Tag Archives: 1-star

Review: Sienna Wilder – The Arab Marilyn Monroe

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The Arab Marilyn Monroe
Sienna Wilder

18+ Review: Erotic Novel Review

Olivia doesn’t know that she’s a lesbian. She figured that she was just abnormal, and not interested in sex. Little does she know that the new lady friend she’s about to meet has a lot to offer her over her last partner.
Much as I wanted to love this novel, I simply couldn’t. The sex scenes were hot enough, but I wanted something more from the characters. Peter was a pushover, Fairuz was one-dimensional and Olivia had no idea what was happening to her. Or actually, she did, but she wasn’t willing to admit it.
It felt too short. The author said to me (when she requested this review), that this was being published separately from the main novel about these characters because she didn’t want to mix genres. One sexy hot sex scene, and it was over! I wanted more, if there could be more. For a week of being shacked up together, there could have been a little more on offer.
I’m not sure I can recommend this novel for audiences that are comfortable reading erotica on the internet. As a printed book of homosexual encounters, I think it is relatively unique, and a valuable addition to your bookshelf if you tend to reread this kind of thing. However, for me at least, I like variety in my diet! There are plenty of online resources that cover this kind of thing. I admire the author her audacity in bringing this out, and hope that she can expand it into a saga like Christian Grey’s (except a lot more realistic and accessible).
My current quest in this area is to find sexual fiction that doesn’t sound completely improbable or completely over-worded. Also, some crude language doesn’t do it for me at all. ‘Creamed her jeans’? Cringe. Not interested. Again, there was potential there.
I wished more had been made of the religious and political ideas behind this. It’s appropriate that this is set in Paris! And the language of the body is much more powerful than the spoken word. Both women use this to their advantage.
I think the last pure erotica novel I read and reviewed were the ‘Romantic Tales‘ episodes, of which I read three excerpts before giving up. That was 2 years ago now (amazing of itself) and I thought I was ready to give the genre another try. Shades of Grey is in the genre, although the author does have a go at giving a bit more storyline. Most erotica novels fail in that they don’t provide me with enough story – this one isn’t an exception.

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Review: Nicole Pouchet – Layla’s Gale

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Layla’s Gale
Nicole Pouchet
Layla has just landed what is almost a leading role in a paying job! But those erotic dreams she’s been having for months could be getting in the way of her responses to the director

Layla seems like a bit of a wuss. For someone who knows how to act, she’s surprisingly see-though. She thinks she’s well put together, but her ex- seems like a real deadhead, and yet it took her a long time to get out of it. Is she just not very bright? She has to be, to remember scripts perhaps. I don’t know how to make it as an actress, but someone with more experience in the industry could perhaps reflect on the likelihood of this scenario.
This is a romance, yet at the same time, I felt like it was reaching, and not quite touching, to be something more. The myths throughout it could have been given more significance, even if the main players in the novel don’t believe in them. I wanted more substance, more linking to ‘history’.
The sex scenes in this did not ring true for me. You can only read about a ‘throbbing member’ a couple of times before it gets old. Other sex scenes have left me feeling like I’m being left out, these ones make me grateful I’m not in the novel. I usually expect more sex in a romance novel though, and I was glad there wasn’t too much.
I could have put down this book at any time in the first half, but started enjoying it more in the second half.  The forward motion that needed to be set in from the beginning only happened in the end. It was inevitable, as you could hear the story from both Layla and Sebastian’s perspectives, that they would end up both happy in their own ways.
I appreciated that the author took empaths and put them in situations where their emotive abilities would be useful and harmful at the same time. It’s strangely appropriate that they work in a theatre – where projecting emotions is normal.
The mystery with this novel held well to my scrutiny. I wasn’t able to guess with certainty who the ‘bad guys’ were, and I remained surprised at the ending.
I don’t know how I feel about reading the next novel in the series.  I don’t see how the 4 elementals coming together is essential to the world. Wouldn’t it be simpler if it just didn’t happen? The final scenes in this novel didn’t clear this up for me much either. Ah well, can’t have everything.
I received this novel from the author in exchange for a fair review. All opinions are my own.

