Tag: Romance

Posted in Book Reviews

One Good Knight

Posted on by Little Bee

13978

One Good Knight by Mercedes Lackey, Narrated by Gabra Zackman

Goodreads Rating: 5 stars

Actual Rating: 4.5 

Narrator Rating: 5

 

One Good Knight is a retelling loosely following the Greek myth of Andromeda. Where Greek Lore indicates Andromeda to be beautiful, One Good Knight indicates she is “lesser” than most females and more homely than beautiful. One Good Knight is also loosely based from St. George and the Dragon, however, it is really in name only as this does not end in an entire town going through religious conversion.

In One Good Knight, Andromeda (Andi) is very book smart and she starts to notice some magical irregularities in her research for the Queen. During this time, the Queen had her consort conjure a dragon to wreck havoc on the villages. Andi is tasked to find out how to “rid” the kingdom of the dragon and discovers meaningful sacrifice would do so. A lottery is set up for virginal women, and each week a new name is drawn. After a while, the reader discovers prior to the cast, that this lottery is not by chance, but whenever a family displeases the Queen or speaks out against the Queen, their daughter is “selected” in the lottery and sent to die. During one such lottery, Princess Andi’s name is drawn and she is sent to be sacrificed, and so the adventure begins.

I really enjoyed the twists and turns this particular story had. As a reader, it is often times easy to get bored when books do as you expect. One Good Knight keeps readers entranced. Without giving away spoilers, the ending has been one of the best I have enjoyed. Much like in The Fairy Godmother, the Tradition had a mind of it’s own, only in One Good Knight I really enjoyed the way the Tradition worked for the characters.  I feel Andi was well written. She is portrayed as a confused, homely, child not to be taken seriously for most of time leading up to her being sacrificed. Queen Cassiopia is one to be despised. She is heartless and offers up her daughter happily to be killed.

The reason the actual rating is 4.5 stars is mainly because it was soooo slow to start out. Once the excitement of Princess Andi being sacrificed to the dragon occurs, things really start to speed up.

I really can’t say there is a particular character I didn’t like, aside from the villains of course, but I even enjoyed them. I thought each character in the book gave the book it’s personality it took on. Oh but the twists!!! It would be too many spoilers to explain the twists, and I want any potential reader to be as shocked as I was when I first came to the twists.

I am really glad I started this series, and I look forward to more Virgin chasing unicorns, fairy godmothers, and all of the other Traditional tales yet to be discovered.

Posted in Spicy Romance

Taint

Posted on by Little Bee

18366077

Taint by S.L. Jennings

Goodreads Rating: 3 Stars

I had high hopes for this book. I believe it held a lot of promise. I can tell you, I didn’t quite see that ending coming!

When I first received this book at the RT Booklovers Book Convention in May, I was pretty excited. The cover was absolutely delish, the story line looked pretty interesting and it became one of the first books from the convention that I cracked open, aching to get into it!

Let’s get to the first point, and this may have been wrong of me…okay it was wrong of me….but I compared it sort of with the School for Submissives Brie attended in Red Phoenix’s Brie Learns the Art of Submission. Let’s face it, based on the description, a bunch of women that are not good lovers, are sent away to a secluded area where they learn to become AMAZING lovers that their hubbys can’t get enough of, sounds like it could be somewhat similar, am I right? So I feel that it was a legitimate jump…well, it wasn’t. So if you have read Brie, don’t make that connection. Because it is not.

Second point, I am still trying to figure out the obsession Justice had with Ally. Maybe I missed it completely. I feel like her character wasn’t fully built up to the amazingness that Justice was seeing. As a reader, it is important that comes across. Based on the little doozy at the end…if that is the reason he is obsessed with her, that is a bunch of crap and I will remove a star. Which, I am sure that has a FRACTION, because he does know who everyone’s husbands are, but if that is the SOLE reason, done…star is gone. I want to think that there was something spectacular about Ally that just wasn’t translating. I know she was pretty “real” based on the little bit of information that was given, but the author never really fully dove into Ally, or Justice for that matter. Justice was all “mysterious” and “brooding” and you didn’t really learn who he was until the end, and then you just felt sorry for him, but he was still sexy and his backstory  wasn’t any different than what happens OFTEN within that community. I wanted to tell him to put his big girl panties on and deal with it! It could have been worse. Get a therapist.

The final point I want to make about this story is that it just took way too long to get to the point. By the time anything significant happened, there was about 50 pages left to the story. And I believe I am being generous and significantly rounding up. That might have been when they first had sex. (Spoiler!) I normally stop reading a book by the 4th chapter if nothing significant has happened yet. I have read books where in the first 10 pages there were at least 3 deaths! (Not GoT either!) So, when a book is 219 pages and it takes almost 170 pages to actually get anywhere in the story? I am not sure why I kept trucking through! I guess because I knew at SOME point, it was going to hit the fan, and I HAD to be a part of it! And it HIT the fan hard! I didn’t quite see that ending, but I guess it was expected.