Tagged: charlie
Electrify Me by Bibi Rizer
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
All Gloria Falcon wants is to have a nice New Year’s Eve with a nice man. Is that so much to ask? But after seven disastrous New Years in a row, this year she’s trying something different. Committed to spending her New Year’s Eve manning the phones at a suicide crisis phone line, Gloria is sure the karma she earns will break her New Year’s curse. But when a blackout cancels her night of philanthropy, rather than spend the night moping in the dark, she goes on a ride along with the cute electric company lineman who failed to fix the power.
Charlie Zhang is not much of a New Year believer either. He’s coasting through life after being discharged from the army and trying not to let his cynicism of pretty much everything define him. When Gloria Falcon climbs into Charlie’s life, and his repair truck, neither of them expect this to be the New Year’s Eve that changes their minds, and their fate, forever.
[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook through Masquerade Tours’ Reader Round-Up program in exchange for an honest review.]
I picked Electrify Me because I was looking for some light-hearted reading. I didn’t really expect much and unfortunately the book didn’t deliver all that much.
The characters are okay. Gloria herself is much more realistic than Charlie. She’s a down on her luck 24 year old woman who was born on New Years and seems to be cursed to have bad things happen to her. In the beginning of the novella you can really feel her exasperation with her situation but also her sense of humour about the whole thing. She has a “How could it possibly get worse?” attitude that sees her through some pretty awful mishaps on that cursed day. What I really didn’t like about her character was that she was volunteering to man a suicide crisis phone in order to help her karma. That’s rather a glib attitude to take toward suicidal people and their problems; it really didn’t feel like her heart was in it. However, it was a part of her character and didn’t really affect my enjoyment of her character.
Charlie, however, was rather dull. You could exchange him for pretty much any other romantic interest in any other erotica or romance novel and you wouldn’t notice a difference. (But to be fair this is a little more multicultural than usual because he is Asian.) He’s boring and polite and although he’s physically attractive he has the sort of personality that induces drowsiness because he’s so boring and perfect. He’s hot because he’s training to be a fireman, he volunteers for shifts on New Years for extra pay and credit at work and he always helps out whenever he can. Those are awesome traits and would be kind of refreshing because I hate the whole ‘bad boy’ trope but at the same time, he doesn’t have much in the way of anything interesting. His conversations with Gloria are pretty predictable and he really just comes off as bland. Nothing really stands out about his character.
The writing was generally okay but some of the sex scenes caused me to laugh out loud because sometimes Bibi Rizer gets a little creative with her descriptions and strays into purple prose territory. Most notably: “Kissing Charlie feels healthy. Nutritious even. As though I’m getting vitamins and minerals and will wake up with thicker, shinier hair and skin that’s twenty-five percent more luminous.” It kind of killed the mood for me. But the rest of the sex scenes were generally okay, if a little boring.
As for the plot, well, it was a little predictable. Usually awesome writing would make up for that but since the writing was ‘meh’ the plot came across as ‘meh’ as well. From the time Gloria and Charlie meet you pretty much know what’s going to happen but the other plot events are just as predictable. I know you don’t generally read romance or erotica for the plot but it just left me bored.
Basically, this book was ‘meh’. It wasn’t terrible but it doesn’t stand out from the crowd.
I give this book 3/5 stars.
Eternal Neverland: Steps Before the Fall by Natasha Rogue
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
Helena K. Sharpe was raised by a man who had sympathy for supernatural creatures, for the vampires his bloodline hunted for centuries. She was too young to understand how he tried to help them, but she knew it was important. Her father made her promise never to hunt them and she would do anything to keep that promise.
Until he is murdered by the very things he dedicated so much of his life to.
Orphaned and alone, Helena takes to the street, afraid for whatever’s left of her life. Without her family, she doesn’t know how–or even if–she can go on. Until a vagrant takes her under his wing and gives her a purpose. Revenge.
For six years she learns about the monsters, studies their habits, until, at 15 years old, she feels she’s ready to find the ones responsible for her parent’s death. All she has to do is become one of them. She’s cute, young, innocent…
They’ll never see her coming.
[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]
I really had high expectations for this book when I started it because of the blurb. A girl who has trained for years to hunt vampires becoming a vampire to seek vengeance for her family’s murder? That sounds pretty darn cool, especially when she’s only 15 years old.
The problem was that the main character, Helena, was totally uninteresting in addition to being unsympathetic. Things start out pretty good with her becoming a vampire, albeit with two sires. Then she gets into the heart of a vampire coven and starts adjusting to vampire life, learning to go by the name Kitt because apparently vampires can read minds if they know your real name. I could get past that weird world-building if Kitt was actually interesting, but she’s not. Throughout the novel she’s supposed to be this master Machiavellian manipulator but all I really saw was a smart mouthed 15-year-old who screwed up pretty much every single thing she tried to do. And yet every single man in this book is attracted to her. Yep, I can totally see all of these decades old vampires being attracted to a naive if beautiful fifteen year old who seems intent on manipulating them all (unsuccessfully). It just makes absolutely no sense and Kitt never really gets past her initial awfulness. In fact, she seems to get worse as the book goes on.
