Tag Archives: romance

TourBanner_Weep, Woman, Weep

Book Review: Weep, Woman, Weep – by Maria DeBlassie

4 Replies

I agreed to review Maria DeBlassie‘s Weep, Woman, Weep as part of its Goddess Fish Promotions Book Tour. The book has also previously been featured over on Sadie’s Spotlight. So, you can nip on over there for author information and an excerpt.

BookCover_WeepWomanWeep

The women of Sueño, New Mexico don’t know how to live a life without sorrows. That’s La Llorona’s doing. She roams the waterways looking for the next generation of girls to baptize, filling them with more tears than any woman should have to hold. And there’s not much they can do about the Weeping Woman except to avoid walking along the riverbank at night and to try to keep their sadness in check. That’s what attracts her to them: the pain and heartache that gets passed down from one generation of women to the next.

Mercy knows this, probably better than anyone. She lost her best friend to La Llorona and almost found a watery grave herself. But she survived. Only she didn’t come back quite right and she knows La Llorona won’t be satisfied until she drags the one soul that got away back to the bottom of the river.

In a battle for her life, Mercy fights to break the chains of generational trauma and reclaim her soul free from ancestral hauntings by turning to the only things that she knows can save her: plant medicine, pulp books, and the promise of a love so strong not even La Llorona can stop it from happening. What unfolds is a stunning tale of one woman’s journey into magic, healing, and rebirth.

my review
I admit that I am not really a raver. I tend to be fairly reserved in my praise. Regardless, I have to say that Weep, Woman, Weep is a truly exceptional story of surviving and escaping generational trauma (sometimes over generations, by virtue of dilution as much as individual grit). Through Mercy the reader is able to see the struggles and challenges of the endeavor—as well as the failures— and feel the exuberance of growth, revelation, freedom, and rejuvenation.

The writing is haunting and lyrical (quite gothic) and DeBlassie manages to relay the despair and dangers to Mercy’s (and the other young women of her town) without forcing the reader to sit through anything graphic for the shock factor. (It wasn’t needed.) The characters are likeable and distinct. The editing is clean and the cover is gorgeous. Whether you call it gothic horror, fairy-tales, or magical realism, I’ll be well up for more of DeBlassie’s writing.

woman

Other Reviews:

Coffee and Wander Books – Review: Weep, Woman, Weep

Review: Weep, Woman, Weep by Maria DeBlassie (2021)

Weep, Woman, Weep

Book Review: An Emperor for the Eclipse, by Eris Adderly

Leave a reply

I bought a second-hand paperback copy of Eris Adderly‘s An Emperor for the Eclipse at Savers. (Though the spine looked like it’d never been cracked, if I’m honest.)

an emperor for the eclipse cover

He was expendable. He was a sacrifice. He was the emperor.

Raothan Ga’ardahn wants to take his own life. Twelve years in exile have a way of beating a man down, and the shameful secrets of his past, no matter how far buried, weigh enough to keep him that way. The last thing standing between him and oblivion is a sign from the gods. That, and a unit of Imperial Guard trooping onto his farm one late summer’s afternoon.

Across the continent, the Taunai heed the warnings of their dead: act to correct an unforeseen fracture in the Pattern of events, or face annihilation. Niquel, their bravest Questioner, accepts the challenge to descend into the dangerous lowlander capital for the good of her people. A journey alone away from her snowy mountain home awaits. Any worry about the strange man in her dreams will have to come later.

When the paths of the two outsiders cross on the steps of the imperial palace at Protreo, the fate of the empire shifts. One the Novamneans call ‘exile’, the other they call ‘witch’. Neither will ever be the same.

my review

Ho, I found this book beyond frustrating. Because I almost loved it. I would have loved it, except the sex! Now, before anyone calls me a prude and asks me why I’m reading sexy fantasy if I don’t like sex in my books, let me say I have no problem with sex. I read quite a lot of it. Outside of the rapes (which I do generally try to avoid in the books I read for fun and sometimes get pissy about), I don’t even have a problem with any single element of the sex in this book. It’s just that the sex the book contains doesn’t AT ALL fit the story the book is telling.

