Romance – Page 6 – Nonfiction and Nonsense

Crescent City: House of Sky and Breath by Sarah J. Maas

With HOFAS due to arrive at my house on February 2nd I did it again and read another book consisting of over 700 pages in less than 48 hours. I could not put House of Sky and Breath down, and it wasn’t because I was in a rush to read the newly released third book of the series. We finally got answers to the many questions that we were left with at the end of HOEAB. On top of that, new mysteries were placed before us in this second Crescent City novel, and I found myself surprised more than once with things I wasn’t even considering and did not see coming. I was happy that there wasn’t an overload of new information right at the start which seemed to overwhelm me and the majority of everyone else who has read the first book. However, we were given just as much new information to mull over and try to sort through. I did have to add to my pages of notes that I took during the first book because I knew that there was no way I was going to remember everything. I also knew that even the smallest thing could come up big in the future. Even though I know I will be re-reading these books at some point in the future, the notes are good to have on hand.

I will preface this next paragraph by saying there are minor spoilers ahead, but if you are here reading this it is likely that you have already finished reading HOEAB and hopefully HOSAB. I am not going to give an overview of the book, it would be impossible, I am just going to express some of my overall feelings. You may now continue if you wish, you have been warned.

At the end of HOEAB Bryce and Hunt were in her apartment trying to wind down after saving the city from Hel’s demons. Before they could seal the deal, they were both interrupted by phone calls, Bryce getting one from her mother and Hunt getting one from Isaiah. They both end up going to help sort out all the chaos that occurs after the battle which also included the deaths of two very important leaders. We find out in HOSAB that afterwards, instead of going home and finishing what they started, Bryce told Hunt that she wanted to take things slow, and get to know each other better. Several months have passed and they have been working on their friendship, and in terms of their physical relationship it seems like at most they have been holding hands and doing cheek and forehead kisses. Then we learn that she suggested a date to consummate their relationship, and that it is still months away. I was so disappointed when I read this, I believe I actually let out a drawn out, “What?” in frustration. I tried to make peace with myself after coming to realize that it was going to be a long time before any action happened. Luckily, my hope of Bryce changing the terms came true and we ended up not having to wait too long for something to happen, if you count a quarter of the entire book as not being too long. But the wait is worth it, because this book gets spicy. For two people that were incredibly attracted to each other, they have an amazing amount of self control. I feel like the wait we had to go through as readers was as frustrating as it was for these imaginary characters in their situation.

Obviously, there is way more to this book than just the spice. We get to learn more about Hunt’s friend, Tharion, the mer man. He actually has kind of a tragic backstory and you end up feeling really bad for the guy. Ithan gets a bigger role in this story, which I ended up loving. He’s a really selfless, kind guy, he just believed in the lies that were spread because no one was able to present him with the truth until recently, and I am glad he and Bryce were able to mend their friendship. The story ends really tragically though, with some of the characters being captured and the core gang getting split up. But it is the last chapter in the book, the chapter with the biggest and most exciting cliffhanger I have ever read, that is probably the greatest thing to ever happen in fantasy novel history. I was more excited about getting to read HOFAS than I was when I got to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows after that two year wait. I will just say that it has something to do with my favorite SJM series. After finishing this book, I think that this is now my second favorite series in the SJM universe. And I think after I have finished the next book in a few days I will be solid with my resolve in this decision.

Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

Fiction

I went into this book knowing very little, the basics basically. The biggest pieces I knew were that the main character was a woman named Bryce, there were a lot of mythical creatures and hybrids, and that the author was inspired to write it after watching Zootopia with her kids. I honestly wish I had never heard that last part because I kept thinking about Zootopia and the similarities between the film and this book as I was reading. Knowing that bit of background information didn’t diminish how much I enjoyed the story overall, it just distracted me a lot.

As for the story itself, I didn’t like it immediately, and not just because it was kind of hard to follow in the beginning. Something about it just wasn’t drawing me in at first, but having finished it I can say that I would read it again, and I will read it again. People were not joking when they said that no one has any idea what is going on for the first fifty pages, and if they say they did then they were lying. I myself took about three standard notebook sized pages of notes while I was reading, two of them I filled up during those first fifty pages. I think that the overwhelming pile of information you get at the very beginning may cause some people to want to give up reading it altogether. But be strong! Once you get past all that and the story begins to unfurl, you will not want to stop reading. I think I may have hit a personal record when I finished this 799 page book in less than 48 hours. Essentially, I only stopped to eat, sleep, shower, take care of my cat, and assure a few people that I was alive and ok. It is rare that I find a book that makes me want to put everything else in my life on hold because I need to finish the story. I think my favorite thing overall was that even though the story had merpeople, fae, angels, and a bunch of other creatures, they existed in a world that also had modern technology. I have been longing for a story like this for a long time.