As you’ve probably guessed, the world-building was pretty weak when you take a good look at it. I can believe fantasy stories where knowing someone’s ‘true’ name gives you power over them, but just their first name? That doesn’t really make any sense and Natasha Rogue never really explains it adequately. The vampire hierarchy within the city, however, was actually pretty good. I like the idea of different covens having different territories but ultimately being interested in keeping the general peace in the city for fear of discovery. However, it’s not really explained why/how Kitt suddenly breaks the peace. She does a bunch of really, really stupid stuff but why David (one of her sires) never lets her go to Charlie (another of her sires who actually wants to take care of her) is just left out. So it somehow starts a war between the covens and other factions get involved. It had a lot of potential but never really lived up to the promise in the blurb.
While the world-building was weak and the characters were generally intolerable, the strength of Rogue’s novel was in the plotting and the pacing. Even though the plot doesn’t always make sense it is fairly interesting in the beginning and the whole novel is actually well paced to keep readers turning the pages. She can do suspenseful scenes fairly well and her writing style isn’t actually all that bad but the different elements of the plot like the world-building and characters really did sink this novel. It was a big disappointment and yet I have to say that I didn’t actually ‘hate’ the book. The little intrigues were well written and with a little work, the characters could have been fantastic. To be honest, it just felt like the whole book didn’t reach its potential. Disappointing to be sure, but not a completely unenjoyable book.
I give this book 2/5 stars.
Between by Megan Whitmer
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
When a supernatural freak of nature forces her family to separate, seventeen-year-old Charlie Page must turn to her frustrating (yet gorgeous) neighbor, Seth, to help reunite them. Seth whisks Charlie to Ellauria—a magical world filled with the creatures of myths and legends—and tells her of the Fellowship, the group charged with protecting mystical beings from human discovery. (All except Bigfoot: that attention whore is a total lost cause.) But when Charlie learns that she’s under the Fellowship’s protection herself, well, “stressed” is an understatement.
Ellauria should be the safest place for Charlie while the Fellowship works to find her family, but things in the mystical realm aren’t what they seem.
Magic is failing, creatures are dying, and the Fellowship insists Charlie holds the key to saving everyone. With her family still missing and the danger in Ellauria growing, Charlie doesn’t know who she can trust. She’s dealing with a power she never asked for, falling for a guy she can’t have, and being forced to choose between her destiny and her heart. And if she chooses wrong, she could destroy magic forever.
Charlie may be in over her head.
[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]
I wavered on requesting this one for ages. It sort of sounded like your typical fantasy (girl has special powers, gets attacked, hot protector dude steps in to save the day, whisks her away to a strange land to master her skills, etc.) and that made me a little reluctant, but at the same time I fell in love with the cover. It’s a shallow reason for reading a book, I know, but it did look interesting and that’s why I requested it in the end.
Luckily for me, Between is actually a pretty good book.
The thing that impressed me most was Megan Whitmer’s world-building. Not only does she populate Ellauria and Earth with familiar creatures like sirens, harpies, elves and fairies, she adds in creatures that you don’t see very often (ones that I’m pretty sure she created) like jourlings and the ever-important dying race of muralets. Instead of being one happy quasi-Medieval world, Ellauria is full of politics and danger lurks behind every corner. Not everything is as it seems and trust me when I say that everyone seems to be playing their cards close to their chests.
I have to admit, the characters were decent enough as well. Charlie is far from the Mary Sue you so often see in these types of books simply because she actually has to work to develop her powers. At the same time, she’s constantly worried about her missing brother and mother and she thinks she’s falling in love with the one man she really, really shouldn’t. Add to that the fact that the Between, the source of all magic, seems to be dying. She’s stressed constantly and you can really tell, unlike some books where the main characters doesn’t seem to be fazed by anything. Seth is your typical tragic bodyguard character archetype but he also has quite a bit of depth and I was really starting to enjoy his character by the end. The only one that disappointed me was Charlie’s brother and I can’t tell you about that without giving away spoilers.
The only thing I was disappointed with is the plot. For most of the book, it really seemed like Charlie and Seth were wandering around with very little purpose with training scenes thrown in to spice things up. But then at the end, when we meet the bad guy, I was supremely disappointed. Let’s just say that the man at his side was a walking stereotype that has been used so many times in the good vs. evil fantasy novels. It was kind of disappointing when the rest of the book had been so strong. Still, I will read the second book when it comes out. The cliffhanger at the end was just too much to ignore!
I give this book 4/5 stars.