2024 reads, #39. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #39. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #40. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #40. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #41. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #41. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #42. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #42. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #43. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #43. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #44. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #44. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #45. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #45. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #46. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #46. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #47. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #47. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #48. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #48. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #49. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #49. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
(Ethical disclosure: I am part of a group of people who receive early free copies of all of Drusilla Swan's books, in return for a promise to post an (Ethical disclosure: I am part of a group of people who receive early free copies of all of Drusilla Swan's books, in return for a promise to post an honest review.)
2023 reads, #78. This was kind of an interesting reading experience, in that it's actually book #3 of the "shapeshifting horny billionaire werewolves" series Swan is publishing these days, but I didn't get to read the first two volumes because of this being her first book since I joined her ARC reading group. So that made my read an exploration of a kind of fascinating question, which is exactly how much do you need to know about a series of romance novels, anyway, in order to understand what's going on in any one volume from the series? For example, I wasn't sure at first whether our female lead character is supposed to be an unhappy member of an Amish community or a religious cult that simply dresses like an Amish community (it's the latter, turns out), or whether this was supposed to be set back in the 1800s or is a contemporary tale (contemporary, I realized after coming across a reference to this cult running a meth lab in order to pay their bills), or whether the big infodump I saw a little later concerning a bunch of other horny werewolves whose names and location are all rattled off with the speed of a TV recap was stuff I needed to actually know for this particular story, or was just a fan-service cameo by the characters of one of the previous novels in the series (which, again, turned out to be the latter).
That left just the current storyline itself after that was all figured out, which was not bad from an objective standpoint (that is, it's no worse than any other romance novel), but suffers from the same problem as a whole lot of Kindle Unlimited books in this genre, of simply being a cookie-cutter repeat of a thousand paranormal romance/erotica novels that have already been written; as someone who now edits many of these KU romance novels for a living, it feels sometimes that I've read a thousand of them myself, and I have to confess that it disappoints me anymore when coming across one whose every beat and every detail I can pretty much already guess in advance. That's perhaps a bit unfair, in that I'm someone in the industry and therefore spend a lot of time thinking about the tropes and traditions of the romance genre; but I would offer that the genre's biggest fans actually read way more of these books than even I do, and so are likely even bigger experts at the tropes than me, so I think it's probably ultimately fair to warn heavy fans of the genre that they're likely to experience "trope fatigue" here.
That's simply a consequence of the age we live in, where these kinds of books are primarily written with keywords, marketing, and search engine optimization in mind, not in the hopes of ever writing something refreshingly new and original; and while that doesn't necessarily make the book bad, it does make it essentially pornography, by which I mean that its biggest fans will be the people who burn through an entire romance novel every 24 hours because there's a highly specific thing they're fetishistically looking for (in this case, most likely the thrill of erotic rape stories, experienced in a safe way in "fated mate" tales like this one because the rapists in question are always vampires or werewolves or space aliens who are biologically driven to do so and therefore ultimately good guys who simply can't help themselves, and will most assuredly make up for it afterwards by tenderly washing the female lead character's hair), and don't really care what the storyline actually is that delivers the fetish as long as the fetish is ultimately delivered. So in this, rest assured that the "safe rape" fantasy you're looking for is confidently delivered here, although in a story that's as easy to guess beforehand as a 16-year-old boy reading a Penthouse letter about a naughty next-door neighbor. As a romance editor, that disappoints me, but as a fan I admit that it'll do; that would usually get a score of three and a half stars from me, being rounded up to four here at the "no half stars" Goodreads....more
2023 reads, #74. It's summer, which means it's time for another of Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" books, comedic fantasy novels that have become a beloved institution in Britain where he's from, in the same manner as his peers Monty Python. Of course, the problem was that it'd been so long since I'd read the first two books in the series, I had actually forgotten by now what they were about, so I ended up re-reading both of those as well (1983's The Colour of Magic [my original review] and 1986's The Light Fantastic [my original review]). And that's when I discovered the unsettling truth -- not that there was a bad reason behind why I couldn't remember their storylines (it turns out it was because they don't really have storylines, I had forgotten, but are more like prose versions of cartoons, where no actual plot takes place and nothing anyone does has any consequences, making it easy to see why I had forgotten what they're about), but rather that reading these even a second time tended to be an exhausting exercise in overly frenetic nonsense, like taking the aforementioned Monty Python and then multiplying their absurdist hijinks by ten thousand while screeching all the jokes in an exaggerated falsetto Cockney accent as loud as you can possibly scream them, leading to an unsatisfyingly chaotic experience that simply wore me out long before the books were over.
