Category: links (Page 5 of 10)

August Round Up

September 1, 2015 / Kaetrin

Monthly Mini Review

Soul Deep by Pamela Clare – C I usually love Pamela Clare’s romantic suspense books and I was excited to see this one release. However, I found this novella overly saccharin and the epilogue was far too cheesy for me and hit a few of my personal hot buttons.

On a more positive note, I was happy to see Janet Killeen again and I liked Jack West from previous books. Jack is 63 and therefore significantly older than the regular romance hero. Janet is 45 and that doesn’t seem the least bit old to me anymore – I’d have almost preferred her to be older actually (with the added bonus of no hot button epilogue because reasons). This is a novella and I expected the romance would be quick but even so I was not expecting the characters to acknowledge (if only to themselves) they were in love in mere days. That was too fast for me and took the book out of realistic and into fairytale for me. Perhaps if I had started the book that way I’d have been okay but I did not so… The beginning was strong but I’m afraid the author started to lose me at the point the L word was first mentioned. I did like that Janet was always competent, even when she was stuck in a ditch in her car in a blizzard, she had a space blanket to keep her warm. Perhaps Jack is unusually vigorous for a man of his age (who knows – when I get closer to that age myself I may well think back to this post and slap my past self upside the head) but I was prepared to go with it for the story. Continue reading

July Round Up

August 1, 2015 / Kaetrin

Monthly Mini Review

Yours All Along by Roni Loren – B- This novella is a kind of prequel to Call On Me which I reviewed for Dear Author this month. I read it in the wrong order but it doesn’t really matter. The only thing Call On Me “spoils” is that they are happily together and romance readers already know that’s how it’s going to end so it’s no big deal. Actually, it was probably beneficial that I’d read Call On Me first because I knew Devon and Hunter were still very happy together many years later and that helped give me a sense that they were very much right at the end of Yours All Along.

The novella is set in 2007 and flashes back to 2003 when both men were in college and roomed in a frat house together. Devon, openly gay, became close friends with Hunter, who comes from a wealthy controlling family with high expectations. His State Senator father is a homophobic bigot and expects certain behaviours from Hunter – and they definitely don’t include being gay. Hunter had previously identified as straight but over time, his attraction for Devon develops. I suppose it is a version of an Out for You story but it felt authentic to me. When Devon and Hunter met they were just 20 so it seemed not unbelievable to me that Hunter may not have previously realised his same sex attraction. This is particularly so because it was only when he came to California for college that he felt any sense of freedom to be himself at all. Continue reading

June Round Up

July 2, 2015 / Kaetrin

Monthly Mini Review

Alex by Sawyer Bennett – C+ I’ve had this book on my TBR for some time. I bought the second in the series when it was on special recently and thought I ought to start with the first one. I was a little meh about it at the very start. The writing style seemed a little too simplistic and on the didactic side and Sutton was just too perfect. But then there was a section from Alex’s POV where he was remembering a particulary awful thing his father did to him and it got me right in the feels. The mid section of the story was a little stronger but Alex wasn’t that much of an asshole most of the time, depsite his warnings to the contrary. In the end, it fizzled a bit, with the wish-fulfillment and sparkly rainbows of the side plots which felt unrealistic. Alex had a whiplash fast change from “I’m falling for her” to “I have to break up with her because reasons” to “what a doofus I was, I want her back”. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me from a narrative perspective. I also wanted a lot more about Sutton’s and Alex’s drug awareness programme. Sutton was supposed to be giving the team owners a weekly report about whether Alex was behaving himself, but if she did any of that, it didn’t make its way into the book. Continue reading

