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Book Review: Cruel Shadows, by Harper A. Brooks

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I picked up a freebie copy of Harper A. Brooks‘ Cruel Shadows through Amazon.

cruel shadows coverI’m caught in the shadows…
…and the shadows want to play.

I thought I’d dreamed up the shadow realm and the place I called Dark Castle.

But it’s very real. And he’s still here.

My prince, my savior, my captor…

The monster in my bed.

But this time, he’s not alone.

I must escape, but first, my prince and his shadow men want me to fulfill their demands.

All of them.

The longer I stay, the harder it is to resist their dark promises, their insatiable hunger. Because, while these monsters’ smiles are cruel, their touches are the most delicious torture.

But they aren’t the only threat in this world. The darkness that wanted me before has found me again, and like my Shadow Prince, it’s ready to claim me as its own…forever.

my review

This was a pretty big “meh” for me. It held my attention for about half the book, and then it lost me to boredom. I only finished it to finish it. The writing is fine. There’s a little inconsistency to it, but it’s perfectly readable. The characters could be interesting if they weren’t just cardboard cut-outs. The world could be intriguing if it were actually developed. The plot might have been fun if it actually materialized before the ~85% mark.

Let me be clear here that I’m not actually complaining about the lack of plot. I know what kind of book I picked up. But, for a book this length, I needed something to make me care about the characters and all the sex they were having. I don’t even necessarily need to like them, but I need to care. And that’s where Cruel Shadows fails. I didn’t care. No one grabbed my attention. Nothing kept me interested. All in all, like I said, “Meh.” It’s a thing I read and will quickly forget.

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Book Review: Her Irish Treasures, by Joely Sue Burkhart

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I picked up a freebie copy of Joely Sue Burkhart‘s Her Irish Treasures from Amazon. It’s a compilation of Shamrocked, Leprechauned, and Evil Eyed.

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After I stumble into an Irish bar called Shamrocked, my life will never be the same.

I may have celebrated my divorce a little too hard because I wake up in bed with a gargoyle statue. It takes a lot of coffee and my best friend’s interrogation to recall exactly what happened after I stumbled into an Irish bar. The statue has to be cursed because it keeps moving by itself, and I start dreaming of a man.

Doran. He’s been trapped in stone and darkness for centuries. He tells me I’m the treasurekeeper, and I need to find his friends, the other three legendary Irish treasures: the Spear of Lug, the Sword of Light, and the Cauldron of the Dagda. My only clue to go on is the bar, Shamrocked, but it’s not on any map of Kansas City. If I can find it again… maybe the gargoyle will finally let me sleep in peace.

my review

This review contains a spoiler.

Yawn. That’s my final verdict on this series. The writing is perfectly competent, and I liked the characters well enough, even if their character archetypes are pretty ham-handed. But there isn’t anything special here. Well, except for the heroine, who is just the specialist Special to ever special. As the books went on and more of her mystery was revealed, she progressively became more and more of a Mary Sue. By the end, she was made out to be so perfect and so worshiped that I felt like I should dislike her on principle, just to balance the scales.

But here’s my biggest complaint (after just boredom, by the end). The author denies the reader the most important parts of the plot. The book starts with the heroine waking up with a gargoyle statue in her bed. By chapter two, she’s already well into the mania caused by the statue talking to her. The reader is left out of all this tension building and just told this has been going on for days. Even all the loves are instant (all of them), so you don’t see any build-up there either.

Similarly (and much, much worse), the book ends the same way. She does the big important thing that the whole book has been building up to, passing out in the process (dies, really, and comes back, but same difference). When she wakes up, she asks if they won and is told that she did succeed and everyone lives happily ever after.

her irish treasure photo560 pages trying to best the villain (who was super obvious, btw), and the author chose not to show his defeat or the Treaures’ endings. Honestly, I’m not even sure if the villain was killed or if the heroine merely returned magic to the worlds. Like, I’m legitimately not even sure what winning constitutes in this situation BECAUSE I WAS NOT SHOWN and barely told. To say it was anticlimactic is a complete understatement.

