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
2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kin2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in order to stay on top of the latest trends so to better help my freelance clients who publish under the same circumstances. In this case you can think of the story as being essentially half-and-half a romance novel and a cozy mystery novel, about a young woman who accidentally reconnects with a man from her childhood who used to brutally bully her (it’s okay -- it was actually his pushy girlfriend at the time who forced him to do it), but who then discovers halfway through the book that her estranged father who she’s never met is actually a serial killer, and is back in town to make her life a living hell.
To its credit, this book has the opposite problem from most quickie Kindle Unlimited reads -- it’s not way too short but rather way too long -- but that nonetheless results in a problematic reading experience, with lots of scenes that should’ve been just summed up in a single sentence (“like Bob had mentioned, the blood test down at the hospital only took ten minutes”) but that instead go in excruciating detail for pages upon pages (“We arrived at the hospital. Bob opened the door. I walked through the door. We asked the receptionist where room 116 was. She told us to go down the hall and take a right. We went down the hall and took a right”...). Combined with a plot that’s pretty easy to guess, and a writing style that’s fairly pedestrian (be prepared for every character to be the ur-archetype of whatever kind of person they represent -- the gay guy’s the gayest gay who’s ever gayed, the villain is the most villainous villain who’s ever villained), that results in a book that was just barely mediocre in this case, which is why it’s getting 2 stars out of 5 when usually I give so-so Kindle Unlimited novels 4 stars so to embrace the lowered expectations of this form of publishing. Go into it, if at all, with this warning in mind....more
2024 reads, #30. This was my latest attempt to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in 2024 reads, #30. This was my latest attempt to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in order to stay on top of the latest developments and help out my freelance clients who write and publish under the same circumstances. I would consider this book a textbook example of what I typically expect from such novels, by which I mean it’s aggressively mediocre, the kind of book that deliberately chooses to not expend even one ounce more of energy than absolutely needed to qualify as A Book That Exists And That I Suppose You Can Read In A Single Day If You’re Super Bored Without Necessarily Becoming Infuriated At The Author. As such, it of course features cardboard-cutout characters, an easily guessed plot, the absolute minimum amount of pages needed to count as a “novel” while ironically featuring a storyline that’s much too slow, and a prose style that maddeningly adds a new paragraph break after every single freaking sentence in the entire book, which makes me want to go to the author’s house and give her a high-school tutorial on “How to Write Narrative Prose When It’s Not a Twitter Update, Sheesh, Enough Already.”
I mean, I suppose all this is acceptable, which is why it’s getting three stars from me -- Lord knows, Kindle Unlimited is now filled with millions of these kinds of lowest-common-denominator books, and they’re apparently delivering just enough to keep their always-grinding readers satiated through their book-a-day habits; it’s just always disappointing to me to see authors who don’t even try to be even a little bit better than the absolute minimum required of them to break even with their latest title and thus afford to live another day. I always try to push my clients to be better than this, and books like today’s are a good reminder of why that’s so important for anyone who aspires to something more than “eh, I guess this will do.” Inhale it on your next bored Tuesday with this warning in mind. ...more
2024 reads, #24. I picked this up as part of my ongoing efforts to read deeply and widely within the world of quick genre novels published through Kin2024 reads, #24. I picked this up as part of my ongoing efforts to read deeply and widely within the world of quick genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, as a way of helping out my freelance clients who write and publish under the same circumstances. It’s a short erotic bisexual MMF story, about a couple who own a restaurant and have a night of naughty fun with their new sous chef. (Hint: the name of the series this is a part of, “Swords Will Cross,” tells you a lot about what you can expect.) It’s...you know, it’s fine, although one thing I’ve noticed about most quickie erotica published through Kindle Unlimited (especially when being shelved in the “romance” category like this one is) is that, no matter how kinky the subject matter, the actual sex scenes all tend to be just plain ol’ boring middle-class suburban vanilla intercourse, even when that’s two men and a woman having boring suburban vanilla intercourse, two lesbians having boring suburban vanilla intercourse, a master and a slave having boring suburban vanilla intercourse, etc. That’s the same case here, which is why it’s getting a thorough and solid “meh” from me, three stars to reflect its “eh, I suppose this is fine for a boring Wednesday afternoon” nature. It should be read, if at all, with these low expectations in mind. ...more
2024 reads, #21. As always with these kinds of books, let me mention first that I was its editor, and was paid to work on it and make it better, so yo2024 reads, #21. As always with these kinds of books, let me mention first that I was its editor, and was paid to work on it and make it better, so you should read my thoughts here based on that context, and understand that I'm presenting far from an objective, removed opinion in today's writeup. That said, I really enjoyed this romance novel just as a regular reader! The main strength of Banks here is that she does "small town romance" right, concentrating not on all the capitalist opportunities inherent in such a small town (no mentions of adorable B&Bs or delightful cupcake stores here), but rather understanding that it's the quiet solitude and tight-knit community that makes these kinds of books enjoyable to read, really putting an emphasis here on the ways the citizens of this fictional small town (supposedly on the rural outskirts of Nashville) interact with each other.
