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Fashionably Dead

Book Review of Fashionably Dead (Hot Damned #1), by Robyn Peterman

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Fashionably DeadI grabbed Robyn Peterman‘s Fashionably Dead from the Amazon free list. At the time of posting, it was still free.

Description from Amazon:
Vampyres don’t exist. They absolutely do not exist.

At least I didn’t think they did ‘til I tried to quit smoking and ended up Undead. Who in the hell did I screw over in a former life that my getting healthy equates with dead?

Now I’m a Vampyre. Yes, we exist whether we want to or not. However, I have to admit, the perks aren’t bad. My girls no longer jiggle, my ass is higher than a kite and the latest Prada keeps finding its way to my wardrobe. On the downside, I’m stuck with an obscenely profane Guardian Angel who looks like Oprah and a Fairy Fighting Coach who’s teaching me to annihilate like the Terminator.

To complicate matters, my libido has increased to Vampyric proportions and my attraction to a hotter than Satan’s underpants killer rogue Vampyre is not only dangerous . . . it’s possibly deadly. For real dead. Permanent death isn’t on my agenda. Avoiding him is my only option. Of course, since he thinks I’m his, it’s easier said than done. Like THAT’S not enough to deal with, all the other Vampyres think I’m some sort of Chosen One.

Holy Hell, if I’m in charge of saving an entire race of blood suckers, the Undead are in for one hell of a ride.

Review:
I almost loved this book. It was almost a great humorous paranormal romance. It was almost a stellar read. It also almost didn’t get finished by this reader.

I feel like the author had a really fun idea, what could be engaging characters, a good sense of humour and some hot sex and then took it all, mixed in a bowl and multiplied it times ten until it was patently unpalatable. Seriously, the idea here is so good. The writing is too, but my god(dess), it’s all just taken soooooo far.

Astrid liked Prada…so she’s a Prada Whore and we’re reminded of it about 1,000 times. She becomes a vampire….then, through no effort on her part, becomes an ultra-vamp. She’s ‘The Chosen One’…then develops unbelievable and unbeatable power and skill that save the day repeatedly, despite her not knowing how she does what she does. (Don’t you just love when mysterious superpowers randomly pop up and rescue the heroine with no conscious decision on her part?) She not only can do a bit of magic here or there (when vamps aren’t supposed to be able to do any), she can shoot hundreds of silver bullets from her fingertips. She can destroy whole roomfuls of enemies (sometimes, but apparently not always, since at other times she just didn’t bother).

She’s chosen as a mate…by the most powerful vamp in the area. She gets hot around him…and then can orgasm repeatedly at a touch on her back. They have sex…and then when that isn’t wild enough for our heroine they throw in handstand positions and things that she thinks probably should be legal. Seriously? Sex and handstands, when she’s portrayed as not particularly sexually experienced.

She wants a family…then she gets one, and then another, and then another. Everyone can’t help but love her eventually. She’s funny and sarcastic…then it just becomes annoying in it’s suicidal banality. She can apparently say anything to anyone at anytime with none of the consequences other vampires would face. She gets a guardian angel…then a special fairy…then her best friend goes all super-power too. She’s too special for a girl who was just some normal Mary Sue a day earlier. She’s mated to the local ruler, daughter-in-law to the vampire king, daughter to the demon king, granddaughter to the king’s best friend, guarded by the most notable fairy to come around for 2,000 years, best friends with the fairy queen, and trained by a powerful angel who also has an important position. It’s all just too much…far, far, far too much.

Especially since I don’t know that I actually grasped why she needed all the special skills to accomplish the task ‘The Chosen One’ was meant to do. Actually, I wasn’t really even all that clear on what that was to start with. Maybe she’ll need to do more powers in the future, but as it stands much of her amazingness seemed surplus to requirements.

Further, the book is incredibly repetitive. It recaps itself at regular intervals, gives the reader the same information more than once and I just plain lost track of how many times I read, ‘What the fu…’ Scaled back, this could be a really good book. I mean it is funny. It is well written. The editing is pretty good. (I noticed a few errors, but far fewer than in a lot of indie books I’ve read.) But it’s completely unbelievable and after a while I just started groaning and rolling my eyes. Plus, it’s a freakin’ cliffhanger. At least it’s not a novella. It’s an appreciably long book, but still doesn’t have a conclusion.