In this third book, then, which features brand-new characters and a brand-new story, the problem is the exact opposite; for while Pratchett obviously meant to write another parody of fantasy novels like the first two books, he ended up writing just a straightforward fantasy novel, and therefore turned in one that's only mediocre at best, for not being satisfying as either a genre story or a satire of a genre story (you know, much like how William Goldman's The Princess Bride started as a Postmodernist parody of fairytales, but then the '80s movie version changed it into just an actual fairytale, making it as unsatisfyingly sappy and sentimental as any other fairytale that's ever been written). That's the biggest problem here, that underneath Pratchett's dark sense of humor, love of puns, and gentle ribbing of genre conventions, there's a kind of unearned gooey sentimentality that wouldn't be out of place in a Lifetime or Hallmark movie, and I have to admit that this book's trite message of "GIRL!!! POWER!!!" just really rubbed me the wrong way, after having spent literally decades listening to people tell me how crazy and subversive and intelligent the Discworld novels are.
Three books in, I have found none of these titles so far to be particularly crazy, subversive or intelligent, but rather just one step up in quality from fan fiction passed around as xeroxes in the back hallways of the annual Coniconicon; and so while I'm going to keep this series in my master list of Completist Challenge authors for now, I suspect I won't be returning to this universe for quite some time, and only then with a high sense of skepticism and an eye towards quitting it as soon as I find enough problems to justify doing so. It's a real shame, because I thought these books were going to be right up my alley; but it turns out they're not nearly the kind of brilliant displays of British wit and cleverness that I've been told my whole life they are. Your experience may be different, but I caution you to go into these with low expectations anyway.
Terry Pratchett's Discworld books included in this review series: The Colour of Magic (1983) | The Light Fantastic (1986) | Equal Rights (1987) | Mort (1987) | Sourcery (1988) | Wyrd Sisters (1988) | Pyramids (1989) | Guards! Guards! (1989) | Eric (1990) | Moving Pictures (1990) | Reaper Man (1991) | Witches Abroad (1991) | Small Gods (1992) | Lords and Ladies (1992) | Men at Arms (1993) | Soul Music (1994) | Interesting Times (1994) | Maskerade (1995) | Feet of Clay (1996) | Hogfather (1996) | Jingo (1997) | The Last Continent (1998) | Carpe Jugulum (1998) | The Fifth Elephant (1999) | The Truth (2000) | Thief of Time (2001) | The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001) | Night Watch (2002) | The Wee Free Men (2003) | Monstrous Regiment (2003) | A Hat Full of Sky (2004) | Going Postal (2004) | Thud! (2005) | Wintersmith (2006) | Making Money (2007) | Unseen Academicals (2009) | I Shall Wear Midnight (2010) | Snuff (2011) | Raising Steam (2013) | The Shepherd's Crown (2015) ...more
(I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the same genres. Che(I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the same genres. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my reviews.)
