Tag Archives: Rowan Casey

the circle gathers

Book Review of The Circle Gathers (Veil Knights, #1), by Rowan Casey

I’ll start this post off with a quick note that I have taken on the HUGE project of thinning the 6,000+ books on my Goodreads shelves, Amazon Cloud, Smashwords lists, etc. For almost two weeks now, I’ve been reading synopsis and reviews, judging book covers, and making executive decisions on which books to keep and which to delete. I’ve gotten rid of about 1,500 so far (I’m up to the Ms). While it pains me to delete books, my TBR was out of control. I had no idea what I owned and a lot of it was stuff I’ve lost interest in.

I mention this because the side effect of putting all my time into this project is that I haven’t read anything (anything at all). The only reason The Circle Gathers got listened to is that I had a pile of laundry that needed folding. Expect that reviews will continue to be slow in coming for the next few weeks, slower even than the fact that I am still planning to read the series I mentioned in an earlier post and review them as a whole.

Ok, on to our normally scheduled programming. I received a free audible copy of The Circle Gathers, by Rowan Casey. It’s narrated by Lawrence Locke.

Description from Goodreads:

Not all legends are make-believe…

Three years ago, Jessie “the Berserker” Noble was at the top of the MMA fight game, a world-title contender with a brilliant future ahead of her. Then the visions started and her world came crashing down. Hard. Now Jessie’s a shadow of her former self, taking no-holds barred fights in the underground circuit to earn just enough to buy the drugs she needs to keep the horrible things she sees at bay.

When a man named Dante Grimm tells her she’s the modern incarnation of a champion of old and that she and her soon-to-be companions are desperately needed to hold back the darkness to come, Jessie thinks he’s as insane as she is.

But Grimm’s far from crazy. There is a battle coming the likes of which the world hasn’t seen in centuries, a battle against a foe straight out of their worst nightmares.

And for them to succeed, Jessie going to have to dive deep into the heart of the very thing she’s been running from all this time – her visions.

Review:

Geez, what a complete snooze fest! I got soooo bored with the nonstop MMA fight scenes, with nothing but flashbacks (of fights) to break things up. (I finally started skimming them.) Then, just about the time the story FINALLY starts to pick up, other characters are introduced and the plot looks like it might actually move along the book ends precipitously. I am not interested in continuing the series, no matter how many of the authors involved I otherwise like and that the mechanical writing is fine.