Book Review of Touched and Death Rejoices, by A. J. Aalto

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I grabbed A. J. Aalto‘s novel, Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files, #1) from the Amazon free list. I then borrowed a copy of book two, Death Rejoices and snatched a copy of the short story Cold Company, which is perma-free.

TouchedDescription from Goodreads:
The media has a nickname for Marnie Baranuik, though she’d rather they didn’t; they call her the Great White Shark, a rare dual-talented forensic psychic. Twice-Touched by the Blue Sense–which gives her the ability to feel the emotions of others, and read impressions left behind on objects–Marnie also has a doctorate in preternatural biology and a working knowledge of the dark arts. She is considered without peer in the psychic community. 

Then her first big FBI case ended with a bullet in one shoulder and a chip on the other, a queasy heart and a serial killer in the wind, leaving her a public flop and a private wreck. When the FBI’s preternatural crimes unit tracks her down at a remote mountain lodge for her insight on a local case, her quiet retirement is promptly besieged by a stab-happy starlet, a rampaging ghoul, and a vampire-hunting jackass in tight Wranglers. Marnie figures the only real mystery is which one will kill her first. 

Too mean to die young, backed up by friends in cold places, and running with a mouth as demure as a cannon’s blast, Marnie Baranuik is about to discover that there’s no such thing as quitting time when you’re Touched.

Review:
I really quite enjoyed this one. Yes, it got completely ridiculous after a while. Yes, Marnie’s use of juvenile word’s like “ginormous” or “poopyhead’ almost drove me to distraction, as did Harry’s nonsensical old-English-speak. Yes, some bits of it were a tad predictable. Yes, I finished up with questions remaining. But yes, I roared with laughter and just basically had a good time with the story and the characters. What more can I really ask for? I know this is a painfully short review, but I’m off to start book two.

Death RejoicesDescription from Goodreads:
Marnie Baranuik is back, and this time, the Great White Shark of psychic investigations has “people skills” and a new assistant who seems to harbor an unhealthy curiosity about Harry, her revenant companion. Together, they’ve got a whole lot of questions that need answering. Is an ancient vampire hunting in Denver? Who is stalking Lord Dreppenstedt? How do you cure a slipper-humping bat, ditch an ogre, or give a demon king the slip? And what the hell was she thinking, swearing off cookies?

Teaming up with her sexual nemesis, Special Agent Mark Batten, and their long-suffering supervisor, Gary Chapel, Marnie discovers that vampire hunters aren’t easy to rescue, secrets don’t stay buried, and zombies sure are a pain in the ass to kill.

Review:
Marnie and her menagerie continued to crack me up in this book. I’ll admit that I found her antics a little over the top here though. Where in book one she was mildly self-depreciating and would concede to mistakes or causing chaos, here she seemed to brag about and revel in it. As a result she eventually started to convince me, the reader, that she really must be as much of a ditzy ‘silly little poppet’ as she claimed to be. I’m not really into stupid heroines. Plus, Diet Dr. Pepper! Really?

Additionally, I wasn’t able to successfully get my head around her ability to simultaneously commit herself to Harry, but also still lust over Mark. I needed some closure, either in the form of choosing one over the other or a ménage à trois. The situation was untenable and by the end its continuation started to forced and unnatural.

Despite a few grumbles on my part (Harry’s ridiculously antiquated English-ese, for example) I just plain enjoyed myself with the book. It’s fluffy and fun. Sometimes that’s all I’m looking for.

Book Review of Shattered Skies, by Heather Linn

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Document2 copyI’ve had Shattered Skies, by Heather Linn on my TBR for a while now. I picked it up on the KDP free list

Description from Goodreads:
I was only three days old when the world, as my parents knew it, became the nightmare that I live in; the only place that I have ever known as home. In my world, the humans are no longer the hunters perched comfortably at the top of the food chain. Humans are now the hunted, the prey; vulnerable and scared, just waiting to be consumed. The stories of the creatures that go bump in the night are no longer fiction. The monsters are real and they do want to hurt you. I live in a world where ‘the something’ lurking in the shadow isn’t a figment of an over active imagination but a real nightmare waiting to attack; a world where I have to lie my way through every minute, just to stay alive.