May Round Up

June 2, 2015 / Kaetrin

Monthly Mini Review

The Marine Next Door by Julie Miller – C (Trigger warning: rape) I bought this one when it was on special recently for 99c. I love the rescue trope, even though it is becoming increasingly hard for me to find books which give me the payoff I’m after. Maggie Wheeler is a Sergeant for the Kansas City PD and has recently qualified to apply for her detective shield. She’s a single mother, with a 10 year old son, Travis. Former marine and now arson investigator Captain John Murdock moves in next door to her and her son. Maggie’s ex-husband, Danny, has recently been released from prison for his brutal rape of Maggie a decade before (do the math) and she is nervous of meeting new men. Even so, Travis quickly bonds with John and Maggie finds herself attracted for the first time since her attack. The romance moved super fast – this stretched my credulity to breaking point particularly given that Maggie hasn’t had sex with anyone since she was raped for a weekend by her violent (now ex-) husband. That she had no hang ups about getting intimate with someone after so long, except for a fear she wouldn’t be very good at it, seemed unrealistic. For a mother as protective of her son as Maggie is, the thought that she’d be prepared to move in with John after mere days of being in a relationship was also a bit much (I’m practicing the art of understatement here).

I don’t know how police forces work in the US but I thought that all police officers had to do their time in the field. Maggie is presented as “desk sergeant” and my impression was that she had not spent any time in the field. I thought all police officers questioned witnesses, secured crime scenes and assisted detectives. When Maggie is asked to be on the task force investigating the Red Rose Rapist, she reacts like this is a first. Maybe I have the way things work in the states wrong but it felt a bit out of place to me. Continue reading

April Round Up

May 4, 2015 / Kaetrin

Monthly Mini Review

Dirty Secrets by Jane O’Reilly – B+ The second in her recent erotic novella duology, Dirty Secrets is about Jules, Amy’s (from Dirty Talk) kind-of-former-best friend. Jules has split up with Dave the Dick for the last time. She has escaped to London for a month to try and recover herself. Somehow over the course of their relationship, Jules lost all sense of her self worth, her value and her self esteem. Dave the Dick slowly eroded her confidence in everything. She is finally out and she realises that he’s done a number on her but it is only as she begins to recover that she realises exactly how big of a number he did.

Theo is a friend from school. They haven’t seen each other in 10 years, but when she calls him he offers her a haven and she takes him up on it. Good decision Jules! Theo is a co-owner of an exclusive sex club in London, the complete details of which are (I think, deliberately) vague. They cater to fantasies, with a particular emphasis on women’s pleasure. Theo offers Jules a 30 day membership to explore her fantasies and get in touch with her sexual self. Theo’s gentle friendship and calm support, together with the encouragement and charm of Theo’s business partner, John, are balms to Jules’ soul and there are sexual adventures with a “stranger”. Continue reading

March Round Up

April 2, 2015 / Kaetrin

Monthly Mini Review

Rock Chick Redemption by Kristen Ashley, narrated by Susannah Jones – B+ I said in my review of Rock Chick (I read the print version) that I imagined Amanda Ronconi reading the story to me and that this would probably mean I’d be inclined to judge the narration by Ms. Jones more harshly. I listened to Rock Chick Rescue and Rock Chick Redemption for fun, “just for me” listens because sometimes it’s nice for me just to be a consumer and not a reviewer and I wanted my brain to relax for a bit. But I wanted to say something about the narration.

I could wish that Susannah Jones has slightly more vocal range and could portray a larger variety of male voices – pretty much, all the heroes sound the same and they’re really only slightly deeper in pitch than her female character voices. (For regular audiobook listeners, this is a trade off we make fairly often. There are only so many character voices a narrator can perform and many male narrators cannot sound “female” in pitch and vice versa; however, they do adjust their tone sufficiently to give an audio cue to listeners that this is the hero or heroine talking and, provided it’s not grating, that can be enough.)

But, as for the rest, Ms. Jones was brilliant. She didn’t have any trouble with some of the more convoluted sentences Ms. Ashley uses (which I love even though their grammar is sometimes quite tortured) and the completely nailed the humour of the piece. I cannot even express to you how much I love her characterisation of Tex. He is twice as hilarious on audio. Continue reading