2023 reads, #48. DID NOT FINISH. I usually don't have any problems finishing what are mostly the ultra-short books comprising the romance genre, done that way deliberately for business reasons (they're faster to write, which means more books can be published each year, and they're faster to read, which means more books can be bought each year). Here, though, I ended up giving up around the 25% mark, because this is way more a fantasy novel than a romance one, and Tolkienesque "High Fantasy" at that, and author Daniela A. Mera has made the mistake so common among so-so High Fantasy writers, of throwing in so much exposition and so much new mythology that it's nearly impossible to enjoy the book as a simple pleasure read, but must become a piece of homework as part of a dedication to reading every book in the series in order to be understood at all. And I'm not planning on reading the entire series (like all the other romance novels I've reviewed this year, I got this through one of those promotional websites that give out books for free), and in fact I'm not a particularly big fan of High Fantasy in the first place, so after the umpteenth reference in the first 50 pages to the Third War of the Fifth Age between the Council of Nine and the Fellowship of Twelve, I closed the book in utter confusion and decided not to pick it up again. Keep it all in mind when deciding whether or not to read it yourself. ...more
2023 reads, #34. It's been nine months now since I read the latest novel by admired cross-genre "slipstream" author Bridget Collins, the "1920s fascis2023 reads, #34. It's been nine months now since I read the latest novel by admired cross-genre "slipstream" author Bridget Collins, the "1920s fascism meets Hogwarts meets The Game" bizarro emo thriller The Betrayals, which of course I adored (you had me at "1920s fascism bizarro slipstream emo thriller"); but I learned at that point that many of Collins' existing fans actually preferred her debut novel a year previous to that, the Victorian alt-history urban fantasy tale The Binding, so I figured I might as well put that on reserve at the Chicago Public Library as well, and I just got around to finally reading that this week. But alas, I myself actually considered this a step downward when compared to her newest, although I can understand why people who first became a fan of Collins through the previous book would feel the way they do; for I don't mean "downward" in terms of quality itself, but simply in terms of narrative complexity, and presenting a general conceit with endless depths of complexity.
She succeeds in that wildly with her later and more mature novel, by mashing together first an amazingly complicated art form that doesn't actually exist in the real world (a sort of combination of poetry, chamber music, ballet, philosophy, game design, and perhaps a little bit of actual magic); then adding this richly detailed and historic castle-school on a mountainside in the Alps where the art has been taught for millennia; and then imagining this Austria-sounding fictional country at a point in the early 20th century when a totalitarian regime has taken over the local government, but hasn't yet begun its plans for world domination, and want to turn this art form into a kind of nationalist propaganda, very similarly to how Leni Reifenstahl did with athletics in the real world with her Nazi propaganda film Olympia. In The Binding, though, we get a much simpler urban fantasy mythos that's much easier to understand -- that in their alt-universe, what we all know as "novels" actually are a way for people to permanently remove memories from their brain, through the use of a wizard of sorts who can somehow make the memories magically imprint themselves as words on the pages of a blank book. Thus, every novel that's read in their world is actually a form of stealing someone else's memories, and Collins uses this to expand on various kinda obvious social-realist issues and especially ones with a progressive political bent. (The main villain, for example, is basically a One Percenter who sexually abuses his household staff, then forces the girls to have the memories of the events "bound" so they no longer remember the crimes, and then reads the books regularly in his own private library whenever he wants to relive his accountability-free sins, while presumably giving an evil cackle and twisting the tips of his black mustache.)
