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Review of Bella Forrest’s A Shade of Vampire

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 I Won a signed copy of Bella Forrest‘s A Shade of Vampire from Layers of Thought. I included both the new and old cover just to be awkward. 

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Description from Goodreads:

On the evening of Sofia Claremont’s seventeenth birthday, she is sucked into a nightmare from which she cannot wake.

A quiet evening walk along a beach brings her face to face with a dangerous pale creature that craves much more than her blood. 

She is kidnapped to an island where the sun is eternally forbidden to shine.
An island uncharted by any map and ruled by the most powerful vampire coven on the planet. She wakes here as a slave, a captive in chains.

Sofia’s life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn when she is the one selected out of hundreds of girls to join the harem of Derek Novak, the dark royal Prince.

Despite his addiction to power and obsessive thirst for her blood, Sofia soon realizes that the safest place on the island is within his quarters, and she must do all within her power to win him over if she is to survive even one more night.

Will she succeed? …or is she destined to the same fate that all other girls have met at the hands of the Novaks?

Review (with mild spoilers):

If Edward Cullen had ever been forced to rule a hidden enclave of vampires he would definitely be named Derek Novak. No doubt about it. A Shade of Vampire is a quick little YA read that Twilight fans will love. The problem is that I’m really not a Twilight fan. So in order to give this book a fair chance I tried imagining how I would have reacted to it if I was still an angsty teenage girl. Certainly Sofia is described as a smart, slightly quirky, wall flower. I can relate to that. She’s secretly crushing on her popular best friend, who I THINK she lives with. I guess I can relate to that too. (Though the whole living situation was never very clear. Apparently she was abandoned, but I never could grasp the details. Maybe I’m wrong.) I had to wonder a little bit about the whole high school clique thing though. I mean if he’s popular and she isn’t how are they best friends? I don’t really remember cliques being so accepting of such social transgressions. In the end I decided that I can relate to Sofia’s life prior to the vampires, but not after. Once she is taken to the Blood Shade I could do nothing but shake my head.

Derek wakes from a protracted sleep and INSTANTLY falls for little ‘ol Sofia. What does he fall in love with? Well, I don’t want to give anything away, but it isn’t anything the other girls don’t have too. So, really the question still stands. Sofia, in turn, is either exceptionally susceptible to Stockholm Syndrome or has no sense of self-preservation, because she is feeling Derek in return. She is falling in love with his kindness, which, honestly, feels misplaced. Really there is a whole undercurrent of incongruous innocence in this book. It’s in small things, like the keeping of harems and constant references to playing with their beautiful slaves, or the leers Sofia is subjected to but the complete lack of follow through or sex of any kind. Example: the girls are all kidnapped when they are 17 because they mature and taste sweetest when they turn 18. Now, the whole blood letting/sex connection is pretty blatant, so the message is essentially that the girls will be ravished, but not until they conveniently (and coincidentally) come of legal age. Riiighhht. The novel is so sexually charged that this absence is conspicuous. I realise that as a YA novel it shouldn’t really have any, so maybe the suggestion needed to be pulled back a little. 

I have a guess about where the story will go from here and I’d be willing to read a sequel to see if I’m right or not. With the exception of the constant and annoying one sentence paragraphs (I was always told a minimum of 3 BTW) it reads fairly smoothly. (Though to be fair Derek’s dialogue is a little too smooth for someone who’s been asleep for 400 years. But since I wouldn’t really want to slog through the old English I’m more than happy to let that pass.) It was also interesting to be able to see both sides of Sofia and Derek’s interactions. Sometimes their actions held different meanings for the two of them, but were still meaningful to both. I thought that was very cleverly played. All in all I thought it was OK, but I’m well aware that there will be those who love this sort of story and they will, no doubt, really enjoy it.

Review of Nathan Young’s Fire and Ice, The Fall Begins

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I won Nathan Young‘s novel Fire and Ice, The Fall Begins in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway. (For the record, that cover freaks me out a little bit. Don’t know why, though.)

