Lucinda Monk is a bank teller by day and a vampire hunter by night, but she wasn’t always a part of this world. Thrown into a heady mix of powerful people and sensual beings, she’s had to find her way practically blindfolded in amongst the creatures of the night. But she’s a capable and realistic kind of girl. Her motto: never show fear. But, there’s something different about Lucinda, something those creatures she hunts, want. In order to stay one step ahead of the enemy she has to let the enemy in. In all his compelling, seductive and delicious ways. Sleeping with the enemy has never meant so much before. But, can she trust him?

From the urban streets of the city, to the dark alleys and sinful bars that promise a wickedness a girl from the farm has never before been exposed to, Lucinda gets drawn irreversibly into the dark side of life. And if the Master of the City had his way, she would always be his. For eternity.

Review:
This is feeling like it’s gonna be a long one and may contain mild spoilers.

To start off with, this is very, VERY similar to the Anita Blake series. The heroine, Lucinda, is a vampire hunter instead of a necromancer who hunts vampires (Anita), but she has a very similar attitude. Lucinda’s best friend is a shifter, much like Richard is in the A. B. series and there are hints of a pretty powerful love triangle (One would hope not an actual trifecta. That really would be far too much to chalk up to coincidence), but it’s Michel’s similarities to Jean Claude that really raised my eyebrows.

Jean Claude (from A.B.) is an ill-defined master vampire, whatever that is. Michel (from Kindred) is an ill-defined master vampire, whatever that is. J.C. is the master of his city. Michel is the master of his city. Both are tall. Both have dark, longish hair and blue eyes. Both own/manage nightclubs. J.C. is 400-600 years old and powerful. Michel is 500 years old and powerful. Both are French (both from peasant families). Both are fashion conscious. Both were changed to vampires in their early thirties—J.C. at 30, Michel at 32. Both have voices that are described as having a physical sensory response in the heroine, strokes their skin and such. Both visit their heroines in her dreams. Both use a little French pet name for their romantic interest—J.C. ma petite and/or ma cherie, Michel ma douce and/or ma belle. They’re both arrogant and act/speak in very similar manners. Removed from context and set side by side, I literally wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other.

Given the similarities, I suppose I can say with complete confidence that if you liked Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter you’ll like Kindred. Personally, I found both of them fairly so-so. Not horrible, but I didn’t fall in love either. In the case of Kindred I found that I basically enjoyed it, but had some fairly serious complaints too.

To start with the positive, I like that Lucinda was an unapologeticly sexual woman, without any kind of fuss needing to be made about virginity or lack of experience. It just wasn’t mentioned at all and at 24 year old, it doesn’t need to be. I really appreciated that. So often, PNR heroines are made out to be chaste maidens and the reader has to sit through endless scenes of mental agony over the consequences of having sex. I liked that this book skipped all that. She had sex, but there wasn’t the need to dramatise it.

I also liked that the basic vampire psyche was fairly well thought out and thoroughly explained. It really gave the reader a good understanding of their actions, especially when dealing with instinctual responses to things.

Most of the time, I also liked Lucinda and Michel. Lucinda was fairly sharp and truly brave and Michel could be really sexy sometimes. I didn’t always like them though. Lucinda seemed to constantly be crying over some little thing or another. It made her seem weak. And Michel was a jackass as often as he was a sweetheart.

Lastly, I liked that the book was set in Auckland, New Zealand. The US, followed by the UK are the settings for the vast majority of the genre. It was refreshing to find myself somewhere new, with new terminology, cultural norms, etc.

Next, to move on to things that irritated me; I’ll start with the minor stuff. The whole vampire/vampire hunter partnership made no sense to me. Michel spoke of it as if the vampires and the hunters had come to an agreement, or an ‘accord’ probably, and agreed to it. But the symptoms and consequences are biological. So how does that work then?

What’s more, if it is all based on some past agreement between the species, even one that later somehow became engrained in the biology of hunters and vampires, how can a hunter be forced into it? How, exactly, the bonding takes place was never fully explained. There was a social ceremony but it wasn’t clear which aspect of it actual initiates the binding. I was left confused about one of the most important aspects of the plot. 

Similarly, the whole dream walking made little sense either. She could physically, but invisibly, appear elsewhere with tools she didn’t have with her where her physical body was and actually affect physical reality. Seems unlikely, but more importantly how could that happen?

Next, and I can’t believe I’m saying this; it’s completely opposite of what I’m usually harping on about—books that end without conclusions—but IMO this book should have ended at about 45% and the remaining 50% been a separate book. (The last 5% is bonus material.)

