zinkow

Let me start by saying I loved this book, I'm really glad I bought it for my Kindle. I got it after recommendations from two authors whose work I love (Darynda Jones and Caroline Crane) and it was a great tip. It's the author's first published book and it's great. A fascinating world that I want to know much, much more about. A broad cast of interesting characters with some possible sequel set-ups, a good plot that flowed well, nice pacing, good writing and a great sense of humour and well written dialogue. Boy does the author know her music and the Dave Grohl cameo was genius, pure genius! I would definitely buy the next and the one after it. All those compliments paid .... On a personal note ... The main couple Lukas and Scarlett really didn't work for me. I'm pretty sure any kind of competent therapist would have told them to move on and find a healthy equal relationship with new people who weren't carrying a bunch of 'you fit in this box' baggage. Scarlett was for me the worst kind of 'woman waiting for a man to fix her'. Her life is badly broken, she doesn't have a single friend who isn't family or her 'foster siblings'. She has employees and band members, but NO friends and NO life. Even her career, in which she is successful, is breaking her, she's underweight, exhausted, unhappy out of control etc and it takes some stupidly dramatic happenings for her to notice this. Everybody in her life runs around after her, tries to fix her and at no point do we have any sense of an adult woman with goals or desires that she's actually prepared to do anything (speak perhaps even?) to achieve. She's truly an appalling role model and I'd hate her as friend ( whereas Bailey I really wanted to lunch with :-) As a couple they've always been unable to communicate and nothing really changes except they have sex. And as a siren and an incubus that's going to be hot - right? But sex really isn't a life ... And even at the very end their communication is poor. just shouting at each other is not communicating :-( At the beginning of the book I actually thought Bailey was going to be the female protagonist and a truly awesome one she would have made. But no, she was just the dumb friend, so the author could feed us info about the world. I loved her, she felt real. However the info dumping was done beautifully in a very skilled and subtle way - in fact I would have liked a bit more info about the background to the world. And as for Stephen, the baddy, (that's not a spoiler you find this out in the prologue) I have no problems with books that reveal the baddy up front. But I do feel that if the author chooses that route that they have a duty to fully and coherently explain the baddy's motivations, character, logic etc as we progress. This didn't happen until the very end - when the resolution was basically "yes, we don't know why". All we got along the way were his symptoms, no explanations and by the end well ... again it didn't work for me. So as you can probably see given my two big problems with the book it must have been freaking awesome to get 4 stars. It was! Recommend it highly.

2022-10-21 05:35