Description from Goodreads:
Danny Patterson never promised that he was a good man, and despite his experiences living in Leigh Park, he is actually quite vulnerable. But with Stacy Ryan at his side, he is finally beginning to find some closure. He has fought for what he believes in on many occasions, however when he finds himself the prey of Alistair Carter and a sinister group known only as The Rogues, he is inadvertently pulled into a grotesque game of cat and mouse from which he may not survive. 

Death waits for no man; today, the fall begins…

Review (with slight spoilers):
It was alright, I guess. This was a Firstreads win and one of the joys of the giveaways is that you chance winning something completely outside your normal reading area. From Fire and Ice‘s blurb I wouldn’t have thought this one was too far outside of mine, but I think this book has a fairly specific target audience, that of the young English male. For the record, I’m a 35-year-old American female. 

I think the book would be most enjoyed by this particular group of people for a few reasons. First, despite living in England for several years, I didn’t have enough of an intuitive understanding of what Leigh Park is and, therefore, didn’t have the automatic knowledge that the author presumes readers will possess. Apparently, people coming out of the area will naturally be tough motherfuckers by virtue of growing up there. If it had been set in Camden, NJ, or East St. Louis, IL, I might have understood this, or if I was English and familiar with Leigh Park’s reputation. But it isn’t, and I’m not, so I was a little too slow on the uptake in the beginning. I didn’t initially grok why Danny was such a good fighter and shot without having been trained in any way. It didn’t make much sense to me. He felt too good at everything. 

Now I’m not saying all books need to be targeted to an American audience or anything so horribly nationalistic, especially since I was IN ENGLAND when I won it…well within the geographic confines of what I would consider its targeted readership. I just could have done with an info-blurb or something in the beginning that others probably wouldn’t have needed. [Unless, of course, Danny’s exceptional skill isn’t meant to be the result of growing up on a run-down, gang-infested council estate, but then I would have to take exception to it for other reasons.]

Secondly, there are quite a few descriptions of the specifications and capabilities of cars and guns in the book. Here is an example:

The SA-8OA1 was the standard issue assault rifle and light support weapon of the British Army. Manufactured jointly between BAE systems and Heckler & Kock, it entered service in 1987. It had an effective range of 450 metre’s when fired with an aperture iron sight whilst later variants of the rifle were kitted out with telescopic SUSAT sights. Gas operated and using rotating bolt mechanism, the SA-8O fired the 5.56 x 45 mm NATO cartridge fro a 30-round detachable STANAG magazine and had a fully automatic rate of fire of between 610-775 rounds per minute.

Now, as a woman, I honestly just don’t care. ‘He had a big gun’ would have been enough for me, but if I was a young man or a gun enthusiast (who knew what half of that meant), I might be thinking ‘right on.’ 

I don’t think I was the intended demographic for this novel, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy any of it. I appreciated the friends’ loyalties to one another. For some reason, I really liked Ade. I’m not even certain why, but I did. I enjoyed the small normal moments, like stopping for a cup of tea (though Carter did anomalously enter the tea area to drink coffee on occasion, shock/horror) or enjoying a good bacon sarnie. This went a long way toward providing the reader a peek into their lives and humanizing them. I also appreciated the fact that it didn’t have a cookie-cutter happy ending, which would have been really unrealistic in this circumstance. As the first in a series the book definitely ends on a clanger that makes you want to know what is coming next and looks to focus on far more than one man’s fight to save himself and his loved ones. 

There is some repetition in the writing. I seem to recall someone, probably Danny, sinking into ‘dark darkness,’ the word instantly being used three times in one paragraph and slightly three times in two sentences. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with these examples, but such things always drag me out of the fantasy and force me to notice the words on paper.