I was coming up with predictions as I went, but a lot of them ended up being wrong. I placed a lot of post its to mark things I thought were important to go back to. There was one specific phrase that is uttered many times in the ACOTAR series that was said a few times in this book. And even though I went into this book almost blind, I do go on the internet, and though I tried extremely hard to avoid spoilers, I wasn’t able to dodge all of them. I think the characters of Prythian might end up meeting some of the characters of Valbara. I think this phrase was giving us readers a hint. I am not joking when I say that as soon as I finish writing this review I am opening up the next book. My plan was to give myself a week to read each of the two preceding books in the hope that I would be ready to go once I got my copy of HOFAS. I really underestimated myself. I think I am going to end up going to a midnight party to try and get a copy of the book the very second it goes on sale, because I know I am going to finish the next book just as quickly as the first one.

Bite of Justice by R.L. Caulder

Fiction

In the final book of the Blood Oath series we get the intense, filthy, spicy scene between all four main characters that we have been waiting for, definitely a four out of five on my spicy scale. Alina and her three fated mates start to figure out how the dynamic is going to work with four of them being connected by the means of a bond that can only be broken both physically and emotionally, but seemingly not spiritually, through death. Everything else that has been going on, between Alina and the slayers, the plot to overthrow Dracula, is resolved, with the exception of one thing.

There is one big unanswered plot point that I was really bothered by once I realized that it was not going to be discussed further. The author never explains what was going on with the violent deaths that were occuring at the school, the very deaths that forced the administration to send all the students home. I think this may have been done purposefully as a way for the author to get you to read her other books. On the authors website, as well as at the end of this book, you are directed to where you can purchase additional novels that follow Alexandra, Alina’s demon friend, as well as Alora and her family, who happen to rule Hell.

Another disappointment, though it was not as all encompassing as I found it in Book 3, were the grammatical and punctuation errors. This is just something I cannot let go of in a book that has been, or at least I assume has been, professionally edited, reviewed, and published. Books like this that exist pretty much purely for the purpose of being an exciting, fantasy, controversial romance, novels that don’t have much else going for them, should at least be well edited. I’m not completely ragging on this genre, I mean look at me, I read plenty of these types of books. They serve a purpose, and we all know what that purpose is. I would just appreciate it if there was a bit more care put into the final edits. I do apologize for the rant, but I feel like it is long overdue and this series just put me over the edge a bit.

I hope to have a book review for you next week that will be full of praise and nothing but kind words. I have been working on a very long history book for several weeks that I have been enjoying very much. Hopefully between now and next week I will have found myself with enough free time to finish it.

Verity by Colleen Hoover

Fiction

After seeing this book mentioned frequently amongst readers of a particular genre I decided that I had to read it. I then went into this book knowing only what was summarized on the back cover. I was pleasantly surprised with the story, which goes back and forth between the present day and the not so distant past. We follow Lowen as she struggles to get her life back in order while also trying to get the extensive notes of an unfinished book series in order. Then there is Verity, the talented writer who no longer has the ability to finish her series, the very same series that Lowen is trying to make outlines for as she goes through the piles of papers that Verity has strewn about her large office. The themes comprised a mixture of loss, mystery, thriller, romance, desire, and macabre, which worked extremely well together and I loved it.

I could see this becoming a film one day, something which has a racy and perplexing feel comparable to that of Gone Girl, which also happens to be an incredible book. It was a delight to finally read a well written book that was also a little bit sexy, but not overly so, one that didn’t try too hard and was not the main draw of the story. I definitely need more books like this in my life and I am probably going to do some research towards finding ones that have a similar feel. If you couldn’t tell, I am encouraging you to read this book, it is worth it.

Bite of Vengeance by R.L. Caulder

Fiction

This book is absolutely riddled with grammatical, spacing, and punctuation errors, it comes out on top with the greatest number of mistakes I have ever found in a published work. It was incredibly frustrating to have to stop reading with such frequency as I had to pause and reach for a post it to mark a flaw, of which I already said, there were many. Every time I found a mistake I hoped it would be the last one and I tried to let it go, but at some point I just gave up on being able to think well of the author and the persons responsible for publishing this mess. You can see my picture of shame along with this post, the dark pink being all the errors I found and the light pink being the spicy scenes. It is kind of embarrassing that there are more errors than there are exciting plot moments, especially when you consider that people usually buy these types of books specifically for the dark romance and not living out a fantasy of being a book editor.

I just really wanted to get that out of the way before I review the actual story. Again, it is very fast paced, events taking place over hours and days rather than weeks. I like that for the majority of this book they are out of the school and in the real world. Honestly, all the plot focused around the school is quite boring, we never get much of an insight into the subjects they study, which I would have found very interesting. The real world, the world in which vampires live alongside slayers and other magical beings is so much better since we get to see them in their day to day life.

I have one more book in this series left to go. I do want to see how the story ends, but I am more interested in seeing if the pages have been edited better than its predecessor. I don’t know what went wrong here, I didn’t find any errors in the first book, and I only found three in the second one. I’ll let you know how things turned out next week.