I also thought she got the balance between plot and sex almost exactly right here, sacrificing neither of these elements for the sake of the other; and she has a nicely unique plot going on here as well, telling a "second chance" story about a woman who leaves their small community to become a chef, just to come back to start her own restaurant and have it burn down on opening night (comprising the first chapter of this book), to discover that her rescuer is none other than her former flighty ex-boyfriend, who in the ensuing years since their youthful breakup has finally gotten his act together (mostly because of getting his next girlfriend after her accidentally pregnant, and finding that fatherhood agrees with him), now the widely admired chief of the town's fire department and sole central station (where she ends up accepting a job as the station's new cook, which is what brings them together again).
A story with a really nice undercurrent of conflict, as the two renegotiate their relationship now as mature and more world-weary middle-agers, I found myself deeply rooting for the FLC and MLC to get together, even knowing that it's a romance novel so of course they'll eventually have a Happily Ever After; and that to me is a great sign of a well-done romance, when you know the inevitable ending but get caught up in the "will-they-won't-they" drama anyway. Strongly recommended for fans of small-town romance and second-chance stories....more
2024 reads, #11. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having2024 reads, #11. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having a growing amount of clients in my freelance editing career who write these same kinds of books, and with me wanting to keep up with the latest trends. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my write-ups. Today's book is fine in that way that would get it three stars in any other circumstances, but four stars as a romance novel since that's all anyone's ever hoping from Kindle Unlimited books, that they aren't actively terrible. It's a science-fiction novel, the fourth in an entire series, with a substantial amount of backstory; although unfortunately, despite author Kaylee Pike giving this away as a standalone book, she didn't bother to actually explain any of the backstory here in volume number four, which means that you're kind of taking guesses at what's going on here besides the very general information common to all of these kinds of books, "Sassy human woman develops fascination for red-skinned hunky alien with gigantic horse cock" (because space aliens in romance novels always have cocks the size of a horse). I suppose that's all you really need to know here, although it would've been nice if Pike hadn't assumed that her readers had already read the first three books in the series, because the universe she's created here seems pretty interesting, and I would've liked to have known more about what the relationship exactly is between these aliens and the occasional human characters we see. Oh well, I guess! ...more
2024 reads, #9. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having 2024 reads, #9. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having a growing amount of clients in my freelance editing career who write these same kinds of books, and with me wanting to keep up with the latest trends. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my write-ups. Today's book is a perfectly serviceable if not pedestrian omegaverse tale, by which I mean it takes about a short story's worth of plot and marries it to about half a dozen sex scenes, the whole thing written with a new paragraph break after every single sentence in order to pad out the page count; and while that would usually get three stars from me in any other context, I've decided to start giving these kinds of romance novels four stars instead, because "serviceable" is all anybody wants and expects from these Kindle Unlimited romance novels in the first place, just something to help pleasantly kill about four to six hours of one's life without being too incredibly insulting to one's intelligence.
I have to admit, I continue to be obsessed with the omegaverse subgenre in romance, because of its goal to bring together what seems like to me two diametrically different ideas that you would think couldn't work with each other, where fans get all the thrills of a violent rape fantasy but all the teddy bears and pink balloons of a normal romance novel, basically by positing a paranormal universe where humans essentially "go into heat" like animals do, thus allowing you to still have Mister Perfect Nice Guy as the male lead character but who also simply can't help himself from grabbing any woman closer than a few feet from him and aggressively having his way with her. (Remember, if a man ever pushes a woman to the ground and then violently takes her from behind, just to later wash her hair in the bathtub, you know you're reading an omegaverse novel.) When it comes to that, this book delivers the fetish just fine, but doesn't bother or even aim to be the tiniest bit better than simply a fetish delivery vehicle, which is why these kinds of books come and go from the Kindle Store in the blink of an eye like the disposable tissues they are. Read it or not with this understanding before you pick it up. ...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
(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, #16. (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 the2023 reads, #16. (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 is my latest read from a group of 30 romance novels I downloaded to my Kindle for free last month from one of those promotional websites, featuring a handful of titles in each of around a dozen romance subgenres, such as Western romances, Regency romances, space alien group sex romances, small-town Christian romances, etc. This particular one is firmly within the "cozy mystery" subgenre, in that a crime is committed at the beginning of the book and our characters then spend the book solving the crime, but with them not being traditional crime-solvers but rather the types of people in the types of professions that go over well with middle-aged women who read romance novels. So in this case that's a group of professional bartenders from a Key West-type town in Florida, in New Orleans for a weekend to sling high-end cocktails on behalf of a hipster whiskey company at an industry booze convention, but who witness both a tampering of the whiskey to try to sabotage the company's chances and an attempted murder of one of the founders, then spend the rest of the book running around the streets of New Orleans trying to figure out who did it and why.
As such, then, this is as good as any other cozy mystery -- in other words, if you don't like the genre in general, you certainly won't like this particular example of it, but those who do like this genre will find a lot to like here as well. In fact, really my only complaint is that it didn't seem to be a romance story at all -- the one and only time our female lead character even kinda shows an interest in the opposite sex is when she makes an awkward drunken pass at her "boss for the weekend" (she does these gigs for fun -- she's actually a co-owner of a bar back in Florida for a living), and even that goes nowhere because he's too nice a guy. That made it funny to find on a page full of promotional books for traditional romance novels; but that certainly doesn't make it a bad book, albeit not a great one either, but rather exactly the amount of quality I would expect from a free book through a genre promotional website. Let the buyer be warned that that's exactly what you're getting here, no more and no less! ...more
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