Category: Urban Fantasy
The Sanctum: The Girl by Madhuri Blaylock
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
The Sanctum, an all-powerful governing body founded by ten families, entrusted to maintain the peace amongst Magicals and ensure the ignorance of humans, has been corrupted by greed and savagery for generations, but is all Wyatt Clayworth has ever known.
Dev, the hybrid demon prophesied to bring an end to The Sanctum and destroy the world for Magicals and humans alike, is not what Wyatt expected to find when sent out on his latest mission. Believed to be hunting a killing machine, Wyatt finds little more than a broken girl with haunted eyes and a bit of a death wish. Drawn to one another for reasons they cannot begin to explain to themselves, much less anyone else, Wyatt is determined to protect Dev and help her realize her mission to avenge the deaths of her family at the hands of The Sanctum.
Set against the backdrop of New York City, THE GIRL is described as “outstanding, original, complex, deep and intoxicating”, a “well written, unique…fast-paced read” that begins as one girl’s simple quest for revenge and evolves into a complicated tale of trust, friendship, honor and love.
[Full disclosure: I received a free ebook from the author in exchange for an honest review.]
One of the things that really stuck out for me as a reader was the characters in this book. They’re all teenagers but because of their life experience you get more mature points of view. Some would say that it’s not quite believable, but if you had to go through what Dev does in the beginning of the book, you wouldn’t act your age either. Even Wyatt and the others in the book who are teenagers act more maturely and that really does showcase that perhaps The Sanctum isn’t as benevolent as they claim to be.
Dev was a pretty good character. She’s the product of an affair between an angel and a demon and that makes her the one from the prophecy that is supposed to end The Sanctum and bring about the end of the world to boot. Except when you meet her, sure she has a warrior attitude but at the same time she’s a healer. She doesn’t want to hurt people that she doesn’t have to except when The Sanctum murders her whole family and gives her even more reason to hate them (other than the fact they are judge, jury and executioner for all magical beings like her). Madhuri Blaylock sure hooks her readers in the beginning with Dev’s unique point of view and then she holds their attention by switching between Dev and Wyatt mainly but a few other minor characters as well. It keeps the plot moving along at a good pace and although in the hands of some authors POV switches that frequently would be confusing, The Girl doesn’t stray into that territory.
Even better than the characters, the plot is very fast-paced. It’s largely character-driven, which makes the frantic pacing unusual but for this book it works. There’s a lot of character development (obviously) and there are some nice little slice-of-life interludes for readers to catch their breath but for the most part we’ve got mostly action. That’s a good thing too because Madhuri Blaylock nicely balances action with dialogue so not only do we get exciting scenes, the dialogue reveals quite a bit about the characters themselves. And best of all, she balances description with action so that the descriptions don’t feel like they’re slowing down the action nor are we left with the feeling that we’ve been dropped in a dark room of talking (and fighting) heads.
One of the things that was good but not great with The Girl was the world-building. It was good because it was relatively believable because The Sanctum keeps tabs on magical creatures and kills any that cross the line and let humans know what they are. Some of the creatures were quite interesting and I loved discovering Dev’s different powers along with the other characters but it just didn’t have that ‘wow’ factor. Like I said, it was good but not amazing. There weren’t any super-unique creatures or anything like that and the prophecy element to the whole story has been done before. It didn’t stray into ‘meh’ territory but it wasn’t the most awesome, unique world-building that I’ve ever come across and there’s really no shame in that. The world-building was solid, believable and for most people I think it will have that ‘wow’ factor.
Essentially, The Girl is a great start to The Sanctum series. It ends on one heck of a cliffhanger and overall it’s a very good book with realistic characters, great pacing and solid world-building. It doesn’t yet have that ‘wow’ factor but it’s a good book and I’m very eager to read the next book: The Boy.
I give this book 4/5 stars.
Eyes of the Seer by Peter Dawes
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
It all started with a murder. Two victims lay dead at the hands of Peter Dawes, but what laid in wait for him was not the sound of sirens or the banging of a gavel. It would turn a doctor into a killer and a man into a monster.
Follow Peter as he exchanges his blood-stained clothing for tailored suits, his scalpel for fine-crafted daggers, and reinvents himself as the newest vampire-child in a coven of decadent sophisticates. He even takes on the name ‘Flynn’ – a child of red – in honor of his new-found devilish side, and to remove one of the last tethers to his human past.
For four years, Flynn embodies every bit the bloody immortal he was sired to become. Under the reign of his maker, Sabrina, he establishes a reputation as the most feared assassin to ever terrorize the covens of Philadelphia. But the surefooted-steps and quick hands that make him a virtuoso when it comes to killing humans and vampires alike are a mark of the mortal destiny which haunts him even beyond death. And despite his efforts, Peter’s humanity is not as dead as some would prefer.
