Before we talk about them, let me first underline the name of this blog - To Each Their Own Reviews. I firmly believe that one person's DNF is another person's favourite read. Tastes in entertainment vary wildly, so take what I say here with a huge grain of salt.
Two very different books, first up is:
Ellora's Cave Moderne imprint
Erotic Romance
Published May 30, 2014
Blurb:
You shouldn’t mix business with pleasure.
Yet pleasure seems to be the one and only thing on Charlize’s mind the moment Connor steamrollers into her life. Desperate to save her family company, prove she’s more than a pretty face and worthy of being CEO, pleasure is a distraction she can’t afford.
She doesn’t want a bodyguard, especially not one whose caveman heroics kick her libido into hyper drive. But surrounded by enemies and an attacker on the loose, there’s only one man she can trust with her life.
Connor knows better than to get personal with clients. Yet there couldn’t be anything more personal about his feelings for Charlize. From the moment he clapped eyes on her he wanted nothing more than to throw her over his shoulder and really give her something to scream about. He’ll get his uptight she-cat to unwind, preferably one orgasm at a time.
With Connor in her office, her home, driving her to sweet, merciless distraction, there’s only so long Charlize can resist his sexy, dominant brand of protection.
I put this book down at about seventy pages in and told myself I was DNF'ing. I sent NetGalley feedback to that effect, and then I picked it up again later on in the day, and skim-read most of the rest of the book.
This book promises a dominant alpha male protecting a beautiful, focused CEO with something to prove. I was expecting a little overbearing but I was definitely not expecting Connor.
I found his behaviour too much to take. From throwing our heroine over his shoulder to extricate her from a potentially dangerous argument in his workplace (her cousin's aerobics club) and not taking the time before or after to understand why she was in the argument in the first place nor to acknowledge that the guys she was arguing with were ENTIRELY in the wrong, to the way he treats her the morning after another incident... I just found it all too much. I didn't think Charlize needed kid gloves, but she did deserve some respect. For a woman who was trying so hard to fight against 'the good old boys' in her workplace, Connor was not nearly supportive enough for my taste.
Having skimmed to the end, I can say that he does, kind of, get there. But I still felt that he reduced a *lot* of her reactions to sexual frustration or simply her being a 'shecat' and that didn't sit well with me.
1 star
Second book:
Darkness by Erin Eveland
Selladore Press
Horror-fantasy?
Published June 10, 2014
Blurb:
One Girl. One Boy. And the Masters of Darkness. See the Shadow Creatures. They are everywhere. But you can't run from the shadows. Or the Masters who control them.
In a world as grim as the powers within it, 16yr old Catherine has been born with a supernatural power called Darkness. Living an impoverished life, a hidden world starts to unfold with the encounters of two men in black, Masters of Darkness. Ancient enemies with the power to control the Darkness and its Shadow Creatures, the Masters will fight to the death for what one girl may hold – the ultimate power of Light.
Darkness is an interactive novel featuring music or art at the beginning of each chapter to explore.
My thoughts:
This one is billed as an interactive novel and I'll be straight by saying that I didn't test out that component at all. If there'd been links to follow as well as the codes to scan, I might have checked them out, but I've never tried to use a QR code and I wasn't really inspired to try.
So, Darkness started out really good. It was super, super creepy, lots of atmosphere, lots of shivers. Great. But then, as we shifted from Catherine's childhood to her present (at age sixteen), things started to drag for me. By the time Jorgen was introduced, I was blanking out for paragraphs and pages at a time. I just could not connect with the story at all. There was a lot of discussion about the Darkness, but I never felt like I got a solid concept in mind for it. And I take full responsibility for that, the many, many sections reflecting on it, I tended to skim read because my eyes were starting to cross.
The pacing of this book was just too slow for me. I ended up skipping maybe 50 pages towards the end, jumping to the final chapters to find out what happened, and that was ultimately unsatisfying for me too. Again, probably my fault for skipping that section of build up, but because so much of the book felt like building and building and building - I wanted a *huge* payoff and I never felt it really hit that point. I think, again, the pacing made my interest wan, which reduced my connection to the characters and ultimately the story.
This book gets a lot of love in reviews on Amazon, so I guess I just wasn't the target audience.
2 stars
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