There's nothing wrong with that, and it's easy to see why fans of urban fantasies (especially strikingly original ones with a really unique hook) would go so gaga for this earlier novel, and be a bit disappointed by the follow-up set in such a different world and concerning such a different thing. I myself, though, am primarily attracted to stories by how complex and multifaceted they can be, so I feel the exact opposite about these two books than the "Buffy crowd" (for lack of a better term). The great news here is that both books have their passionate fans, which makes Collins a remarkable writer whose career is worth paying attention to, because I bet she's going to have something even more explosive for all of us with the next one. (She's been spending the last two years participating in anthologies and other short-form opportunities, or at least according to her Goodreads page.) I look forward to that; and in the meantime, I encourage you to check out both of these books, and see which one you might prefer as well. ...more
2023 reads, #9. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the 2023 reads, #9. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the same genres. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my reviews.) It was only yesterday that I was raving about Lizzy Bequin's Their Human Vessel, an outrageous dark sci-fi tale in "fated mates" territory, or "reverse harems" or "why choose" or "imprinting" or "compelled to breed" or any of the other subgenres that basically all celebrate the more animal side of sexuality, and especially the what-if concept of human women developing legitimate estrus, which is the scientific term for "going into heat." It was while checking out Bequin's website and signing up for her newsletter that I learned that I could get a free "lead magnet" title from her within what's called the "omegaverse" subgenre of romance and women's erotica, which I've had a particular interest in since having it be the very first romance manuscript ever offered to me as a freelancer, something like nine months ago now. Part of its appeal is that there is no one uncontested understanding of what it is; but in general you can say that most people agree that such stories take place in some kind of reality or another where elaborate and complicated sexual rules exist regarding who gets to have sex with whom and under what circumstances (think Jon Norman's "The Chronicles of Gor," for example, which back in the 1970s set the model for how a lot of this stuff is thought of) and that there exists the alphas of this world (the sexually dominant ones who control all the breeding and pairing that take place), and the betas (who...um, don't). In fact, it's how the omegas fit into all of this that makes it so complicated, because sometimes the omega exists to fit traditional gender roles, and sometimes it can take on a radical queer identity and goals; sometimes it serves more a romantic purpose in a book, and sometimes more explicitly sexual.
Bequin's Wounded Omega, though, gives a biological explanation for each designation -- the "betas" are the pale, zombie-like creatures that the majority of the human race turned into after an "unexplained airborne environmental event" called the Cataclysm; "alphas" are the small minority who "evolved" into better physical bodies (tougher, bigger, faster) and accompanying elevated sexual drive; and "omegas" are the 1% of women who evolved in order to breed with them, by having this ability to achieve estrus, which is treated as a sort of Star Trekian "pon farr" in that getting the urge for dick but then not getting dick can literally make a woman sick or even suffer from toxic shock in their universe. That's fine, I suppose, but when it comes to one of the main pleasures people get from this genre, of watching betas get cuckolded by their natural alpha masters, it's a whole lot less fun when the betas are chalky-pale zombies who don't even understand in the first place that only the alphas are getting all the trim, much less care. Ultimately, Bequin is just positing the same concept that drove my previous read of hers, the sci-fi Their Human Vessel, this idea that exposure to space alien DNA or spores or cum or whatever will turn humans into "the next stage of evolution," which happens to have a much more animalistic sense of sexuality and an unapologetically positive attitude towards "taking what you want." And that's perhaps a better way to see this, as a sister tale in her shared "Bequin Literary Universe" where the events and races of Their Human Vessel take place too, because it doesn't really work as an omegaverse tale as I understand the subgenre to me, but is like a smaller, tamer, less logically sound version of her exquisitely batshit previous novel about eight-foot-tall blue-skinned space aliens with literal horse-sized cocks. I have more traditional omegaverse reads coming later this winter, though, so keep your eyes out for that! ...more
2023 reads, #7. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the 2023 reads, #7. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the same genres. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my reviews.) This "lead magnet" title (that is, a book designed specifically to give out to readers for free, in return for them signing up for the author's newsletter) gets points right away simply for being an actual full-length novel, unlike so many lead magnets that are little more than a single scene with a little exposition tacked onto the beginning. And I have to say, this book works quite well as a fantasy novel on its own, even without any romantic elements; set in a rural town in West Virginia, author Jane O'Roarke does a great job at creating a full, interesting, very lived-in-feeling community, full of strange and memorable tics that make you want to know more (including a stoic family of former race car drivers who live on top of a private mountain, a sinister chemical company with obvious nefarious plans for the town, and a local hillbilly loner who may or may not be a witch), and a unique storyline that sees our reticent female lead accidentally win a music contest that will soon be taking her to London for the first time in her life.