All in all, if you like a Mary Sue, this is a good series for you. But I found it underwhelming, on the whole.

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Book Review: Steele’s Salvation, by Leeah Taylor

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I picked up a copy of Steele’s Salvation (by Leeah Taylor) as an Amazon freebie.

Hi, I’m Lilith Boudreaux and I am a super magnet for trouble.

New regent to my mother’s coven? I’m the girl.

Secretly more than meets the eye? Yep, that’s me.

The Vampire Conclaves long awaited Queen? Crap… that’s trouble.

I came home to take my mother’s place as regent to the Blood Crescent coven following her death. How hard can it be to smile, nod, and lead the witches of Rivercrest?

Should be easy, right?

If easy is finding out I’m also mate and Queen to the Greystone brothers—the most powerful vampires in Rivercrest—then this will be a piece of cake. There’s just a teensy little law forbidding me, a witch, from consorting with vampires. Oh, and it’s punishable by death.

The secrets I keep will suffocate me.

The pressure to be something I’m not will crush me.

My sanity hangs by a string.

And my only salvation may very well be my demise —Steele Greystone.

my review

OK, look, I’m going to go ahead and acknowledge that I know some things that I hate in a book are the same that others will love (and vice versa). But I don’t feel like giving this fact a lot of space in my review. So, I’m going to go ahead and write my review in the declarative, with the overarching caveat that it’s my opinion. I know others will feel differently, and that’s ok. No one needs to come argue with me if they love the very things I hate. You do you, Boo.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. Honestly, for the first 1/3 or so, I thought I was going to love it. The blurb starts with, “I came home to take my mother’s place as regent to the Blood Crescent coven following her death. How hard can it be to…lead the witches of Rivercrest?” I was down for it.

Let me now give you a quote from the last paragraph of the book. (And, yeah, obviously, it’s going to be a spoiler.) “I came as the Blood Crescent coven’s Regent, only to become the vampire Conclave’s queen but really, I became a mate, wife, and mother.” Let me just pry my eyeballs out of the back of my skull from where I rolled them so damned hard.

Let me also lay this out. I was promised a woman large and in charge, with power and authority in her own right. What I was given was yet another patriarchal fairytale of a woman who would rather give up all of her own power, authority, ambition, and success in order to play second fiddle to her man (men, in this case). Because obviously, being someone else’s wife and mother is going to bring her more satisfaction and joy than setting and achieving goals of her own.

And let me be really clear. It’s not being a wife or having children that are at issue here. It’s the fact that women in such books always have to give up everything else. The message is very clear about how wrong she is for wanting anything else. Under her man, bearing his children was the only true and proper place for her all along. She just needed whatever obstacle the plot provides her to overcome in order to learn this truth. That’s the lesson of such plots.

Why must women always give up their own lives to find happiness with men? Why, exactly, can’t women be socially powerful and have a family/children? I mean, men get to do it. All. The. Time. In fact, all three of her mates do it in this very book. What’s more, they not only get their family and keep their power, they gain by virtue of tying themselves to a queen. (And let’s be clear, she is their queen. The importance of the role is tied to them, not the administrative duties or social position.) Have women really not had enough of this exact same message yet? I know I’m beyond sick of it.

I am not only just exhausted with being endlessly force-fed the idea that the only true place for a woman (the only place she can really find happiness) is popping babies out at the behest of men, but I just find the lack of imagination almost insulting. This story has been written and written and written and written and written and written. And frankly, it doesn’t even make a lot of sense to me in the why-choose genre. If I wanted to bask in stereotypically traditional family gender roles, I sure as hell wouldn’t be picking up a polyamorous vampire romance book. Get out of here with that shit.

steele's salvation photoI’ll grant that the writing is fine, the dialogue especially. But the editing does start to deteriorate past the halfway mark. And I very much appreciated that, since we got the men’s internal dialogue, we were privy to a lot of their fears and vulnerabilities.

I guess if you will like this book comes down to if you like this sort of plot. I just really, really don’t. And I feel like this book promised me so much more, only to then serve up the least imaginative drivel Western (misogynistic) society has to offer.

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