Tag Archives: paranormal

Review In a Badger Way, by Shelly Laurenston

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I borrowed a copy of Shelly Laurenston‘s In a Badger Way from the local library.

Description from Goodreads:

Petite, kind, brilliant, and young, Stevie is nothing like the usual women bodyguard Shen Li is interested in. Even more surprising, the youngest of the lethal, ball-busting, and beautiful MacKilligan sisters is terrified of bears. But she’s not terrified of pandas. She loves pandas. 

Which means that whether Shen wants her to or not, she simply won’t stop cuddling him. He isn’t some stuffed Giant Panda, ya know! He is a Giant Panda shifter. He deserves respect and personal space. Something that little hybrid is completely ignoring.

But Stevie has a way of finding trouble. Like going undercover to take down a scientist experimenting on other shifters. For what, Shen doesn’t want to know, but they’d better find out. And fast. Stevie might be the least violent of the honey badger sisters, but she’s the most dangerous to Shen’s peace of mind. Because she has absolutely no idea how much trouble they’re in . . . or just how damn adorable she is.

Review:

This was really just horrible: juvenile, stupid and basically plotless. I could give it credit for being grammatically sound and edited, but I had to force myself to finish it. So, I’m not going to encourage this puerile idiocy. There were far too many jokes about farting on people, dog shits and releasing anal glands. I want to ask if the author thinks her audience is 12; but the book has lots of good reviews. So, someone somewhere likes it. Just not me. 

I admit I got the occasional chuckle, and I suspect a lot of what made me grit my teeth at the ludicrously over the top antics of this group was probably also meant to be funny. But I just wanted to ask if no one in Laurenston’s professional life is able to reign her in just a little bit. The petite woman doesn’t just shift into a large tiger/honey badger. No, she shifts into a TWO TON animal. No one is just smart or talented, everyone is a GENIUS or a PRODIGY. Stevie doesn’t just have anxiety, she has a crippling phobia of a certain sort of shifter (that doesn’t even make sense in context). There is no spark between the H & h. She just decides they are together and he spends the whole book saying they’re not, until they have sex and then he stops and they’re together. 

I love a bit of humor in my PNR. I abhor a slapstick collection of too-dramatic-to-believe schticks. AND THAT’S ALL THIS BOOK IS.

Bless Your Heart

Book Review of Bless Your Heart (Fairy Tales of a Trailer Park Queen #1), by Kimbra Swain

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I purchased an e-copy of Kimbra Swain‘s Bless Your Heart.

Description from Goodreads:

Scorned by her family. Banished by her kind. Hunted by zealots. 

Where does an exiled Fairy Queen hide? 

A remote mountain cabin, the seedy underbelly of a metropolis, or an uninhabited island. All would be good choices, however, after hundreds of years on the run, the daughter of Oberon, King of the Wild Fairies, signs a binding contract with the zealots that hunt her. In exchange, they allow her to settle down in the last place anyone would look for fairy royalty. 

Adopting the name Grace Ann Bryant, the Queen buys a double-wide and moves into a trailer park in the one-horse town of Shady Grove, Alabama. Her contract requires her to lend aid to the local sheriff, Dylan Riggs, when supernatural problems arise. 

But when two children go missing, the humans point to the trailer park queen helping the sheriff, and the zealots point at the exiled fairy. Grace must decide whether to fight for her innocence or break her contract returning to life on the run. 

Bless Your Heart is a Southern Urban Fantasy that will make you laugh, cry, and laugh until you cry, as Grace wrestles with the dark fairy inside herself and starts to see that she’s more than just trailer trash.

Review:

This was a cute story let down in the execution. It really needs another copy editing pass, to catch misplaced commas, missing words and homophones and such. Plus, someone really needs to sit the author down and discuss the fact that people DON’T SAY NAMES IN EVERY CONVERSATION. It’s one of my biggest dialogue pet peeves. It’s redundant and annoying, and Swain is particularly bad about it. I almost DNFed the book pretty early on honestly, because of it. 

Beyond that, I didn’t believe the twist at the end (in the church). Grace would have to be exceedingly oblivious, moving into Too Stupid To Live territory, to really not have noticed ANYTHING until the big reveal. And could/would the town really have kept that secret so well? Plus, keeping the secret from her doesn’t even make sense. 

All in all, I did actually like the characters and I appreciated the male/female platonic friendship. But beyond that, the book didn’t live up to what it could have been.

Drawing Dead

Book Review of Drawing Dead (Dana McIntyre Must Die #1), by S.M. Reine

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I picked up a freebie copy of Drawing Dead, by SM Reine from Amazon.

Description:

The vampire slayer is turning into a vampire? Over her dead body. 

Dana McIntyre has been bitten by a master vampire. She’s infected with the venom. And after killing hundreds of vampires to keep Las Vegas safe, she’d rather die than turn. 

There might be a cure. But the only way to get it is through Nissa Royal, a vampire with close ties to the masters of Las Vegas. Nissa is dangerous — too dangerous to be allowed to live, much less work alongside. 

But if Dana dies, vampires win Vegas. If she doesn’t die, she becomes one of the bloodless. The cure’s her only chance. In this deadly game of hold ’em, Dana’s drawing dead, and whatever happens next, there’s no changing her losing hand. Dana only knows one thing: If she’s going down, she’s taking as many vampires as possible on her way out… 

Review:

I was pretty disappointed in this book. But largely because I went in with really high hopes. I bought it because the heroine is a fat, butch lesbian and how often do they get to be the heroes in a story…an action hero no less? It wasn’t the diversity aspect of the story that let me down though. Dana is just as the cover suggests (and YES she even got to be fat and butch on the cover!). She’s married to a butch-ish woman. So, Reine didn’t even play into the ‘one of them has to be femme’ trap. I love that. The police chief is a ball-busting trans woman, and it’s engaged in the book, not just dropped in as a token. And not all the other characters are straight, white, cis, etc. So, I’m not disappointed to have bought a book that includes a lot of things I wish more books incorporated (Positively represented fat women on book covers? Hell yes, more!).

Unfortunately, what let me down was that Dana is so darned unlikeable. She’s rude and vile and dismissive of people who care for her. I don’t mean that as any sort of ‘proper women don’t act that way.’ Heck yes, give me more cursing, belching, sarcastic women. I mean it in the sense that she’s almost cruel to a wife that loves her, prioritizing her own wishes over heartfelt pleas. She snarks off to people who are actively trying to help her, as if they are being unreasonable, etc. 

What’s more, Dana is basically suicidal for a large part of this book, which means she runs head-long into battles with so little regard for her own life that it felt too much like a miracle that she continued to survive. Heroes/heroines that are so perfect in battle that they never even consider fear is are flat and uninteresting, IMO. 

All in all, Reine’s writing is fine. And despite there being 40 books in this universe (as of the publication of Drawing Dead, the book is readable as a standalone. But I wouldn’t go so far as to claim you don’t feel the lack of those other books. There were several decisions important in this book that are made based on the events of other books, and you notice.