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Review: Sandeep Patel – A Potion

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A Potion
Sandeep Patel
I worried that the English in this book, and the language would be poor, and it was.

I felt like much of the novel really had no plot. There were some marvellous descriptions, but also some boring tracts of repetitive dogma. There were many ways of life that were introduced, and I felt like I was being thrown literally around the universe with no real anchor or connection with each of the parts.

The author informed me that this book was based on a journey of enlightenment based on his religion, and I did see some signs of that. If I look at it primarily in that light, it is no better of worse than the Bible, if a little more accessible. Eastern religions often have more life, but in this case I felt like it dragged.
I received this book as a ebook after being requested by the author to read and review it. Unfortunately, it took me quite a long time to get into the book and I did not finish reading it. Not recommended.

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Review: Shannon Hale – Book of a Thousand Days

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Book of a Thousand Days
Shannon Hale
This is told from an interesting perspective of a diary. Even though you know someone must be writing it, and you assume it is Dashti each time, you sometimes think that someone else has taken over, because the events she is writing about are too overwhelming or odd.
The synopsis for this on Goodreads suggests that the conclusion is so romantic that no reader will be left dry-eyed. I was dry-eyed. I didn’t connect with Dashti or Lady Saren enough. I felt quite empty after reading it really, and I didn’t ever feel worry.
I felt frustrated that Dashti didn’t make more of an effort to escape. She just waited until things were desperate. She’d rather stay in the tower than be exposed to men. She has a knife! Why doesn’t she protect herself? Surely she has a song to escape? The songs were good, I did like those.
I also felt frustrated in the end of the evil warlord. Dashti was very brave, but damn she’s stupid! She was doing what was noble. And right, I suppose. But damn! Why does she have to be so loyal to someone who doesn’t deserve her help? I guess she is too good-hearted.
The remote tower is a stolen idea. It was stolen from a Grimm’s fairy tale. There are so many adaptations of fairytales these days, and Hale does a lot of them (such as The Goose Girl). It makes me annoyed that no-one has any new creativity and has to resort to old stories instead of new ideas. Even some of my favourite authors are responsible for that sort of thing.
What can I take away from this story that I couldn’t have gotten out of a regular book? What girls can relate to this story and dream of their own fairytale ending? What if they are all like Lady Saren? Why is she so stupid? Get a spine! Don’t depend on loyalty to get you anywhere or magic to take a hand.
Sometimes I don’t realise how much I didn’t enjoy a book until after I have read it. This is one of those ones. It was a throw-away novel – keep your reading time for something else.

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Review: Liam Hearn – Blossoms and Shadows

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Blossoms and Shadows
Liam Hearn

It’s rare that I don’t finish a novel I’m reading because I like to give books a chance to improve. I’m a little less tolerant of talking books however because I only have limited time to listen to them and if a reader is bad, I don’t see why I should force myself to listen.

This one wasn’t given a chance after the second disk. The reader wasn’t great, and I struggled to differentiate the characters.
Even worse was that 9350510the writing was dry and uninteresting. The main character was potentially interesting, a girl wanting to learn medicine from her father. But the trials of her uncle who wanted to go to a special school, no, I couldn’t have cared less.
I realise that this book is a translation from Japanese, and so a sprinkling of Japanese words is expected. In this case however, there were so many that I struggled to fix the place names in my mind.
I really loved Hearn’s other novels, but this one just wasn’t my flavour. I get a feeling this novel was meant to be a kind of history – I don’t love history. Maybe if you have an interest in this area this book could be an easy introduction for you.

