Tag Archives: PNR

Shadow Love Stalkers

Book Review of Claudy Conn’s Shadow Love: Stalkers (Shadow Vampires, #1)

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Shadow LoveQuite some time ago, I grabbed a copy of Claudy Conn‘s Shadow Love: Stalkers (Shadow Vampires, #1) from the KDP free list.

Description from Goodreads:
What do you do when your father wants to turn you into a vampire and the man who offers you protection has his own, dark agenda?

Shawna Rawley has no choice but to run. Pentim Rawley, one of the most evil vampires who has ever lived, has just discovered that she is his daughter. Now he’s obsessed with finding and turning her. She doesn’t want Pentim to find the people she loves and use them to get to her. She doesn’t want him to find and turn her. She has only one ace up her sleeve. The human in her may be at risk, but in addition to being half vamp, Shawna is also a white witch!

Chad MacFare has an offer for Shawna he thinks she can’t afford to refuse: he’ll protect her from Pentim and his minions. But Shawna doesn’t trust the sexy immortal. She knows he has his own agenda-he wants to kill her father, and he wants to set her up as bait…

Review:
This book was OK. I thought it started off quite rough, but did eventually smooth itself out. I enjoyed the H & h (though I did want to slap Shawna on more than one occasion). Oddly, my favourite character was Dammon. He was just a side character (and apparently the H of the next book in the series), but I quite enjoyed his calm demeanour.

Though I generally enjoyed the book, I am not without complaints. I hate making this criticism, because I think it is horribly over used, but a lot of the book is told instead of shown. I think a full 10% goes by in the beginning before the reader gets a single sentence of dialogue that isn’t in someone’s memory. The reader is also told repeatedly how skilled Shawna is, but we don’t really see her fight or defend herself at all. We’re also treated to quite a lot of internal dialogue as both Shawna and Chad tell themselves how sexy the other is.

Though I imagine it comes into play in future books I also didn’t see the importance of the Dracula connection. It is set up in the prologue and he shows up once in the book, but doesn’t seem to have an active role in the plot. I was left wondering, ‘what’s that all about?’

I also felt that the two dangers to Shawna didn’t seem to line up. She’s supposed to be running for her father and that’s the basic framework of the story, but a good 75% of the book goes by before there is any real threat present to her by him. Most of the action centres around a demon she randomly encounters when she moves to Scotland (and amazingly and coincidentally moves in next door to Chad). This demon has nothing to do with the whole father situation and really felt very out of left field to me.

I also never understood Chad’s attitude toward Shawna. If you were meeting a woman for the first time (and all subsequent encounters with her) and needed to convince her to trust you to protect her while she endangered herself for the greater good, would you’re chosen method be antagonism and smug arrogance? He keeps trying to get her agree to his dangerous plan, but never gives her a straight answer to anything and purposefully goads her at every turn. Yes, it made for some amusing verbal sparing, but compromised his own goal repeatedly.

I will happily say this isn’t a case of insta-love. At least not on Shawna’s part. It is however a stunning example of sex = love. Shawna doesn’t trust Chad and he only admits to lusting after her. Then they have sex and voila, sudden boundless, eternal love exists. I got a little whiplash I think.

Then, after 250+ pages of supposedly running from her sociopath father (that we almost never see) the whole book wraps up in about a page and a half. The climax was a little underwhelming I have to admit. Despite all of the above, I did enjoy most of the book. It took a little while for me to settle into the story. But once I did it rolled along well enough and it presented an interesting new birth of vampires myth.

Craved

Book Review of Stephanie Nelson’s Craved (Gwen Sparks #1)

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CravedI downloaded a copy of Craved, by Stephanie Nelson, from the Amazon KDP list.

Description from Goodreads:
Gwen Sparks just wants to live a peaceful life in the supernatural town of Flora, but from the moment she read about the first murdered witch, all hope of peace was abandoned. Possessing the rare ability to read the memories of dead, she volunteers to help catch the culprit behind the string of drained witches. Gwen has to team up with the one man who broke her heart, deal with a ghost who pulls her into the deathly realm at will, and a fight off the advances of sexy but frustrating vampire who not only craves what runs through her veins—he wants her heart.

Review:
I think the most I can say for this one is ‘Meh.’ I didn’t hate it, but I wasn’t really all that impressed either. I was expecting to like it too, since it has so many great reviews. But I found myself irritated and confused more often than not.

To begin with, Gwen got on my nerves from the very first page. Her whole ‘he broke my heart’ spiel was like a broken record. Then when it came out that this relationship that ended, broke her heart and left her so bereft she was unable/unwilling to open herself and love again had only lasted 8 months, I just pretty much said a mental ‘pishaw.’ Overreaction anyone?

