Rating: WARTY!
I picked up this book as an advance review copy from Net Galley. I'm not a fan of vampire stories, werewolf stories, or paranormal romances, but I've read one or two, and this one promised to be different in that the vampire was married to a human female (at least he was after the first few screens), and contemplating reverting to human if only his wife's concoction could be perfected. I should have known better than to trust a blurb! It's hard to believe that a series like this which depends upon the vampire character would actually cure him anyway. Now that would be a story, but I'm guessing, sadly, that it's not the plan for this series.
This was volume two in a series (and it has a prologue! wasn't volume one the prologue?!), and I have not read volume one, so it's possible that I was missing something from that, but having read ten percent of this, which was more than I honestly wanted to, I don't believe I've missed anything at all! Lance and Leila have a half-human, half-vampire child, and they get married in the beginning of this novel. Lance is the leader of one of the vampire clans in England, and ridiculously rich in addition to being, as Derek Zoolander might put it, really, really, ridiculously good looking. His wife was voluptuous and beautiful, because there cannot be ordinary, everyday people in these novels.
So much for hoping that this novel would eschew trope and venture onto new ground. Every single vampire trope save one was here. It was the typical centuries old vampire falling in love with the mortal human, which doesn't work and is frankly disgusting. It's the old vampires and werewolves don't get along trope. It's the old vampires are ageless and beautiful, which is tedious, trope. It's the old vampires are organized in hierarchies with leaders or queens or whatever, and the country is divided into organized territories, which is a tired cliché. It's the old vampires are inexplicably rich story. There was absolutely nothing that was original. There was nothing to set any atmosphere, and there wasn't a single piece of descriptive prose worth the name, not in the part I read. It was all talk and movement.
The one exception I mentioned was that despite all this vampire trope, they seem to have no trouble going to Aruba for their honeymoon, and being out in the bright sunlight. If you're using all the other tropes, why not that one? Who knows? The most serious problem as that if you removed the paranormal element, this same story could have been told about a rich businessman and his trophy wife. There was nothing her that really required vampires and werewolves. The guy could have simply had an ordinary illness. The entire Harlequin romance catalog could have one of the characters be a vampire, with nothing else changed, and republished! What would that give us? Nothing we didn't have before!
The novel is supposed to lean towards the erotic, but there was nothing erotic to be found here. Not that I find vampires erotic at all, but the love-making here was full of cliché and frankly, was boring. The funny thing is that at one point we're told that the sun was starting to set. The couple had sex three times, and then decided to sleep all afternoon. Wait, wasn't the afternoon already gone if the sun was setting?! Maybe the sex was so great that it turned back time? Wouldn't it be great to have sex like that?!
Part of eroticism is playing-out the love-making, making it last, teasing, slyly stimulating, being a playful bit mean by withholding and denying from time to time. There's an old joke that erotic is using a feather; kinky is using the whole chicken, but there was neither here. This sex chickened out. It was much more of the 'slam-bam thank you ma'am' style: an urgent drive to orgasm, avoiding the scenic route like the plague,, and offering no rest stops to appreciate the journey or the view along the way.
It really was just a determined rush to orgasm, and the saddest thing was that there was no love-making after the orgasm either. Here I mean love-making in the old-fashioned sense where endearments and warm touches are exchanged. There was no pillow-talk, no nuzzling, no gentle hands on the back or the hips, or wherever. There was no hugging, snuggling, or holding, no sweet teasing as an invitation to a future encounter. It was like these two couldn't wait to get out of bed, or to fall asleep. This betrayed all of the 'lovey-dovey' talk they spouted so tediously endlessly at each other the rest of the time.
I was actually glad that they slept, because if I'd had to read about Leila arching her back once more, or reading of her saying that she was "more than okay" one more time after having sex, I would have to arch my back and throw up before I was more than okay. Here's an example of the prose:
"More than okay," she said, grinning. "Here," I sad, biting into my wrist. A moment later, red crimson blood dripped from the wound. "Drink this," I gently cooed, knowing that I needed to heal her.This is part of the problem. No, not the red crimson blood(!), nor the cooing, but the fact that Lance effectively owned Leila. She's "Mrs Lance Steel" (Lance Steel, really?! It sounds like the pseudonym of a porn actor!), and he's always putting his arm around her "protectively". He's hovering over her and worrying about her like she's his child, not his wife, and it was creepy. It was creepy how obsessively they were "in love" which actually felt fake in the extreme. There was creepily obsessive parenting, and it was creepy when they'd just become married and he kissed 'the bride' like so: "my tongue danced with hers before our family and friends." Seriously? In front of the guests they're tongue kissing?
The objectification of 'the bride' - especially given that this is a female author - was as sad as it was disturbing. I read phrases like "Leila was beyond beautiful in a white, spaghetti strapped wedding gown that accented her curves in all the right places," way too often. Nothing about her mind was said, like all she had to offer was this body and once that was gone, what use would she be to any man? This is upsetting. At least it was until I found myself contemplating how "her curves" could ever be accented in all the wrong places and managed a smile at last.
These two flew off on their honeymoon in Lance's private jet, but while it had sufficient range to fly them to Miami, it didn't have the range to get them just 200 miles further directly to Aruba? That was curious, but a minor issue. I think I really got to a point where I wanted to throw the book a the wall when Leila microwaved a bag of blood and stuck a straw in it to feed their child. Smart moms don't even heat breast milk in a microwave. The nutritional value of the blood would be destroyed if it was microwaved, but then since we get no vampire lore related here, perhaps not. Who knows?
That said, the thought of this happy, happy, joy, joy family sitting around with the kid sucking blood through a straw from a microwaved bag, and the husband hungrily gulping down his own blood bag, while the doting wife sits beaming at them both was simply too hilarious to take seriously. I had hoped, as I said, for something different, but all I got was more of the same tired ideas that have been staked to death long ago. There was nothing new here and nothing worth my time.
I had hoped to make it to at least 25%, but like a bag-o-blood, I honestly could not stomach it. The idea of a centuries-old vampire even remotely finding a twenty or thirty year old woman appealing as a partner carries the same creep factor as a ninety year old man marrying a nine year old child. What could they possibly have in common? Why would a normal woman find anything attractive about a man who drinks blood from hospital bags and sucks her blood when they make love, without even asking? Perhaps there's a market for this, but I could not take it seriously. Paranormal stories seem to do really well, but they're not for me when written so un-inventively. I wish the author the best of luck with this, but I can't in good faith recommend it.