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Review: Larry Rodness – Perverse

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Perverse
Larry Rodness
Emylene is a second generation Goth princess. Little does she know that she is soon going to be trapped in a picture frame for 2 years while her new best friend takes over her position and turns the world to bad.
I spent the first chapter wondering when the perspective and tone of the novel was going to turn into present tense. In the second chapter I figured that this was a very long prologue. By the third chapter, I’d basically given up, and resigned myself to the awkward storytelling.
I can’t say why I kept reading this novel – it annoyed me a fair bit in the way things were told to me, rather than shown, and also Emylene seemed just plain stupid. Seriously girl, get a hold of yourself! She was so prissy and rude I wouldn’t have minded if she died.
If this wasn’t an ebook, I would have been drawn in by the beautiful cover art anyway. It’s a simple design it’s true, but also all the more attractive for it. The transformations of Emylene seem hollow when compared to her original self. She should have stayed true to herself from the beginning!
Another element that disturbed me was the frequent references to sex and death, particularly in conjuntion. I believe this is a book aimed at teenagers – and I would find it inappropriate for my own teenager to read such things.
It wasn’t clear to me at the end how they survived the fire. See, I’m being nice and vague so you don’t know who I mean! But anyway, it’s a bit confusing as to why all of the specific type of creature would die, if the other progenitor was still living.
I wouldn’t recommend this novel, unless you’re a complete sucker for everything vampire. I was drawn in because of the Goth concept, but the blurb didn’t deliver in a satisfying way for me.
I received this book free in ebook form for review purposes. I was in no way compensated for this review.

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Review: Katie Gallagher – Catching You

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Catching You
Katie Gallagher

16136789I previously received this book as part of a tour, but I could not rate it high enough to let the review be published while the tour was on. Please find my review of this 1-2 star book here.
I was drawn to ‘Catching You’ because it had hints that Lauren could see the dead after her boyfriend dies in a car accident. Paranormal plus YA = good, right? No, not in this case. Instead there was a wishy washy storyline that didn’t get me excited or even have me wondering what was going to happen. I had no empathy for the characters, and so I couldn’t have cared less if more of them were killed.
I started getting bad feelings about this novel from the beginning – too many description of people’s outfits in ways that didn’t work for me, as well as blow by blow descriptions of teeth brushing and the like.
The funeral, and the young characters reactions aren’t all that good. I felt like there should have been more there, both in term of emotions and also the reactions of the adults to Elizabeth’s pronouncements. I just didn’t have any feeling.

The dialogue left me feeling a bit sad. It’s ok to have contractions in speech! Sometimes it feels like the author has just gone right through with Word replace. Much more work to be done there.

Lauren’s responses to the text messages were a bit weird. It’s just think it was a wrong number, or try calling them or something. No big deal. It was totally unclear to me why this would be the case. Maybe it’s an American thing I’m missing?

I’m going to be generous and give it 2 stars. Or maybe not. I at least finished it, but I can’t decide if that was out of pity for the characters or some sort of odd martyrism.

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Review: C.S. Dorsey – The Unsacred Gift (Review and Giveaway)

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The Unsacred Gift

C.S. Dorsey
Welcome to IO Book Tour’s stop for ‘The Unsacred Gift’.

Sissy has a gift, an unwanted gift. Plagued with visions of people’s deaths, she has isolated herself for years. A visit back home reawakens her worries, and not even her grandmother can sort her out.

The official blurb:

Have you ever had a dream that came to life? How about losing the one you love and  not being able to save them? What about a gift that you were cursed with? Well image having all three like Sicily “Sissy” Monroe.
“Some might say what I have is a gift. I say, I want to return it.” Sissy declares.
 Sicily “Sissy” Monroe has all the qualities of a perfect young lady. She is almost where she wants to be in life. But lying deep in the pupil of her eyes hold something that she cannot get rid of which interferes with her plans. She fights everyday with no one but herself. After having her first vision at age six of her sister’s (Misty) disappearance and the dreams of failing to save her, Sissy wants no part in another person’s fate. For years Sissy tried hard to avoid contact with people because she feared foreseeing their death. In keeping with this, she tries to stay away from her family. Little did Sissy know she could not run from her past, or her gift. She hopes someone will put her out of her misery, but she will soon discover that her visions and dreams were just a mere image of herself.