Review:  **mildly spoilerish**
Not to be mean, but this is going on my ‘worst in a while’ pile. OK, I don’t really have such a stack, but I barely finished this one and I’m barely fending off the urge to rant here in this review. I’m so baffled by this book. Not because of the poor writing (that might have been passable with another few editing passes). Not even because there were too few contractions in the dialogue and names/endearments were used far too frequently, leaving everyone sounding forced and formal. No, I was completely stymied by the fact that it made no sense.

The basic premise is that Vampire-like aliens have invaded earth and COMPLETELY enslaved the human race. A generation later humans only exist as food, breeders and slaves. With the exception of our main character and her cohort, there are no other free humans, that we know of. So, please note the COMPLETE annihilation of human civilisation, but somehow the common currency is still the dollar, roses are still given as a romantic gesture, people (or more to the point, not people) still read paper bound, pre-invasion books, one would presume in English (as opposed to whichever method galaxy traversing aliens might possess), the main character still refers to jobs that have health insurance and days off, etc. The book seems to posit that humanity can be simultaneously overthrown and enslaved by an overpowering advanced species, but still be the dominant culture. Um…I’m gonna have to go with NO on that one. It makes no sense at all!

This was not believable dystopian future. It felt like Vampires/Dominion were just inserted into the current western world and expected to work. It doesn’t, not at all. Why would a conquering species decide to live a human lifestyle, use human technology instead of their superior tech, or adopt the mannerisms and habits of their slaves?

Similarly, the current sexist opinions of modern America were exaggerated and expected to make sense in a drastically different circumstance. With the few (15) remaining free humans, a breeding program was established, but women are still treated as less important than men because they don’t go out and fight (just as stay-at-home mothers are so often disparaged for not working outside the home in the real world). Excuse me, but when facing such imminent extinction is there ANYTHING more important than bearing the continuance of the species?

I obviously this is just my opinion, but it read as illogical to not value the importance of reproduction. The way Cat and all the other males treated the women as ‘barefoot pregnant’ simpletons with no valuable contribution to make was both infuriating and out of place. It felt artificial, or rather like no deep thought had been put into how near extinction would alter human perceptions of gender roles in a new and limited environment. They would surely change.

What’s more, there were 11 women and 5 men available to breed, but it was also suggested that assigned breeding partners were essentially marriages (and not polygynous marriages either, or at least this is notably not stated). This doesn’t seem to have addressed the basic math problem inherent in this. There are two women to every man.

My biggest confusion revolved around the timeline though. I understood that Dr. Walker locked himself and the babies away the day of the invasion because the Vampires were killing all the children, aged or infirm people. He then raised the children to mimic Dominion (Vampire/Human hybrids). But, if he was locked away during the subsequent years, how did he know what behaviours to teach the children. Also, it was AFTER invading that the Vampires bred Dominion. This means that the oldest Dominion can’t be any older, and probably younger (since the children were already born at the time of the initial invasion) than the babies Dr. Walker raised. So, the very behaviors he was teaching the children hadn’t even occurred yet, or at best were just developing. It makes no sense! I thought that this might clear up when the big reveal about Dr. Walker occurred, but no, it just created more questions. Such as, if there were already Vampires on the planet, how was Akia the first Dominion?

Then there are all the silly little rules that pop up. If a person is given Dominion blood 6 times they become immortal, how random. Dominion having sex with humans will kill them. I can kind of follow this for female Dominion, but why would male Dominion die? There is no deposit to eat away at their insides. Is it magic of some sort? And how exactly was this little quirk bred into their DNA in the first place? I’m not just complaining about the illogical aspect of some of these, but also the way they just kept appearing unexpectedly.

Even if I hadn’t been completely cross-eyed trying to follow the plot, I still probably wouldn’t have liked the book. I simply hated the main character. Cat was selfish, mouthy, mean, and just about too stupid to live. As an example, what was she doing at the ball in the first place? If she could’t hunt that night, attendance requires mandatory inebriation of all women (just one more example of how women are devalued and disempowered in this book), and there’s a good chance she could be discovered as a mole, why attend? It seemed to be an opportunity to party, but who does that when it endangers everyone you love? Beyond showing enough of her personality to dislike her, there was almost no character development. Well, almost none for Cat. There was none for the other characters, none at all. Most of the remaining humans didn’t even get names!

So, by this point it’s probably redundant to say I didn’t like the book. A lot of people do…to each their own. I have the sequel that I picked up free at some point, but I can’t imagine I’ll be reading it.