On the verge of completing their vie for power, Sabrina’s ‘dark-killer’ will suddenly find himself at odds over his devotion to his mistress when an impish sorceress named Monica awakens the hidden powers he was destined to possess. In this world of macabre and shrewdly practical immortal beings, will Flynn’s supernatural gifts be used to orchestrate the wicked deeds of his maker? Or can the cold-blooded nature of a vampire be warmed by the compassion of a Seer?
EYES OF THE SEER is a gripping tale conspicuously authored by Peter Dawes – years later, he’s decided to put the story of his life to paper, albeit listed as ‘fiction’. (Vampires can’t really claim to exist, after all. It would ruin the whole gig.)
[Full disclosure: I received a free paperback copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.]
I’ll admit it: I like vampires. Not the wimpy sparkly ones of Twilight, but the cold-blooded killers that are as ruthless as they are beautiful that you find in many movies and other books. So when I was contacted about reading Eyes of the Seer, I knew I was in for a treat. I was not disappointed.
Flynn/Peter is a complicated character. He just killed his fiancee and her lover and then is suddenly turned into a vampire. Not only that, his maker seems to think he has a higher purpose and is determined to make him into a vampire super-assassin. But is everything as it seems? Of course not and that’s what makes Flynn’s journey from mild-mannered but slightly morose doctor to a ruthless killer to something else (I’m not going to spoil it for you). It’s fascinating as Flynn struggles to find his true self and it’s not at all simple, so you’ll be in for an emotional roller coaster. There are times when I hated Flynn and times when I loved him, but by the end I was satisfied as to how Peter Dawes developed his character. It felt like a believable transition.
The best part about this book is that although it is quite character-driven, it is short and has a very fast plot. Like I said, it’s not a simple plot so you’re in for one heck of a ride as you try to guess what will happen next. Some of the twists and turns are predictable while most are not. Flynn has a long road to go down in only five years and he’s constantly adapting to the latest developments, including the appearance of the mysterious and beguiling Monica. He has to make some pretty tough choices and he is constantly fighting a battle with his two sides (the good side and the ruthless vampire side); sometimes one side beats the other, but the beaten side never stays down for long. It definitely keeps you guessing.
The writing was excellent. Peter Dawes has a very concise writing style, but also a very beautiful one. He can describe things in perfect detail without going too far overboard and boring readers. It’s a tough balancing act, but he’s able to keep up the suspense during the many fight scenes while at the same time giving readers a good picture of what’s going on. Not many authors can do that, so I was very impressed.
Finally, the world-building was actually pretty good. It wasn’t the “oh wow” level but it was pretty darn close. Just when you think that you know everything there is to know about vampires in Dawes’ world, he throws you for a loop. For one, there are other supernatural beings out there that are just as nasty (if not more) than vampires. Flynn has created himself a few enemies, but because of his unique nature, a few friends to compensate for the enemies. I can’t really go into detail without spoiling some of the good surprises, but I will reiterate my point: this book keeps you guessing.
You really can’t ask for more than that in a vampire book. You have a believable vampire mythology, an interesting if not entirely sympathetic main character, awesome writing and lots of plot twists. The book ends on such a cliffhanger that you’ll be like me, though: begging for the next book.
I give this book 5/5 stars.
The Vampire’s Bite by Eve Grant
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
She’s responsible and takes life too seriously
Susan Ethans is a model student: perfect grades, a dream scholarship, and a promising career ahead of her. But her grades alone aren’t enough to flirt with the hot guys on campus. She doesn’t want to end up being a wallflower, but there isn’t much she can do about it.
A vampire bites her
A madman bites her neck and drinks her blood. She tries to get away, but he drains her life away until she collapses.
She thinks she’s going to die, but she wakes up at an eccentric millionaire’s home. She feels healthy, renewed, and even smarter. Something is changing within her.
He has everything… except love
Nicholas Hill has power, money, and an English accent to die for, but he speaks like a man from the 19th Century. His notions of propriety and manners make him different to every other man in the world. Susan is instantly attracted to him and knows that he likes her, but something tortures his soul and doesn’t let him follow his heart.
Will an ordinary girl change a powerful businessman’s life, or will their personalities clash until they can no longer stand each other?
[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]
This is mainly a character-driven novel so first I’m going to talk about the main character: Susan. Susan is essentially the same kind of person that I am. She works hard to please everyone at the expense of following what she really loves as well as having a social life. When she becomes a vampire and is intoxicated by her new powers, I can totally understand her suddenly wanting to leave it all behind despite working so hard for her spot in university and her scholarship. Sometimes you just want to say “screw you” and leave it all behind and a life-changing event like realizing you’re a vampire can do just that to a person. So while I know that a lot of people will hate Susan for giving up everything, for me she was definitely easy to relate to as a character.