My review:

I was unable to write a positive review for this novel, and so my review was taken down until the tour is over. My apologies to regular readers. Here it is:

My initial impression of this novel was not positive. I felt confused by the somewhat repetitive beginning, and the kindle format was poorly laid out with the page numbers interspersed in the text. As this is an ARC I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it still put me off.

The style of writing seemed very stilted in the first couple of chapters but I held out hoping that there would be an improvement. ‘I was frozen. It was like my body was numb.’ Then some more meaningless clichĂ©s. There is so much telling instead of showing, something that really irks me. Sissy talks about greens having a bitter aftertaste. It’s such an unecessary detail. In a more skilled author, those beans might be a metaphor for something else – not here, they just detract from the story.
There was a sudden time jump with no preparation, for a minute I didn’t know what I was reading about. This was 10% of the way into the book. The weird sentences at the beginning of the chapters didn’t do anything for my enjoyment either. I just couldn’t get over how awkward all the text was, particularly the dialogue. There were also some random changes in tenses.
Heaven and Halo for cousins and Sissy and Misty as sisters? Those names are not believable! The twins are the spawn of Satan?? Demonic ways? The tantrum Sissy describes sounds like typical badly behaved children – not demon-possessed.
Sissy’s mother is the most beautiful woman on earth? Also questionable. Sissy says she needs her mom, yet she has barely talked to her mom since she left for college, and her mother getting married is going to destroy what they have – when Sissy hasn’t visited for ages, and she constantly lies to her mother about her feelings?
The overtones of God-talk put me off. Maybe it isn’t something big to other readers, but it certainly didn’t work for me. If Sissy’s God was so good to her, why did she have this ‘gift’? The God talk, including mentions of such things as Sissy’s mother kissing in the dark being a bad and disgusting thing, is just unrealistic and threw me out of the narrative.
Some people see horrific things in their work all the time, not the occasional visions that Sissy has. Emergency room doctors, paramedics. Sometimes it seems like just because Sissy is a sissy she can’t stomach anything. Other things I found that didn’t work for me were the statements about how Sissy’s father will forever be a butt to her and the piranha fish eating the cat that was dumb enough to fall into the fishbowl.
Don’t even let me get started on the ending. I felt so frustrated after reading this book, and I literally felt like I had wasted 3 hours of my life. It’s hard to believe that such an interesting synopsis (which caused me to volunteer for this tour) could fall so short.
I appreciate the fact that it is difficult to write a book, believe me I do, but this book was crap. I think it was even worse than Twice Shy, which I didn’t enjoy either. It would suit an uncritical teenage audience, if anyone.

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About the Author

C. S. Dorsey currently lives in Northern California. She graduated from the University of Phoenix with an Associate’s Degree in Financial Services, and is currently working for a financial institution. She never thought about writing until one day this girl started talking to her in her head and never stop. She has written other young adult books including best selling Lukos Trilogy.


You can find her at:

Not sure if you like my opinion? Good thing this is a tour! You can look at some other reviews at:
Mallory Heart Reviews, Concise Book Reviews, My Cozie Corner, M-N’s Amazing Book Reviews, Bookworm Babblings, Books, Books and More Books and Books & Other Spells.

Think you want to read a first chapter? Find those here:
Mallory Heart Reviews, T B R, Comfort Books, Concise Book Reviews, The Bunny’s Review, Night Owl Reads and I Just Wanna Sit Here and Read!

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Review: Patrick Freivald – Twice Shy

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 Twice Shy
Patrick Freivald

Ani is dead. That’s nothing new to her or her mom, but the rest of her classmates can’t know or she’ll be incinerated. As a carrier of zombie virus, she won’t ever grow old.

