Vampire – Nonfiction and Nonsense

Quicksilver by Callie Hart

I decided that I needed to read this book to see if it was appropriately hyped. I also felt like I had been missing a little bit of magic in my life lately. While I have been reading a lot of romantic fiction over the past few months, they have all been realistic romantic fiction, no magic, fae, witches, vampires, no other worldly creatures of any kind. I was missing stories that involved intertwining the supernatural with romance, with adventure and intrigue on the side, and I was hopeful that this would provide me with what I was longing for. It did.

Saeris lives in a ward called The Third in the city of Zilvaren. The planet is dry and hot, with two suns that never set, making water more valuable than gold. The people of The Third are expected to survive on a daily ration of the smallest portion of the filthiest water out of all the residents in the entire city. Life is hard, so much so that Saeris steals cleaner water from another ward, as well as other things, to ensure her and her younger brother’s survival. The story begins with her taking something that is a little bit too valuable, leading the queens guard to invade her ward, something they usually avoid at all costs due to rumors of The Third being full of disease. After being captured by the guards and interrogated by the queen, she is sentenced to death. But something strange happens after Saeris is stabbed, and after passing out from her wounds she wakes up cold for the first time in her life.

Kingfisher, the fae male who arose from a pool of liquid silver as Saeris lay dying, returns to the kingdom of Yvelia after a decades long disappearance. Everyone has questions, where was he, why was he gone for so long, and why does he have a human female with him? But most importantly, how did he travel though the quicksilver pool when they have been sealed shut for over a thousand years? Saeris, it turns out, has the ability to unfreeze the pools, she just needs to learn how to do it with purpose rather than through a near death experience. Overnight, she becomes the most valuable being in the realm, an alchemist. Thought to have become extinct, she has the gift to activate the pools which makes travel between realms possible. And the fae of this realm desperately need to travel elsewhere to trade goods so that they can win and end the war that has been going on for centuries.

This novel really had everything that I was looking for, and I am optimistic that it will end up turning out to be a very good series. There were mystical creatures, but not too many that it was overwhelming, conflict, war, excellent tension between Saeris and Kingfisher, which lead to amazing intimate scenes, and a good overall plot. I placed a lot of post its throughout the book to mark things that I thought were important or bits of information that I found a little tricky to understand and knew I would want to go back to. I found that the way the curse was described made it harder to understand than it should be and I ended up reading that passage a few times. There is also a lot of information about swords and the magic they used to have as well as who they belonged to versus who owns them now, it was a lot.

I do appreciate that the author put a pronunciation guide for both people and places at the beginning of the book, but I found myself not caring so much about that as I did the map. Not all of the places mentioned in the novel are marked on the map, so you do have to try and estimate where they are based off of where the characters are coming from and where they are headed. I don’t know why, and I am sure I am not the only one, but I like to trace the path that the characters travel along. Even though we are only in Zilvaren for a short period of time, Saeris’ home city does not have a map at all. While I like to think that I have a very active imagination and was able to create a basic picture in my mind of what all the wards surrounding the central palace looked like, a map would have been nice. Maybe we will get one in the upcoming second book. An expanded or improved map of Yvelia and the rest of that realm would be nice too.

To bring this post to an end I just want to mention that I did originally buy the book in paperback, because it was less expensive. But after reading it and enjoying it I decided to buy the hardcover so that it will look nice next to the copy of Brimstone, which I preordered almost immediately after finishing Quicksilver. So I will say, if you enjoy fantasy, go ahead and buy the hardcover because you will enjoy this series and want to have a nice, matching set.

Bride by Ali Hazelwood

Fiction

I have been having a hard time getting through the last psychology book I had planned to end the month with, surprise surprise. So, I kind of got a little side tracked and began my summer of fun reads a little early. I started with a standalone fantasy novel that takes place in a world where humans, vampires, and werewolves all live together, but not harmoniously.

For hundreds of years, there have been feuds, kidnappings, and murders between vampires and weres, weres are humans, and humans and vampires. All three species hold grudges, most everyone believes in the common stereotypes, even when they are told otherwise, and no one ever seems to be able to hold to a truce for very long. One such attempt at keeping the peace over the years has been the exchange of a collateral, in which a family member of one species is traded with the family member of another and forced to live amongst them for ten years. In a further attempt to try to force peace, this time, a vampire female is traded to an Alpha werewolf, not just as collateral, but as his bride. The female in question, named Misery, is an unusual and surprising choice, but I won’t tell you why.

I enjoyed this because it was classic monsters but with a modern twist. Not all the standard characteristics you would expect to be true of vampires and werewolves are true here. You do get some of the usuals, such as blood drinking and shapeshifting, but some of the other things you would expect these creatures to do are left out. I liked that there were multiple mysteries that were going on at the same time, it kept the plot interesting. I needed that interesting plot because the romance didn’t even start until about mid book, this being the reason I got the book in the first place. However, the scenes I read were worth the wait because I definitely see a re-read in my future.

Even though I wanted a standalone as opposed to an entire series, I was left wanting more. Like a novel I read a few months ago, Nocticadia, the end left it open to a future novel if the author decides in the future that she would like to write more about these characters. I don’t believe that I could possibly be the only one who feels this way.

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.

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.

Bite of Betrayal by R.L. Caulder

Fiction

Alina’s tale in Bite of Loyalty began late on a Saturday night, early Sunday morning really, when she was essentially rescued in the form of being taken to another realm by a goddess who sensed that she was in need. From there she got barely one night of rest before she immediately had to prepare for her new life as a vampire. Having very little control over her new urges for blood and knowing next to nothing about the rules and etiquette of vampire society, she is expected to attend classes the next day with students, all of whom have been vampires for quite a while and are well versed in all the things she is not. The entire book spans just four days. Bite of Betrayal, the second book in the Blood Oath series, begins where it left off, on a Wednesday morning. Things progress with the same intense, expedited speed in book two, with Alina just making it through her first week at the Academy.

This book could be so much better if there was more detail, more plot, more depth. I think that if the author could have spread the timeline out it could have potentially been on the same level as some of the truly great fantasy series that are popular right now. Because honestly, the speed at which things occur really makes the story hard to believe, even though it is a fantasy series about vampires. But, I don’t find myself saying that about other books in the same genre, because the way that time moves and feelings and rapport between characters develop in other more complex stories make them truly believable. And even though I know that magic and superpowers and unusual creatures aren’t real, it feels like they are when the story is well written. The best I can say about this book is that the spicy level is equal to that of the first, and those few scenes were worth reading.