There is a fairly dramatic event around that time that then requires the introduction of a whole new threat (plot) and reads as a separate, but related novel. There are even the occasional recap passages one finds in sequels to remind them of what happened in previous books. The shift felt abrupt. I might not even mention it if this was a stand-alone book. I would just assume the author was trying to keep the whole story in one text and appreciate the effort. But there are 7 subsequent books in the Kindred series, so why not just break it up and make it a 9 book series instead?

Lastly, for the small irritants, there are a series of deus ex machina events. These always annoy me. She repeatedly saves the day, or at least the lives in a situation, by pulling some unknown ultra-power out of her back pocket without knowing how or even that she was capable. These powers weren’t supposed to have manifested yet, but the miraculously do whenever she needs them. That always strikes me as weak.

Now, to move on to the (admittedly vague) major thing that made me grind my teeth. Lucinda was demonstrably powerless. Sure she pulled out the superpowers when need be, but I’m speaking of social and interpersonal power, not magic or fighting skill power.

For all the times she went on and on about equality, her wants, needs and desires were walked over repeatedly. Even her own emotions were manipulated by a variety of male characters. Often the reader would be told something along the lines of, Lucinda didn’t want to feel this way or reciprocate the lust, but her hands/mind/mouth/etc had a mind of their own. It was as if she had no defence against the men’s overpowering presence or that as a woman she had no control over her own sexual responses. God, women have been shoved in that box for generations and I still hate it.

And this manipulation wasn’t just done with vampire super mind control (you know glaze, glamour, rolled mind, etc) but by the fact that she was repeatedly distracted from justifiable anger by giving in to sexual desire when angry, or even worse regretted and cried, then apologised for her own feelings or appropriate retaliation for offences. Why should she have to do this? Men in this book were allowed to get angry, stay angry and react in anger. Lucinda was NEVER allowed this response.

Women just aren’t supposed to do that…not good girls anyway. We’ve all heard some version of it, ‘suck it up honey let the men handle it. They obviously know better than you, even if it makes you want to swallow your own teeth.’

The message became obviously one of secondary status. The problem is that it was written as if to suggest she wasn’t, but actions speak louder than words, as they say, and Lucinda was not the one able to cause change in herself or others, she was only the recipient of it and she then wasn’t even allowed to be angry about it.

As an example, Michel denied her demand to see Rick (her best friend). Michel placed his own image, not even his or her wellbeing, but his image, above her very clearly expressed desire. He did not apologise for this and when she briefly became angry at him a mere act of impressive skill on his part caused her to not only lose her anger, but then become the cliché nurturing woman who set aside her own desire to instead support on his moral journey. She never did get to see Rick and he never had to face putting her wants secondary.

A second example (one that showed up more than once), she wanted to join a fight. He locked her away, despite her protest to prevent this. Circumstances always progressed such that she never remained angry at this and he never had to alter his behaviour.

Even a blatant physical and nearly fatal attack (Michel against Lucinda, because she smelled of another) is dismissed because it’s vampire nature. When Lucinda briefly retaliated (it might be better stated as fought back), she stopped when he asked, despite the fact that her similar pleas hadn’t even paused his attack. Then she cried, apologised and felt bad for her actions. Did Michel? Nope, not all. He’s allowed his anger and reactions to it. Lucinda wasn’t…at all.

That’s like asking a woman to apologise for hitting a man back, without asking the man to apologise for hitting her first, because men (and not women) are, by their very nature, violent creatures. Proverbial show of hands, anyone here find that an acceptable scenario? Because all I did was swap the word vampire for man. That’s exactly how it’s presented in the book, more than once even.

We can pretend she was an equal to Michel, but she was shown to be less able to control herself, her emotions, her environment and her mate than he was.  I hate to read more into this than is there, and I’m not claiming the author wrote it this way on purpose. Instead, and in a way worse, I think it’s a subconscious mimicking of the basic male hegemony. That’s what makes it so pervasive. It’s either unseen or seen as the natural way of things. Even a female author, who likely thought she was crafting a strong, in control, female lead instead wrote a classically second-class little woman. I hate that!

The writing itself was pretty good. The book could do with a little more editing. There are a few typos, it can occasionally be difficult to tell who is speaking and it’s occasionally repetitive. So, final word…I had some major gripes, which I’ll admit as many people as not will role their eyes at, but it was still an amusing read. There was a decent amount of humour and some pretty good sex scenes.