In the end, while I openly expect that others will whole-heartedly love this book, the best I can say is that it was OK. I couldn’t help wondering why it focused on Danny (especially since the initial hit wasn’t intended to be him in the beginning). Surely, the police, his friends, the bad guys, etc, would be more interested in the person whose identity set the whole mess off in the first place than his friend. I also wondered why everyone was so willing to just let him take care of everything as if no one else was involved. Why the protagonist and antagonist wanted each other dead very very badly, but somehow never simply shot each other. They both had numerous opportunities.  There seemed to be some drastic leaps of logic, where a character knew A and, therefore, immediately knew B, with no apparent reason why. For example, how Paul knew that the relatively common name ‘Carter’ must be Alistair Carter, a man he presumably hasn’t seen in ~20 years, doesn’t know Danny, and would have no obvious reason to be involved in what might otherwise be presumed to be a basic gang turf war. Some extreme decisions are based on this knowledge, but I can’t fathom how he could be so certain. And I never could reconcile the cold killer in the beginning with the man Danny was at the end. It was meant to have come full circle, but they didn’t feel like they met up with me.

Review of P.L. Parker’s The Chalice

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Some time ago I won a copy of P.L. Parker‘s The Chalice from Laurie’s Thought and Reviews.

Description from Goodreads:
Decimated by the savage Deg’Nara and teetering on the brink of extinction, the last surviving males of the once great Chiagan-Se embark on a quest to salvage what is left of their civilization. They send their remaining seeker ships into the void, searching for genetically compatible females. Time is running out, but in the far reaches of the universe, on an obscure and primitive planet, a match is discovered.

One thousand panic-stricken women awaken two hundred years in the future, captives aboard an unmanned alien spacecraft bound for parts unknown! How had they gotten there and why? 

The males thought they came willingly. The females believed they’d been kidnapped. Full of hopeful expectation, the Chiagan-Se prepare for the arrival of their new mates. Terrified and furious at the inexplicable abduction, the women prepare for combat! And when the two sides meet, the battle commences.

Even though I won a copy of The Chalice way back in June, I put off reading it because I honestly hate the cover. It makes me think of bad Swedish porn. (No offense against the Scandinavian porn industry. I’m sure they have some good porn too.) And come on, lets face it, the plot-line of a ship full of females bound for a the arms of a wholly male populace is rife with the possibility of cheap bow-chica-bow-wow moments. It could easily go bad very quickly. But I wanted to support the author and appreciate the winnings so I gave it a chance.

I made it 45% into the book before there was even a hint of a kiss and a good 250 pages before there was a sex scene. (It was only the first of two and fairly mild to boot.) Relief, not porn then. What it was instead was funny. Now, I don’t mean the trying to take itself too seriously, forcing you to laugh derisively at it funny. No, I mean the genuinely and intentionally humorous type of funny. Danesha, or ‘Dread’ was a whole ball of fun all by herself. Never have I encountered such a bitter and pessimistic character that makes you love her so much. No matter how dire the circumstances you could count on her to think of something worse and lighten the mood. Then there was a little bit of slapstick and all of the basic misunderstandings that one would expect to encounter when two sentient species are forced to interact. I laughed out loud a lot.

Some of the characters were a little stereotypical. Dread was after all a foul mouthed African American from the Detroit ghetto who was always ready for a fight. Then there was the stiff lipped Englishwoman who always kept her cool, the whinging Irish woman who kept wailing ‘I dinnae nooo,’ the busty blond Swede, and the placid Japanese ninja-type. They were a lot of fun though. A little more thought seems to have gone into the male cast. Parker painted them as contradictorily strong, hot-blooded warriors who also happened to feel like lost little boys. I really enjoyed seeing the women take charge. I also enjoyed that there was a plot outside of the romances. In fact I would have liked to have seen a bit more of the smoldering bits. I especially wanted to see how Shagal won his mate over…or was won over. Hard to tell on that one.

On the downside, to say the book head hops would be an understatement. It not only leaps unexpectedly from one person to the next, but from one scene to the next. One moment you are in Kara’s head on a transport shuttle, then the next you are with Tegan on the bridge of the ship, with nothing to indicate you have moved. I often had to reread passages or just keep going until I found a clue to reorient myself by. It was a challenge. Despite this I was pleasantly surprised by the book and look forward to reading more of Parker’s writing.