I knocked a full star off my score, however, for two main reasons, primarily that this is not a standalone novel from a story standpoint but rather a book-length first act for a coming trilogy; and rule number one in genre publishing is that, even if you're writing a series, every book in that series must also work as an entertaining standalone story by itself, because who knows if any particular reader is ever going to get around to reading the other books in the series, or even if the author is ever going to get around to writing them. Related to this, then, is that although this is being marketed as a romance novel, there isn't a single moment of romance to actually be had, and in fact there aren't even any single men presented as characters besides the female lead's half-brother through their mutual father; and unless this series is planning on taking a weird incestuous turn at some future point, this means that O'Roarke didn't even bother introducing the male romantic lead in this supposed romance book, and that makes me angry and disappointed as someone who was reading precisely to get me my daily romance fix. A quick look at O'Roarke's website tonight showed indeed that 100% of the usual romance-novel stuff doesn't happen until book 2 and later; and let me just advise all you romance writers now, if you mean for your lead magnet title to attract fans so that they'll keep reading everything you write, that first interaction they have with your work should be the most satisfying experience they have with you, not the least, which defeats the whole purpose of having a lead magnet in the first place. (Also, let me admit that a certain amount of my lowered score is merely because of O'Roarke giving this book the unwieldy title of The Eve of the Fae: The Beginning: Thea, which again pretty plainly belies the fact that she never meant for this to be a standalone book in the first place.)
So, a mixed bag here, although this first volume of the series is of such unusually high quality for a romance novel that I'm giving it a high score anyway, because I know that most readers will actually be Kindle Unlimited members who will have the chance to read the other books in the series immediately following their finish of this one. It comes recommended in this specific spirit, that you should consider this more a 50,000-word introduction to O'Roarke's real story, and not a decent standalone story just on its own. ...more
2023 reads, #4. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through t2023 reads, #4. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through the Kindle Unlimited program (a relatively new feature of Amazon, in which for one flat monthly fee, members can read as many quick cheap genre novels as they can possibly get through in 30 days); and so that has me starting to heavily read in these specialized genres for the first time in my life, especially when it comes to crime, fantasy and romance books, since I've never been a natural fan of these particular genres myself in my personal life, which means I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to service my clients as well as I can. So for example, early this week I got the latest promotional email from marketing company BookFunnel.com, which a couple of my clients use, letting me know of the latest hundred or so romance books that I can now download for free through their service, in return for signing up for these authors' newsletters; and instead of ignoring it like I usually do, this time I went over and actually downloaded seven titles from the unending page of identical overly Photoshopped covers of shirtless hunky badboys, and thought I would try blazing through them as fast as possible just to get an idea of what the average KU customer goes through when hunting and pecking through these endless slush piles themselves.
This is now my seventh and last book of this run (see also Victoria Lewis' Wild Nights, Ellis O. Day's The Voyeur, Pearl Tate's Mate Exposed, Cecelia Mecca's The Blacksmith, Candy Quinn's Shipwrecked Beauty, and Bella Beaumont's Can't Stop Won't Stop), and I'm relieved to say that it's far and away the best of all seven; in fact, I can state with no hesitation that it's simply a great novel, full stop, no matter what genre you're talking about, and certainly is heads and shoulders above many of the urban fantasy novels I read last year when doing my first deep dive into that genre as well, including many books by supposed amazing writers from so-called mainstream presses (I'm looking at you, Jim freaking Butcher). One of the big reasons is that author Drusilla Swan isn't afraid to get her hands dirty here, and just gleefully throws herself into the full prurience and immense darkness that a BDSM story involving vampire doms enslaving the human race begs for.