The first one is full on m/f master/slave kink play with spanking, anal pegging and anal sex. Involving a character we’d just met long enough to have a work conversation going home to have sex with his wife, who is only introduced for the purposes of him having sex with her (and she basically isn’t in the book in any meaningful way after). Nothing in the book, up until that point, was even remotely erotic. The scene literally came out of nowhere. I spent that whole VERY LONG sex scene (12 pages) wondering what the point of it was. The characters were not important ones. The reader wasn’t invested in them or their relationship. The sex wasn’t stitched into the plot. The whole thing was jarring and out of place.

The second scene was a m/f gang rape. The third was coerced f/f sex, in which one was straight and the other basically owned her. The fourth was (m/f) forced fellatio, so rape. The fifth was another f/f scene, in which the previously straight woman ostensibly entered willingly, but only because she was told someone would kill her nieces if she didn’t seduce the other woman—so, basically another coerced scene. And the last was finally a sweet, gently love scene between the main characters (the only sex scene between the main characters).

The point I’m making is that the main couple basically have a very sweet VERY LOW STEAM romance and then the author shoved all this jarring, unpleasant sex into the plot with other characters. They didn’t fit together even a little bit. It’s not even that they were badly written. They weren’t. It just felt like the author took the sex scenes she wrote for an entirely different book and shoehorned them into this one in order to make it steamier and IT RUINED THE BOOK.

I can’t even reason that maybe she was trying to create a purposeful contradiction because nothing in the story or plot supports it. So, I’m just left scratching my head and super frustrated.

Outside of the ruinous sex, I really enjoyed this book. I liked the characters. The world is complex and multilayered. There’s some humor. The writing and editing is good. I would have 5 stared this book if the author hadn’t forced it from fantasy romance into erotic fantasy. (Not erotica necessarily. The sex isn’t the point of the plot. But definitely a higher erotic rating that the story needed or, more importantly, supported.)

an emperor for the eclipse photo

Other reviews:

https://andypeloquin.com/book-review-emperor-for-an-eclipse-by-eris-adderly/

fae bound banner

Book Review: Fae Bound, by Verity Inkwell & Aspen Winters

Leave a reply

I do this thing sometimes, where I go to Amazon, limit my search to paperback books available through Amazon prime, in a certain genre, and then order them by lowest to highest price. It’s fun to see what the algorithm throws at me for like 2 bucks. If it offers up something halfway interesting and not number 37 in a series, I buy it and read it. It’s not so much about getting a cheap book, it’s about the chaotic joy of letting mysterious math and fate recommend a book. That’s how I ended up buying myself a physical copy of Fae Bound, by Verity Inkwell and Aspen Winters (a book I’d never heard of).

fae bound cover

Changelings are well known in lore. Fae take the human child and leave their own behind. But nobody has told the story of what happens to the human child taken.

My name is Amelie le Fae, and I am a human Changeling. High King Oberon declared long ago that Changelings had to marry and stay within the realm. I’m a bit of a different case.

I was born a witch, and being brought to the Underground realm only increased the potency of my magic. Unfortunately, Oberon had a clause ready for Changelings like me. Upon our three-hundredth birthday, we must be bound to no less than three mates.

Every fae in the Underground would give their left leg for the chance to be bound to a witch. The problem is, I want love. So, I’ve kept my magic hidden from suitors for two-hundred and ninety-nine years. I’m running out of time.

my review

This had a very simple plot, very little world-building, and basically no character development. But it was still a fun little sexy romp. Amelie needs to find no less than 3 men to marry in the next few days. Because, despite having had 300 years to do this, she’s waited until the last moment and not even bothered to learn anything about the requirement. (She’s 300, but this still reads like YA. Partly because of her lack of concern or knowledge about her own situation, but also because of the sort of interactions the characters have with their parents.)

Luckily, all she has to do is stand still and the men will throw themselves at her and, like any good fairy-tale, only the right ones will stick. Nothing in this was believable—yes, I know it’s fantasy, but even fantasy has to meet the suspension of disbelief threshold, and this doesn’t. But, again, it’s an enjoyable read anyway, if you’re willing to just let it be silly.

It is oddly in-explicit in the sex though. So, don’t go in looking for high steam. It’s not quite fade to black, but the sex scenes just aren’t particularly full or robust.

The book ends on a cliffhanger. But being only 148 pages, I feel like there really wasn’t any need to break this up into multiple books, except that that seems to be the thing to do lately.

All in all, not a finely crafted piece of literature. But there is an innocent joy to it that makes me interested in continuing. The 5 characters basically meet, decide they’re a family now, and go about being good to one another. There is something to be said for that.

fae bound photo

Other Reviews: