Tag: Romance

A dark, unconventional romance that is rooted in revenge is the premise of Never Kiss A Bad Boy. The story begins and ends with murder, and everything in between fills us in on how our male leads, Kite and Jacob, became hit men, and why the female main character, Marina, is out to kill. If you couldn’t guess it from the phrase ‘male leads’, this is a triad tale. I liked it far better than the Dark Elite series I read several weeks ago. I enjoyed there being only two male love interests rather than a harem of four, and the plot was better besides.

That being said, I was disappointed in the number of grammatical and punctuation errors that I found in the text. Equally disappointing was the fact that not only was the antagonist’s last name misspelled once, the main female character’s first name was also spelled incorrectly one time. Did the author incorrectly spell her own characters names more than once, or were they somehow messed up during editing or printing? Either way, I find this carelessness sloppy. 

On top of that, I found the format to be unsightly, the margins were incredibly large, taking up about a third of the surface of the page all around. It made for odd sentence spacing and large gaps in paragraphs, which I also found to be too numerous. The chosen font and size of the text I found unfitting of the genre, the text being large and ordinary when something smaller and more feminine or delicate would have looked a lot better. I might not have even made such a big fuss over the errors I mentioned in the previous paragraph had the font and format been more pleasing to the eye. It’s not just that the story has to be good, it has to be visually pleasing for the reader, in my opinion. 

Besides seeing obvious room for improvement, I will say that I might read this again.  The spicy scenes are probably the most well written parts of the book, which is good since that is the genre this book falls within. They are lengthy, which I like, the language can be just slightly vulgar, and the descriptions are just right to give you a good visual, for those with very active imaginations. I did mark the scenes with post it notes just in case I want to skip over everything else, which I can see myself doing because I can also see myself becoming irritated if I notice even more errors during a re-read. I feel as though I am slowly making my way towards finding my perfect book or series in this genre, I just have to pay my dues by reading some not so great pieces first.

The final book in the Dark Elite series can be described almost exactly the same way as I described the first two, a long fan fiction that gets straight to the point. However, the spicy scenes do intensify, a much anticipated moment between the female main and the most reserved of the four guys finally happens, and everyone finally has a conversation, although a very brief one, regarding what exactly is going on between all five of them. While I am satisfied that pretty much all the ends were tied up, I am not satisfied with the overall story. I feel like this could have been so much better if it had been longer and more care had been put into the story telling. I was so frustrated that at many points as I was reading all three of the books I considered starting to write my own reverse harem novel just so that I could read something along the lines of what I was hoping for. If this continues to bother me in the back of my mind, I might actually start a draft. 

All in all, it does what it needs to do and you can get through the series very quickly. If I had absolutely nothing else to do, I could have read all three books in one day. I won’t recommend the series but I will keep it on my shelf as a reference to go back to if I do ever decide to write that book, so I can remind myself of everything I don’t want a reverse harem novel to be. Hopefully, this is the most disappointing series I read this year and perhaps I will get lucky in having read my worst books of the year at the very beginning of it.

I said I would push through, and so I have. I finally got around to reading the second book in the Dark Elite series. 

This story feels more like a long fan fiction rather than a book, in my opinion. It could have more details, it could give you more back story, it could be longer. I would have loved for the plot to be more in depth and I think I would have actually liked the story a lot more. In addition to the plot, and the length, there are other things that bother me, such as there never being any dialogue between the female character and the four guys that she keeps hooking up with about what exactly is going on. I know this is a fantasy, but there is no way that a woman living with four men is hooking up with all of them and no one is talking about it. It’s not like I can even imagine it happening in the background because the way the story is written makes everyone seem so one dimensional. The female character never has a single conversation with any of the guys regarding their intentions with her, and the men never talk about it among themselves either. And the worst thing is, everyone knows what is going on, but they are just completely ignoring both the situation and the conversation that really needs to happen. I am hoping for some confrontation and resolution in the final book in this trilogy. 

I think I am going to try to read the third and final book one day this week so that I can move on to better things. This might be my first Friday bonus review of the year, so keep a lookout.