Knight by Addison Carmichael

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


While I expected to like this book enough, black wolf protectors and all, there was a number of issues that just really bothered me:
– Personalities of main characters seem inconsistent and floating. They jump from one kind behavior to another in a way that doesn’t feel natural. The heroine switches from acting like a reasonable young woman kidnapped out of her life and being hostile and suspicions, to suddenly being all accepting and understanding and kind to everyone, to suddenly playing at being the lead detective on a case and having authority, to playing at girlfriends, to cuddling with a person and propositioning them, to shutting them out and down 5 mins later… and on and on. The hero only appears to be better because there is much less text in his POV, but his personality also felt like it flipped over half way through. There’s also this ‘brainless’ disease I’ve seen a number of times before, where characters talk and act but pretend that they have no ability to analyze or comprehend why they are doing something and just exist in denial.
– A tad too much hate towards women. As in, it’s very hard to find a positive female character who is not dead. I half expected for Rachel to turn out to be the killer. Because the remaining female characters were a lying traitor who sold people out for money and an aggressive egocentric bitch who couldn’t take no for an answer. A vivid contrast to a whole collection of attractive males who also all look like they are in their twenties, regardless of their age, and of course like the main character.
– The fact that people kept forgetting and ‘letting be’ the serial murderers they had to catch. The treatment of this part of the plot didn’t seem appropriate, as it was constantly pushed behind something else, as if catching the murders before they killed again was far less important than a whole list of other things. Or at least that was the impression I got.
– While the ‘twist’ conclusion itself was not boring, something happened to writing on the last 20% where it turned jaw-numbingly cheesy and dry. The places that were supposed to make me swoon made me grimace. It’s like suddenly there was something very unsavory about the tone of the book and it spoiled the conclusion. The bare facts of which, again, weren’t actually bad on their own… there was just something about the way it all was presented.



View all my reviews

Dark Days: Semester 1 by Liz Meldon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


While I thought that the book begun strongly, it soon switched to a format of jumping from one short encounter to another, most of them turning sexual. It was very easy to forget that the main characters were supposed to be supernaturals. Or that there was supposed to be something else going on besides two adults behaving like hormonal teenagers around each other, unable to express their thoughts and feelings. And the ‘mysterious disappearances’ were hardly mentioned until the very end of the book. While some of the writing and dialogs were fun, the ‘they’re going to speak or have sex once a month and that’s all the story we’ll get’ format made me feel increasingly detached half way through, especially from the heroine (who mostly bit the insides of her cheeks at least once each chapter, if not page).
I don’t know, I feel that there were some very good elements, but they are not really tied together in an engaging way. Maybe timeline-hopping kind of stories is just generally not my thing. I also generally don’t like characters (and people) who can’t be honest to themselves, it’s tiring.



View all my reviews