The Vampire’s Bite is ridiculously short at only 85 pages, so we really do have quite a fast-paced plot. Susan herself sometimes slows it down, however. She takes interludes to describe everything in great detail as she comes into her new powers, but then never really goes anywhere with those new powers. I would have liked for her to have more interaction with Nicholas simply because then things would be explained, but that was not to be. I really would have liked for Eve Grant to extend her book for a little more detail, rather than shoving the explanation into the sequel because while it does make the plot fast, it leaves you with more questions than answers.
With all that said, The Vampire’s Bite is not a bad book. It will never be high literature and for myself it’s more guilty pleasure than anything. I wasn’t intrigued enough to want to read the sequel, but some of you might if you give it a try. If you’re into the modern vampire (suave, sophisticated and rich) then you’ll probably like it, but if you’re new to the whole vampire thing it wouldn’t exactly be the first book I’d recommend. In the end, it falls somewhere around the middle: it’s not great and it’s not bad. It’s just a solid ‘meh’.
I give this book 3/5 stars.
Immortal by Gene Doucette
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
“I don’t know how old I am.My earliest memory is something along the lines of fire good, ice bad, so I think I predate written history, but I don’t know by how much. I like to brag that I’ve been there from the beginning, and while this may very well be true, I generally just say it to pick up girls.”
–Adam the Immortal
Surviving sixty thousand years takes cunning and more than a little luck. But in the twenty-first century, Adam confronts new dangers—someone has found out what he is, a demon is after him, and he has run out of places to hide.Worst of all, he has had entirely too much to drink.
Immortal is a first person confessional penned by a man who is immortal, but not invincible. In an artful blending of sci-fi, adventure, fantasy, and humor, IMMORTAL introduces us to a world with vampires, demons and other “magical” creatures, yet a world without actual magic.
At the center of the book is Adam.
“I have been in quite a few tight situations in my long life. One of the first things I learned was if there is going to be a mob panic, don’t be standing between the mob and wherever it is they all want to go. The second thing I learned was, don’t try to run through fire.”
–Adam the Immortal
Adam is a sixty thousand year old man. (Approximately.) He doesn’t age or get sick, but is otherwise entirely capable of being killed.His survival has hinged on an innate ability to adapt, his wits, and a fairly large dollop of luck. He makes for an excellent guide through history . . . when he’s sober.
Immortal is a contemporary fantasy for non-fantasy readers and fantasy enthusiasts alike.
[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]
What I’ve always wondered at is if there really are immortals, how will they live in today’s society where you need an ID to do almost anything? At what point do mortals discover their existence? Well, Gene Doucette certainly deals with that in Immortal.
Adam is probably one of my favourite characters I’ve read about in a long time. Sure he’s a drunken lecher of the first degree, but after sixty thousand years, wouldn’t you be too? He’s clever and street smart, which has kept him alive over the millennia and yet he still holds onto the romantic idea that he’s not the only immortal, that the redheaded beauty he keeps seeing will one day reveal herself to him. If they all don’t get captured by scientists to be poked and prodded and exploited first. I love The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and I have to say that quite honestly, Immortal does have the feel of the classic as Adam tries to sober up to run away from his many would-be captors. I don’t compare classics like Douglas Adams’ book to contemporary works very easily, so you can be certain that I really do enjoy and recommend Immortal.
Even though not all that much is revealed about the origins of Adam’s immortality, I can still say that the world-building in this book was excellent. Why? Because there are very good reasons for his immortality being shrouded in mystery: humans were quite primitive at the time and he himself says that he wasn’t engaging in the kind of complex thought that is present today. “Fire good, ice bad”, indeed. We see flashbacks of his travels across the centuries, sometimes drunken and sometimes not as he encountered everything from demons to famous gangsters. He’s certainly had a pretty cool life, but not in the “I’m immortal so I’ve met every famous figure ever” way. No, sometimes he lived a pretty ordinary life and sometimes not, which makes his current political savvy believable as well as his street smarts.
As for the plot, it was surprisingly fast-paced when you consider that there were occasional interludes into the past. Normally those slow the plot down unbearably, but not so in this case because Gene Doucette is a good writer. I wanted to know more about Adam’s fascinating background not only because it was fascinating but because it was also relevant to where he is today: being hunted so that scientists can figure out how to recreate the conditions for his immortality. Adam’s not too keen on being poked, prodded and possibly dissected so things get very, very interesting toward the end of the novel. Particularly when we see our red-headed friend again.