In fact, this has been one of the big surprises of this reading series so far; that despite so many of these books supposedly embracing outrageous situations and subversive sexuality, most of the authors in the romance and erotica genre then pull back at the moment they should have thrown themselves forward, promising kinky adventures but then giving us the same ol' dumb boring vanilla sex, Valentine's Day teddy bears, and boyfriends washing the main character's hair in the bathtub. (Jesus, what is it with you ladies and your unending fascination for having your boyfriend wash your hair in the bathtub?!) Swan instead gives us the full monty her premise calls for, throwing us on page one into a filth-covered underground prison where kidnapped willowy young women are kept in deplorable conditions, for the purpose of being sold to vampires so they can be fucked to death and then bled for that night's dinner. Yeah, Swan ain't messing around, so that makes it all the more interesting when our reader stand-in hero Amanda (kinda mousy, kinda nerdy) is purchased by the head of one of the two major vampire "families" now running the planet (due to a magical orb the vampires acquired that completely blocks out the sun 24/7, allowing them to very easily overwhelm and then conquer the global human race), then is treated with the kind of "loving firm hand" that's so prevalent in BDSM romance novels, as her stoically gorgeous, emotionally stern master Alex slowly enfolds her into his life at the Paris castle he has taken over as his private home and family headquarters, where she learns that there's actually a lot more infighting, politics and drama among the vampires than the puny conquered humans have even guessed at (to say nothing of the rebel humans who have learned how to wield magic and act as a sort of terrorist antagonist to the vampires, eventually revealed as the actual villains because they have murderous contempt for the "weak, useless" other humans who haven't bothered to fight back).
That gets us into the other major thing that makes this book stand so much taller than the others I've read, which is that Swan goes to the trouble of actually building out a complex and compelling universe for her characters to inhabit, a deep and rich mythos involving underground demons in eastern Europe, thousands of years of vampire history, and other details that wouldn't be out of place at your local "Coniconicon" fantasy convention taking place each summer. The simple fact is that Swan's writing chops are high here, so much so that she could easily be a staff writer for a Peak TV kind of series like Buffy or X-Files; and that does nothing but highlight even more that so many of these other romance and erotica novels you find at these promotional websites are just real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, churned out by the truckload and all of it just barely of high enough quality to justify its existence as a free read at Kindle Unlimited. I was relieved and gratified to come across a romance novelist who actually cares more about her audience than that, and who is committed to giving them the same kind of high-quality reading experience one might get with any mainstream book you'd find at a Barnes & Noble; and I have to confess that Swan now becomes the first romance author in history that I've actually given money to, so that I can read the further adventures of our plucky hero Amanda and see whether things work out for the seductively dark Diamantis family or not.
That now brings an end to my original run of seven novels; but I have to admit, I found the whole experience so fascinating, I went back to one of these promotional websites and downloaded an entire 30 more books, which I'll be continuing to make my way through this winter and spring in between my more usual titles. (Yes, friends, I know many of you have been getting sick of my detour into Romance Land this month; don't worry, Don Delillo's White Noise is coming next!) Please check out the "romance" tag at the top of this review to check out all the romance novels I end up reviewing; but for now, absolutely stop everything and go pick up a copy of this, a real highlight of the romance genre that will scratch every itch a paranormal or BDSM fan will have. ...more
2022 reads, #46. Longtime friends will remember that a few years ago, I created an Urban Fantasy Canon Reading Challenge for myself so that I could fi2022 reads, #46. Longtime friends will remember that a few years ago, I created an Urban Fantasy Canon Reading Challenge for myself so that I could finally get up to speed on this genre I know little about, and that I was recently inspired to actually start it after reading my second "Dresden Files" novel by Jim Butcher and being as underwhelmed by it as I was by the first, and deciding I finally wanted to go out there and see what more interesting and expansive things the genre might have to offer besides the usual supernatural private detective dressed in '80s chic who is battling a group of sexy mythological creatures who all look like club kids and hang out in beautifully and perfectly decrepit abandoned subway stations, using mediocre prose that can only be described as "Joss Whedon on a bad day."
But wow, Kim Harrison's "The Hollows" series is not the place to find an alternative, but rather is an exact and total duplicate of what I just described, just as was the first book I chose to start out this series, last week's Fated by Benedict Jacka. And that means that out of the 50 books I plan on reading for this series, the first three randomly chosen have all been exactly alike in both theme, mythos and writing quality; and I have to honestly say, I don't know if that's just a coincidence, or a troubling sign of what I'm bound to find in most of these "best loved of the best loved" titles in this genre to serve as a primer for myself. After all, one of the new insights I had here was that all three of these so far I've read (first published in 2000, 2004 and 2012) were written by what had to be slavish fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the 1997-2003 TV show that first made Whedon a celebrity, and that I've never really thought of before as "urban fantasy" per se but in hindsight makes sense that it would have such a huge cultural impact on this literary genre.