Then there was the fact that Nelson set up magical rules, but didn’t seem to follow them. Why don’t Gwen and Aiden have a blood bond if Gwen’s same interactions with Ian resulted in one? How did removing Gwen’s magic from Aiden break his addiction if he was addicted before he encountered her magic to begin with? If Gwen had certain magical abilities, how come she occasionally managed to do things she shouldn’t have been able to do? I realise some of this was the development of a new talent, but why was it suddenly popping up?

Then there was the whole premise of witches’ blood being addictive. I have a really, really hard time figuring out how this small fact has remained unknown for all eternity. Seems to me that at some point some vampire would have gotten his/her hand on a witch and gone ‘oh yeah, that’s some good stuff right there.’ So the whole plot of this ‘new drug’ seemed implausible at best.

Then there were the pitiful sex scenes. They were all really, really rushed–some no more than two or three paragraphs and there was very little detail…or for-play. Which was apparently OK because Gwen can, enviably, orgasm at the drop of a hat. (Not to mention the characters odd tendency to hop to it while in otherwise dangerous situations.)

I noticed a few editorial errors and the book was in first person, which I generally dislike. But I admit that the writing was pretty good. And though Aiden often appeared weak, I did really like how much he loved Gwen. Many of the issues I’ve highlighted as annoyances for me might not irk other readers. So, this might just be a case of the right reader for the book.

Blood Red

Book Review of Sharon Page’s Erotic Vampire Novel, Blood Red

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Blood RedI grabbed a practically new (maybe even new) paperback copy of this book at the secondhand shop.

Description from Goodreads:
Take a bite of desire…

Althea Yates is a vampire hunter, skilled with the crossbow and the stake. But she knows nothing of a man’s touch—or how to control the unladylike dreams that haunt her sleep. That is when they come, two men of unearthly beauty who ravish her in sweet carnal games, taking her to the precipice of exquisite desire and unimaginable erotic pleasure. It is scandalous. Forbidden. Unholy. For her lovers are not men, but vampires—the very beasts she and her father have sworn to destroy.

It is only a dream…until the elegant carriage arrives at the inn, drawn by four black horses. Until Yannick de Wynter, Earl of Brookshire, alights, silver-eyed, determined, and hungry for something she cannot name. And suddenly, Althea is no longer certain whether she has had a dream… or a dangerously erotic premonition…

Review:
I’m gonna use a star rating here and go with three stars for this book. But that needs to be understood as three stars on the erotica rating scale. I’m not really suggesting there is a whole different grading system for erotica, but we all know to expect less plotting, character development and world-building from an erotica than from, say, literary fiction. So a three star erotica is still going to have less of all of the above and readers accept that as par for the course.

I can sum this book up in seven short words: sex, sex, sex,sex, and more sex. Yep, that’s about it. I realise I can’t reasonable complain about too much sex in an erotica and I’m not. But even by erotic standards the plot was pretty flimsy for a full length book. A lot was left unexplained, such as exactly what special skills Bastien had that was supposed to help him battle Zayan or what exactly vampire were. Somehow demons and Lucifer came into play and I never really figured out how.

So, you’re doing the math in your head, aren’t you? There wasn’t a lot of plot, but the book is 300 pages long. Wow, there really must have been a lot of sex, you think. Yep, and surprisingly the author manages to put enough variety in to keep it from getting too stale. (I admit that by the end I was ready to finish, but I never quite reached the ‘Oh, bloody hell, not another one’ stage.) There is M/F sex, M/M sex, F/F sex, M/F/M sex, a M/M/F/M/M/M orgy, and even a little light bondage, S&M and breeding thrown it. Having said that, some of it just felt a little ridiculous–as if Ms. Page was trying desperately to create situations to add something more. The orgy especially felt this way. You see it coming a mile away, and then just watch it unfold with a mental eye roll and move on.

For all the forced variety there was also a certain innocence to the book. Maybe it’s because it is a couple years old and the current publishing rage is questionable consensuality, forced seduction, heavy BDSM, dominate men and simpering submissive women. I really appreciated that every sex scene in this book is clearly consensual. Althea (what the hell kind of name is that BTW) may be a virgin when she meets Yannick, but she takes to sex with enthusiasm. I did begin to wonder just how much she could experience before she lost that same innocence that the twins love so much, but it’s hardly a point worth thinking too deeply about.

I could have done without the sappy, happy ending. But, all-in-all for a full length erotic novel it wasn’t too darned bad.