What attracted me to this YA novel was the front cover. Your eyes are immediately drawn to the black corset (just my type of style) and then the boots with the strange feet (which once you read the blurb of it being a zombie novel make sense) and then finally you notice the little white thing sitting next to her.


The concept of Ani being a zombie is introduced slowly and subtly, but if you’ve already read the blurb it’s a bit lost. Something that wasn’t clear to me was that Ani had been infected with zombie virus since she was a baby, yet she only started showing zombie symptoms in the last two years.

The author goes for what seems like sarcasm most of the time, but it just doesn’t do it for me. The humour (is there any?) is just highschool bullying, and I suppose I was supposed to think it was funny that Ani’s mom is dating Mike’s dad.

I wasn’t convineced by Ani’s interactions with her mother at all. The superficial hugs and so forth didn’t really show me that Ani loved her mother – it seemed like her mother was doing everything humanly possible for her, but yet Ani didn’t care. Also Ani’s mother fears becoming a zombie so much that she would kill herself first – which doesn’t fit in with constantly keeping Ani alive.

The ending was pathetic. As I was reading this on a Kindle app, I noticed that at 90% read there was still a lot of story that should have been told. The ending, complete with ‘THE END’ printed on it, was such a let down. It was obvious that it wasn’t going to be a happy ending and I actually found myself hoping she would be incinerated because Ani was so damn annoying.

I thought the point of being a zombie was that they couldn’t feel pain. I didn’t understand how a cut on Ani’s forehead needed extra special attention while she’s cutting herself with razors frequently.

The initial image painted of Ani screamed opposites to me. I had no idea what was happening most of the time. She’s happily pretending to be emo, and then the next minute she wants to rock out to pop music. It seemed to me like music was the key to who she was, as as art, but there was no feeling of backstory – perhaps being creative was linked to being a zombie?

I didn’t like the use of abbreviations by the author, including FML. ZV for zombie virus. Ugh, it seems like an attempt to seem ‘hip’, but it just didn’t work for me.

I would recommend this book for older teens, as it involves mentions of self-harm and foul language that are not necessary for a younger reader to encounter. The self-harm is particularly disturbing, as it’s painted as a release for Ani. The drug use is also not great.

I did not enjoy this book, and I’m not sure I would actually ‘recommend’ it at all. It took me around 3 hours to read, and I wish I could have those 3 hours back. If it had been a book I had bought for myself, not one that I was expecting to review, I probably would have stopped reading after the first chapter or two.

I received this ebook free for an honest review. My review has not been influenced by my correspondence with the author’s management company.

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Review: Laurie Hergenham – the Australian short story

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the Australian short story
Laurie Hergenham (ed)
This is a novel I had to read for a literature class. It is not really a novel, as it suggested, it is a collection of short stories. It covers quite a long time period, around 100 years, from Peter Carey to Henry Lawson.

As befitting my usual treatment of literature studies books, I didn’t read all of the short stories in this collection. I read and studied just three: Short Shift Saturday by Gavin Casey, Josie by Vance Palmer and Happiness by Katherine Susannah Prichard.

Short Shift Saturday is a gritty short story written in a realist manner. It’s longer than the other two, and I felt that it was easier to understand and get into the depth of the characters.

Josie is an odd ducky. The whole short story is an odd ducky. It was a bit hard to read, and it certainly wasn’t enjoyable. In a way, it was more disgusting than anything. It makes the point of the outsider in Australian early culture.

Happiness is told from the perspective of an Aboriginal woman. It feels like a setup, and I wasn’t entirely convinced about the authenticity of feeling.

As a whole, I hated the unit of study that this book was part of, and I really didn’t do well on any of it. For this particular assessment, I had jetlag! You can tell it’s been on my mind for a while to review this book, because I went on holiday more than a month ago.

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It is not currently available from Amazon, although you may find it on The Book Depository (affiliate link).1star