Tag Archives: romance

Think of England

Book Review of Think of England, by K. J. Charles

Think of EnglandI bought a copy of Think of England, by K. J. Charles.

Description from Goodreads:
Lie back and think of England…

England, 1904. Two years ago, Captain Archie Curtis lost his friends, fingers, and future to a terrible military accident. Alone, purposeless and angry, Curtis is determined to discover if he and his comrades were the victims of fate, or of sabotage.

Curtis’s search takes him to an isolated, ultra-modern country house, where he meets and instantly clashes with fellow guest Daniel da Silva. Effete, decadent, foreign, and all-too-obviously queer, the sophisticated poet is everything the straightforward British officer fears and distrusts.

As events unfold, Curtis realizes that Daniel has his own secret intentions. And there’s something else they share—a mounting sexual tension that leaves Curtis reeling.

As the house party’s elegant facade cracks to reveal treachery, blackmail and murder, Curtis finds himself needing clever, dark-eyed Daniel as he has never needed a man before…

Review:
Yep, you can add one more to the K.J. Charles fan list. I adored this. I liked that you really felt the time it was set in. Yes, it was unpleasant to read the slurs and class snobbery, but it also really brought home that THIS IS NOT THE 21ST CENTURY. And it was all very, very English; with the language and the food and the folly and the accepted Summer House rules. All very enjoyable.

I also very much enjoyed Archie and Daniel; Archie’s straight forward, what he would call unimaginative honesty with himself and those around him, Daniel’s masks and attitude and sharp tongue. I liked that Archie was just figuring a lot of stuff out about himself for the first time and refused to run from it. I loved the internal debates about if there is a difference between tossing a mate off and actually preferring men and what that means for an individual. (Sorry the whole ‘everyone does it in school/college/army’ trope is a little bit of a kink for me, I think. I ALWAYS wonder if it’s true and if so, what the etiquette around that would be.) I loved the subversion of the idea of prim, sexually repressed Brits of the time.

The writing is sharp and well edited (no surprise there) and it wraps up nicely in a stand-alone story.

Note: There happens to also be a free short story that follows the last chapter of the book. It can be found here.

fever blood moon

Book Review of Fever (Blood Moon Rising #1), by Lola Taylor

FeverFever: Blood Moon Rising, by Lola Taylor, is a perma-freebie on Amazon. That’s where I picked my copy up. I read it as the 6th book in my Blood Mood Reading Challenge.

Description from Goodreads:
When the Blood Moon rises, the wolves come out to play… and find their mates. 

Danica has about given up on love. In a last-ditch attempt at finding “the one,” she agrees to a blind date through an online dating service. But instead of finding roses and romance, she finds someone intent on killing her. That is, until the mysterious, brooding Gage shows up to save her…. 

Gage is running out of time to find a mate. If the Blood Moon sets before he can find her, he’ll lose the rank of packmaster – and the peace within the pack – he’s worked so hard to obtain. When he saves a luscious blonde in the parking lot, he has no idea she is his mate – until he Marks her with his touch. 

Determined to keep her safe at any cost, Gage whisks Danica away into a hidden world full of lust, unlikely love, and treachery. Someone’s put a hit on his mate, and he’s hell-bent on finding out who, all while the Blood Moon looms closer, threatening to destroy his chances at true love forever. That is, if something – or someone – doesn’t kill the woman he’s falling for first.

Review:
*Sigh* It wasn’t Baaad. It just wasn’t very good either. Nothing and no-one had any depth or development. It was schmaltzy to the nth degree. The same gimmick (like her refusal to believe she wasn’t dreaming or the interrupted sex) was played over and over. Dangers popped up and disappeared without any true tension. In fact, nothing in the whole book had any kind of edge to it. Gage was the most beta alpha I’ve ever read (he did not inspire confidence) and Danica was just annoying and useless. This is basically just a collection of various werewolf tropes strung together with nothing to bolster it up or tie it together. I did like the brother Nik and some of the dialogue is funny, but all in all, not a real winner for me.

Blood Moon

Book Review of Blood Moon, by Aimee Ash

Blood Moon Aimee AshI picked up a copy of Blood Moon, by Aimee Ash, from Amazon. It was free at the time.

Description from Goodreads:
Haidee had a bright future ahead of her, that was until she was viciously attacked in the Never North forest. With a single breath of life left in her lungs she is found by a strikingly gorgeous man. With hope in her heart that this mysterious stranger will save her life, she is dumbfounded when she sees his fangs appear. With Haidee buried alive in the forest she fights for freedom, but when the sun burns her skin she fears that her worst thought is true. She has been turned into a vampire. But soon she will realize that she is no ordinary vampire, she is the chosen one and is sent on a mission by her mistress to kill the leader of the only werewolf pack left in existence. But as she finds herself distracted on her journey the fate of everyone’s lives soon rests in the palm of her hands.

Review:
Wow, that was shockingly bad. The book starts out with this TSTL move on the main character’s part.

Following my usual trail, just as I’d done many times before, my basket gently swayed comfortably on my arm. While I walked, I pictured just how beautiful my sisters would look with mauve bellflower weaved through their braids. Drifting into a daydream, I soon found that I’d lost my bearings and had roamed much further into the forest than I’d intended.

In one short paragraph, the author manages to tell us the girl knows her way, but then gets her lost. What’s more, how stupid does she have to be to wander far past the route she’s supposed to KNOW and end up in a part of the forest called the Never North that she and everyone else is afraid of?

The book had a serious case of, oh-so-special for no apparent reason. Haidee was apparently beautiful, smart, strong, alluring, her blood was sweeter than anyone else, and everyone desires her. She was given power and position for no reason and with no effort. She was too perfect.

The book then just basically turns into a list of fed from/had sex with this person and that person and that one too, interspersed with small snippets of story. She went from virgin to having sex several times a day with no time in between. Maybe this was supposed to be erotica. I say maybe because I’m really not sure. It isn’t, but the character had enough sex for it to be. Until she fell in love with a man she literally hadn’t even had a conversation with.

There were also all sorts of oddities, like her being buried overnight to become a vampire, but never needing to bath afterwards. There also wasn’t a point in which it could have happened and the author simply not mentioned it. Or up until 53% the setting was women in long dresses and cloaks, horses, bows/arrows, candles, and prudish women in teashops. I understandably assumed it was a historical setting. Then, suddenly, Haidee’s talking about her car running our of gas and getting a ride from someone. I honestly believe the author wrote it as a historical and then lost track of the story. That’s how it felt!

The whole thing was full amateurish writing. The narrator’s voice damn near killed me. The writing makes me think the author is very young, though I don’t know if that’s true.

There was an overuse and often inappropriate use of adverbs (other words too, but the adverbs really stood out). Plus, everything seemed to be pulsating, throbbing or pounding. Beyond that, the grammar was just a mess in general. Haidee’s name was used too often in conversations. There was no character development, in fact a large number of them never even speak. They were just there to highlight Haidee’s perfect, desirable self.

I’ll be honest. If I hadn’t been reading this for a challenge, I wouldn’t have finished it. I wouldn’t even have made 20%. It was quite frankly horrible. I’m not even going to pull that punch. That had to be the longest 98 pages of my life. I’d never been so happy to have an ebook end at the 80% mark!