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Review: From Blood and Ash

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From Blood and Ash

By Jennifer L Armentrout

DNF

A Maiden…
Chosen from birth to usher in a new era, Poppy’s life has never been her own. The life of the Maiden is solitary. Never to be touched. Never to be looked upon. Never to be spoken to. Never to experience pleasure. Waiting for the day of her Ascension, she would rather be with the guards, fighting back the evil that took her family, than preparing to be found worthy by the gods. But the choice has never been hers.
A Duty…
The entire kingdom’s future rests on Poppy’s shoulders, something she’s not even quite sure she wants for herself. Because a Maiden has a heart. And a soul. And longing. And when Hawke, a golden-eyed guard honor bound to ensure her Ascension, enters her life, destiny and duty become tangled with desire and need. He incites her anger, makes her question everything she believes in, and tempts her with the forbidden.
A Kingdom…
Forsaken by the gods and feared by mortals, a fallen kingdom is rising once more, determined to take back what they believe is theirs through violence and vengeance. And as the shadow of those cursed draws closer, the line between what is forbidden and what is right becomes blurred. Poppy is not only on the verge of losing her heart and being found unworthy by the gods, but also her life when every blood-soaked thread that holds her world together begins to unravel.

This book has a solid 4.5-star rating with over 24K reviews on Amazon and I was so, so excited to finally pick it up. I’ve seen so many great things about it, ‘best love story’ even, that I was sure I’d found a new favorite book…

From page one, I was let down.

I just couldn’t. I put it down on page four.

A few days later I started it again. This time, I forced myself to continue reading. So many voices in my head were telling me it was supposed to be one of the greatest reads of my life. I think I got about 20%. Maybe not quite. Every page was a struggle.

First of all, the writing style… it was so clunky. I could never fall into a flow, constantly kicked out to slow down my reading to interpret sentence structure. I wanted to send it back so it could go through another round of edits.

Sure, the world seemed cool. The problems seemed problematic. The MC was in a place to dive in and leave her mark and get some things set right, damn the man! But I just couldn’t stick with it long enough to see if that happened.
The main character—I don’t even remember her name—just no. I have not liked MCs before and it isn’t necessarily a deal breaker for the book. I think a lot of MCs we’re not even supposed to like. This one though, I think we are supposed to like. We are supposed to feel sorry for her and be so curious about her traumatic past. But it all seemed so forced. Something about her seemed—inconsistent?
I hated the opening scene. I hated the forced nature of it, like it was saying ‘look, I’m not afraid to be sleazy. I know you like that.’ And I can like sleazy. Erotica is one of my most-read genres (don’t tell my mom). But I hate things being force-fed and that’s how I felt this was. Maybe it would have made more sense if I’d stuck around to find out what happened, but I have too many books on my TBR…

A part of me wants to go back and see if maybe I was just in a mood of some kind. But the rest of me will just put this one in that column of ‘didn’t do it for me.’

What books did others love that you just couldn’t stand?

Two of Forty-Eight Hundred (a rough guesstimate)

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What’s your second edit look like? For some reason, I was thinking I’d been all brilliant with this latest project, that my editing would go faster and smoother than the last book because I’d nailed it the first time through. Yeah, well, let’s just say I overestimated my brilliance by just a micrometer. A micrometer to the eleventy-billionth degree.

Sure, I got the basic story going, but I’m rewriting whole chapters into intelligible language, rather than basic phrases that might be understood on a certain dosage of hallucinogenics laced with droplets of my blood. Needless-to-say, editing is not going to be a quick once over.

How could I possibly think it would be easy? Mostly, I think it was just over-eagerness, or simple optimism. I’m way behind on my deadline, so I convinced myself it was fine because the edits would be smooth and I’d be able to catch up some time. Riiiight. Maybe for my next book I can just think really hard at a blank page and the story will fall right out all neat and clean and full of genius. I won’t even bother crossing my fingers…

We have to put in the work. Every time. Every time this is the process. Every time it comes in stages, slowly sculpting it out to its best form. Rushing is a mistake I’ve made, and I won’t again. Sure, some people will be disappointed to have to wait longer, but they’d be more disappointed to get a rushed piece of work. Still, I need to focus and get the work done, regardless of where I’m at with it.

I hope all your projects are moving forward, regardless of the pace that happens.

Souljacker, Lily Bound #1

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Book Review

SoulJacker

By: Yasmine Galenorn
Urban Fantasy
2 Stars

Lily O’Connell, a succubus, owns Lily Bound, an elite sex salon in the Blood Night District of Seattle. When a client is murdered in her house, a patch of skin missing from his chest, she knows there’s something evil afoot. Then comes the news that the Souljacker—a tattoo-artist-turned-vampire—has escaped from an institution for criminally deranged Supernaturals. And he’s hunting and killing everyone he has ever inked.

With one of the Souljacker’s tattoos on her thigh and nowhere else to turn, Lily hires Archer Desmond, a chaos demon and PI, to help her track down the vampire before he finds her and her friends. But Lily didn’t plan to fall for Archer. And as the old tales say—a succubus who falls in love will destroy the heart of the one she seeks to claim.

The main character of this series is a Succubus, with a Chaos Demon lover. How can that not be good?

This is exactly what I thought when I decided to start on Lily’s journey. If I hadn’t been listening to it at work, where I’m suited up and unable to easily stop the player and change it to something else, I probably wouldn’t have even finished it.

Trite. That sums it all up. It was the word that kept exploding in my head as I mentally groaned at the pure uninspired telling of what should have been a fantastic UF tale. Yasmine Gaelnorn uses all the right keywords but just can’t pull it off. There are Bisexual tones, with erotic sex scenes, witches, vampires, and Fae, and did I mention Succubus and Chaos Demon? I can’t say it enough: how can this not be good?

This centuries-old creature apparently has zero life experience to draw from when the shit hits the fan. The only time in centuries of living, of hiding, among humans, does anything happen is for the purposes of this book. Ugh. It was just all too cliche. And I love cliche. I don’t even think it was cliche, now that I say that. It was just so non-imaginative. Is there a word for that? Uninventive? Trite.

And how is a Chaos Demon not hot, and fun, and just everything great about urban fantasy? Well, he’s not. And the sex scenes weren’t even great. The book’s main character is a succubus. “Need sex now?” “Yes, please.” “Okay, excuse us for a few minutes.” Trite.

Basically, read any other Urban Fantasy book.