Since Buffy was a '90s project too, just like Neil Gaiman's Sandman and the other pioneering projects we've talked about in previous reviews, I guess it's only natural that it would have an outsized influence on the urban fantasy genre as it coalesced for the first time into something big enough for its own name in these same years; and maybe I'm just bound to discover that most of these fan-favorite titles in my canon list are various pastiches, homages and takeoffs of these foundational projects at the genre's birth, because I have to admit, these first three have reflected an ultra-narrow slice of cultural history in a way that's surprised me, that slice being those heady days in the '90s when all the male badasses wore floor-length coats and fingerless racing gloves, and all the female badasses wore sleeveless t-shirts and goth makeup. That's why I'm taking on this challenge, after all, to see how much is out there in this genre besides that; but right now it's been 100 percent sub-Whedon, with this one being unfortunately the worst of the three. (The prose here is just unbearably twee and overly on the nose that at any time I expected to see one of the characters eventually say, "Is that your...FINAL ANSWER, demon?!") I'll keep forging ahead, and as always I encourage you diehards to recommend your own great titles in the comments or perhaps let me know of another Kim Harrison book I should read instead of this one; but for now, it's a permanent goodbye from me to sexy witch and supernatural bounty hunter Rachel Morgan, whose tale reads with all the flattened former charm of a fourth-generation Xerox. ...more
2022 reads, #45. Friends will remember that I recently tackled my second "Dresden Files" urban fantasy novel by Jim Butcher, part of my Great Completi2022 reads, #45. Friends will remember that I recently tackled my second "Dresden Files" urban fantasy novel by Jim Butcher, part of my Great Completist Challenge, but that my underwhelmed response to it reminded me that several years ago I actually put together an urban fantasy primer challenge for myself as well, and that maybe it was finally time to start throwing myself more into that and less into these mediocre Dresden novels. But alas, by complete coincidence, the first one I could find available at the Chicago Public Library, Benedict Jacka's 2012 Fated (volume 1 of the now 12-volume "Alex Verus" series), basically just outright states in the first chapter that his universe is supposed to exist in the same universe that Dresden's does (by essentially making a reference to Dresden in the first chapter, unnamed for legal reasons but perfectly describing him); and so not only is the mythos exactly the same, but even Jacka's writing style is almost identical to Butcher's (which can both be described as "Joss Whedon on a bad day"), which kind of defeated the point of branching out into other urban fantasy titles besides Butcher's in the first place.
Jacka succeeds here at what he's aiming for, so he doesn't deserve a bad score, despite the fact that I personally didn't like it; but that said, I personally didn't like it, and especially the way it seems already dated just ten years after its initial publication (for one good example, his personification of an air elemental here is described as a manic pixie dream girl, a character type that briefly exploded in popularity at the turn of the 21st century but even by the 2020s has been disavowed even by the guy who invented the term), so I can't in good conscience give it a good score either. Instead, I guess let me just perhaps warn you that this is a great example of what kept me away from urban fantasy for so long, because it's so stereotypically known by non-fans as these sort of sub-par adventures about dashing rogue white guys in '80s-chic wardrobes (sigh, all those floor-length coats), battling supernatural creatures who look like club kids and live in beautifully ruinous abandoned subway stations. I'm entering this Urban Fantasy Primer Challenge in the hopes of finding that the genre has expanded and gotten more complex since its 1990s invention by people like Neil Gaiman (who had a hugely outsized effect on this '80s-chic look and feel that became such an early cliche of the genre); but Fated is not it, but rather a deliberate paen to the very tropes I'm hoping to get away from. More power to you if you like this kind of B-level Whedon stuff (which I mean sincerely -- I myself love B-level steampunk novels, and make no apology for it), but this kind of trenchcoats-and-cute-goths material simply isn't for me. ...more
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