1 out of 5

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Warrior's Woman (Ly-San-Ter, #1)

Warrior’s Woman by Johanna Lindsey

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


DNF.
This book made my skin crawl so bad I couldn’t throw it away fast enough.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but this vulgarly over-sexualized…slavery/rape/humiliation kink?whatever this is, is definitely not my cup of tea.
I kept reading for some time thinking ‘maybe it will still redeem itself with some next development’ or ‘maybe it’s not actually as bad as it seems’ (that maybe a character who was supposed to be this highly-professional, impeccably-trained, highest rank security officer with knowledge and space technology will actually win or at least keep her dignity?)…but every turn brought only increasing disgust.
A future where humans are so obsessed with sex they become mindless and violent if they don’t get their ‘sex therapy’ from professionals daily?
Where women are required to lose virginity before certain age or they will be forced to do it by law (for their own health, of course)?
Where a wild ‘usurper’ appears to take over the planet and the first important matter of business he completes is to ship off fighter women into (sex)slavery and rob all other women out of employment immediately? And it just happens?
An AI (the “wise-cracking” one from the description) that is obsessed with the topic of her human not having sex and decides she (the human) must be raped by alien and enjoy it?
I can’t. This book made me so nauseous I think I need a bucket.




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Kitty and the Midnight Hour (Kitty Norville, #1)

Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


DNFed.
This book lost me somewhere between mleh and disgusting.
A weak (in more than one sense) main character who surfs through the story on sheer dumbness and luck. It’s likely very subjective, but there just was nothing to like about her. The whole ‘Secret world of supernatural creatures? Hear me talk about it on the radio! A hired gun is coming to kill me and he needs to do it on the air? Of course I can’t quit the show and save my hide, the show is more important!’ way of thinking is just something I can’t get behind.
Her attitude towards everyone and everything is just..too dumb.
Then, even setting the protagonist aside, the whole “supernatural world” of this book is too immoral and distasteful. It’s all about dominating, bullying, and abusing each other. Mated alpha practically raping anyone he wants and she still wants to hide behind him and have him protect her? Main character’s close friend questioning her why she would protect herself from being raped by the guy who turned her against her will and telling her she’s “getting too cocky”? The main character in turn then deciding she would enjoy it to become a bully herself instead?
No thanks.



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Born of Night (The League: Nemesis Rising #1)

Born of Night by Sherrilyn Kenyon

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


For the love of all bookish I don’t understand why are these books so popular. The only reason I went there (commenting on a book’s popularity) is because it was due to this book showing up in all kinds of ‘best’ lists while having a high rating that likely made me order it by mistake, without realizing that when I last tried to read a book by this author I DNFed after first few chapters.

I did not get much further with this one either.
Made it 100 pages in, hoping to catch a glimpse of a reason so many people’ve read this, but decided not to torture myself any further.

Everything about this is awfully cheesy, trashy, and confusing.
With all the head hopping on top.
With all the time and word count spent talking about how hot and sexy everyone is and how much trouble they have being hard for each other all the time of course we can’t spend enough time to actually describe the world around us so that it would make some sense. Ah, but we also have time to mention rape and child murders and abuse, to add to ‘badass’ factor. But making sense of how planets, ships, stations, space travel work in this world? Not nearly important enough than all the sexiness.

In this book, the setting ‘implied’ and one actually presented never seem to match.
The ‘deadly assassins’ hardly act the part. The main male character is a disaster…
Little example: he hides his eyes. Not because they are some strange alien product of his mixed heritage, or because of some gruesome battle scars. But because they’re normal human green eyes that ‘show his beautiful soul’. He lives with a bunch of cats. He walks constantly hard when he is around the female main character. Really. The image of mysterious and aloof deadly assassin, don’t you understand?

The female main character… Her thought pattern is well described by this: ‘You saved me from assassins and are here to guard me because there’s a huge price on my head? You even put shields on my windows so that they wouldn’t shoot my head off? How dare you! You’re fired! Get out of my home!’

I rarely do this, but I’d like to pick up at the few more moments that made me want to bang my head against the nearest wall from the very beginning of the book:
FMC – kidnapped, almost raped, beaten, chained in the middle of compost pile on a ship that was just went through hostile take over. Sees a new person coming for her:

‘Kiara was amazed by the handsomeness of his face.’ 3 seconds later ‘For some reason she couldn’t fathom, she believed him (that he wouldn’t hurt her)

…

‘And she had to admit there was nothing hotter than a man with that kind of honed physique whose face was totally hidden.

I’m sorry. What? Is this some kind of ‘keep a bag over your face’ kink?
Just…what?

MMC – Professional assassin, one of the best out there, built up to be this powerful, mysterious, cold man with dark past and iron moral principles. First time we get his POV:

‘His body was so hard it was all he could do not to limp. And to think, he’d mistakenly believed he’d survived real torture in the past.’

Really? He carried a beaten woman out of space trash can where they just killed a few people, and all he can think is that her small breasts in the torn and dirty nightgown are torturing him more that years of child abuse and murder and outrunning a league of professional assassins? REALLY?
In what dimension are we supposed to find this romantic or even okay?

Another classy thought from the main character after she wakes up in a strange place and still thinks she might be held captive:

‘Tall and lean, he was the sexiest thing she’d ever seen in her entire life, and given the hot pieces of cheese employed by her dance company, that said a lot.’

Am I the only one who has problem with writing like this? Really?

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Love is Blind

Love is Blind by William Boyd

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Couldn’t do it. DNF.
Yes, yes, the author certainly knows how to use his language, that is a fact. But the content…
It’s boring. It’s unpleasant. It’s full of cliches so thick I was gagging.
I almost quit right after the Part I (which I’d rather call ‘waste of pages irrelevant to the story’, personally), which consisted of an ‘introduction’ featuring a cliche prostitute interlude, a selection of no less cliche ‘random unsavoury side characters’ (completely irrelevant to the story), and the most cliche abusive father figure. Practically every element of this part one was nasty and distasteful, and left a heavy feeling that it existed only to stretch word count while pouring out author’s loathing towards humanity.

It’s a skilfully written account of a life of a man⁠—an average man⁠—who isn’t especially clever, talented, or interesting, who had some things happen to him in professional life, and had a lot of bad luck in his personal life (starting with his birth), and I believe that’s all it is.
If the main character is present there will be a mention of a cigarette on every page. Maybe five cigarettes. And 3 more cliches.
He, of course, also has brilliant ideas and great ambitions, while others exist only to make his life difficult.

I should stop justifying the fact that I couldn’t finish this book.
The real reason is only one—it was unpleasant to read.



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A Hunger Like No Other (Immortals After Dark, #2)

A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I didn’t like the first one, but since this one kept showing up in practically every list and ranking I use to find new books to read, I felt almost obligated to try it.
This one felt somewhat better than the previous one, but still 1.5 legs over the line of “too rapey”. Still too full of hatred and aggression. Too crude. Too preoccupied with material things and symbols of wealth and sex, with ‘sex and violence’ being all these books are really built on. Characters hardly talk to each other, mostly at each other. Everyone hates each other, everyone wants to kill everyone else, and then when they feel a fierce need to also have sex with each other for some ‘supernatural-biological’ reason, the ‘plot’ ensues.
At least I now have ‘tried’ these series and the author enough to have no regrets about parting our ways and not looking back.



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