So all in all, Immortal was a very enjoyable read and I would definitely recommend it to others. Adam is a very memorable character and the world-building is so well done that even with the little knowledge you’re given, you remain fairly satisfied that you know most everything that is relevant to the story itself. Of course I can’t wait to see that expanded in the next book, Hellenic Immortal. I’ll definitely be watching and waiting to read the rest of Adam’s story.
I give this book 5/5 stars.
Blood Diva by V. M. Gautier
(Cover picture courtesy of Mythical Books.)
The 19th century’s most infamous party-girl is undead and on the loose in the Big Apple.
When 23 year-old Parisian courtesan, Marie Duplessis succumbed to consumption in 1847, Charles Dickens showed up for the funeral and reported the city mourned as though Joan of Arc had fallen. Marie was not only a celebrity in in her own right, but her list of lovers included Franz Liszt – the first international music superstar, and Alexandre Dumas fils, son of the creator of The Three Musketeers. Dumas fils wrote the novel The Lady of the Camellias based on their time together. The book became a play, and the play became the opera La Traviata. Later came the film versions, and the legend never died.
But what if when offered the chance for eternal life and youth, Marie grabbed it, even when the price was the regular death of mortals at her lovely hand?
In 2014, Marie wonders if perhaps nearly two centuries of murder, mayhem, and debauchery is enough, especially when she falls hard for a rising star she believes may be the reincarnation of the only man she ever truly loved. But is it too late for her to change? Can a soul be redeemed like a diamond necklace in hock? And even if it can, have men evolved since the 1800′s? Or does a girl’s past still mark her?
Blood Diva is a sometimes humorous, often dark and erotic look at sex, celebrity, love, death, destiny, and the arts of both self-invention and seduction. It’s a story that asks a simple question – Can a one hundred ninety year-old demimondaine find happiness in 21st century Brooklyn without regular infusions of fresh blood?
[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]
As my regular readers are probably well aware of by now, I love opera. It makes up the bulk of music I’ve listened to in the past two years or so and since there’s nothing on television anymore it also makes up the bulk of movies/performances I watch. I guess you could say I’m an opera fanatic, so when I saw this book on NetGalley I decided I’d go for it. After all, while I’d never heard of the real Marie Duplessis, I sure loved Violetta in La Traviata. I figured it would be nice to see a different take on the woman behind the legend.
What was really clear from the beginning is the Gautier loves opera and she loves the book by Alexandre Dumas fils. She has this excited energy about both of them that you really just can’t fake. However, to me it seemed like her love of opera sometimes exceeded her knowledge of it. When referring to a famous aria from Verdi’s Rigoletto she called it “Dona e mobile”, which is not correct Italian. It should be “La Donna e mobile”. At another point a vampire tells her he calls blood l’elisir d’amore because of the Rossini opera; that’s not really possible because Donizetti wrote the opera in question. Some other errors like saying “vencere, vencere” is the last line of the aria “Nessun Dorma” can be attributed to the lack of knowledge of characters, but the two examples above should have been caught in the editing process.
For all of my nitpicking, I really did enjoy Blood Diva. Marie/Alphonsine is a great character and is very three dimensional. She struggled so much with her transition to being a vampire and now she struggles with being a vampire because she’s falling in love with a human. A human that doesn’t (and can’t) know about her past. Marie also really struggles about what she’s forced to do for work because sometimes the elder vampires (in order to gain funds for the communal fund to help other vampires) sometimes make her revert to her old profession. It’s actually kind of sad that she was gifted an immortal life on her deathbed and yet, for all that she’s seen and learned, she’s back where she started 200 years ago.
This is mostly a character novel, so it helped that both Marie and Dashiell were three dimensional. The one thing I really loved was that their relationship was intense and beautiful, but that it also had its rocky moments. Contrary to how they’re portrayed in many novels, relationships are rarely straightforward and couples in love do argue. Marie and Dashiell certainly argue, but you can always feel that they love each other. Considering their relationship takes up most of the book, I really appreciated that Gautier spent so much effort on it.
The plot was pretty good right up until the end. As I’ve said, this was character driven so of course it’s going to be slower than a plot-driven novel, but Blood Diva never really drags. The characters are far too interesting for that. My only problem is that the ending left me unsatisfied. It fits with the theme throughout the book of Marie’s fictional incarnations, so I don’t mind that the ending was not necessarily the most cheerful ever. I just felt unsatisfied, like “I read all that only for it to end like this?”. It didn’t feel like there was much closure, really.
Still, Gautier’s writing style was beautiful, her pacing was excellent as well as her characters and she had that kind of excitement that you just can’t fake. Despite the ending and the little mistakes I really, really enjoyed Blood Diva and I hope that Gautier, whether under this pseudonym or another, writes more novels in the future.
I give this book 4/5 stars.