I bought this omnibus of books one and two at a thrift store. My friends and followers have been trying to get me to read this series for ages, although I think I've missed the bus on the book's popularity train. It peaked ages ago; now people are all about her vampire fantasy series (which I definitely did not like). The Lux series honestly isn't too bad for what it is. It's very much a paranormal YA romance cast in the mold of TWILIGHT, but the heroine has a lot more empowerment than most other female characters done in that vein. Katy is a book blogger, she stands up for herself, and she doesn't hate every female character who so much as breathes in the direction of her love interest.
This is basically TWILIGHT with aliens. The Lux are light people, the Arum are shadow people. They are at war and Katy's proximity to them ends up putting her in danger-- multiple times. Daemon, the love interest, is one of the most powerful of his kind, and after reading FOURTH WING, let me tell you that light beings kind of pale in comparison to shadow baes. Also, he's just such a raging asshole. Did I need a TWILIGHT where "Edward" constantly insults and sexually harasses "Bella" while doing a self-defensive light show? No.
Did I read it anyway? Of course I did.
If you're really into books like FALLEN, TWILIGHT, and HUSH HUSH, you will love this book. Actually, now that I'm saying this, I think Daemon has more in common with Patch than he does with Edward, so maybe that's a better comparison. I probably wouldn't recommend this series to anyone who isn't a die-hard YA paranormal fan, and honestly, the bonus scenes in this book just made me super glad that the books aren't dual POV. I probably won't read more in this series but I don't regret what I did read.
UNTIL THE END has been sitting on my bookshelf gathering dust for years until I finally decided to purge my bookshelves of some of my old YA and middle grade novels (I'm more interested in mystery and romance these days). But because I'm compulsive as fuck, I figured what better way to give these a final send-off than to binge-read everything I can get my grubby hands on? If I don't like it, I DNF. Either way, a winner is me.
This trilogy is a repackaging of Pike's 90s thriller trilogy, The Final Friends. I was really pleasantly surprised by these books, to be honest. I was expecting the usual Point Horror-esque cheap thrillers and instead I found myself being sucked down a rabbit hole of sex, violence, school rivalries, and madness, with a locked-room mystery premise to boot. How did I miss this series growing up? I would have LOVED it. Deadly parties are one of my FAVORITE tropes.
I don't think I've binged a series so fast in a while and these books are relatively young for pulp YA. My omnibus edition was 800+ pages and I finished it in TWO. DAYS. Books two and three I read back to back in one day. That's how badly I wanted to find out what happens. Because Pike does something truly evil. Book one doesn't give you any closure. Neither does book two. To find out the identity of the murderer from book one, you have to wade through the drama of all three books.
I know right?
But I think the wait is worth the pay-off. The characters are all fleshed-out and interesting (for pulp) and I liked that the author actually lets the teens do bad teen things, like underage drinking or relationship drama. These teens are not squeaky clean and aren't afraid to let you know it. A lot of these teen pulps feel really old-fashioned and use 50s slang, because I think the authors writing them were probably teens themselves in the 50s, so they refer to dances as "hops" and frequent malt shops and have ice cream socials. These teens want to party and get laid, which makes the books feel more modern, although I must say that there are some pretty serious trigger warnings across the board for virtually everything, as this series touches upon subjects like abortion, self-harm, and racism.
It's like no other vintage YA I've ever read before and for that alone it would have probably gotten a pretty positive rave from me, but I like that it had such a compulsively readable storyline, too.
Okay, so I've read 4/5 of the books in this anthology and I've decided that these books are a little too young for me. Which isn't probably all that surprising to you given that I am a thirty-something reading books for tweens. But they were sent to me to review and all I can really do is read them and give my honest feedback with regard to my own perceptions of the characters and the storylines.
This box set contains the first book in each of Riordan's series to kind of give you a taste of his writing style, I guess. As far as I can tell (from the four of these five I've read), all of them basically start exactly the same way: snarky teen with one dead parent finds out that they are the chosen one to stop the world from being destroyed and also they're involved with the gods/descended by the gods/possessed by the gods/are a god. Literally all of them are exactly this.
I don't think this identical plot would be quite as fatiguing if you were actually reading the series in chronological order, but reading the "first" book in each "new" series and seeing the same recycled plot with different faces and different names is... well, it's a lot.
So, let's break it down. The best book in this collection, overall, is, by and far, Magnus Chase. I was honestly surprised I enjoyed that one as much as I did. Maybe because it kind of reminds me of K.A. Applegate's Everworld series, which is what I was obsessed with as a kid (I know, I told you-- I'm old). I thought it was really clever how Riordan incorporated some of those Norse myths into modern day society and the fast-paced plot made the incredibly long page count way less noticeable.
Kane Chronicles had the best magic system, but the kids were annoying. Especially Sadie, who is quite possibly the least British-sounding British person I've ever heard. I know it's tempting to turn the number of times she says "blokes" or "quite" into a drinking game, but don't. Just don't. Trust me.
The Trials of Apollo was the most annoying, period. If you've ever wondered what a teenage Lestat would be like, or find yourself wishing that Artemis Fowl was even more annoying and arrogant, you'll probably enjoy this book. Otherwise, stay far, far away. Forever.
Percy Jackson is the most well-known and probably the most overhyped, but it was fun. I read it years ago and liked it okay but it was definitely way too young for me. I feel like it's the most solidly middle grade of these books. Magnus and Trials both read as being slightly older in tone with Kane feeling more mixed because the boy lead is a teen and the girl lead is a lot younger, I believe.
What these books do well: honestly a really clever and fun way to teach mythology to kids. I know a bit about Egyptian, Greek, and Norse mythology so the in-jokes were genuinely clever and hilarious (especially the ones about Loki). I also really admire this author's attempts to incorporate positive diverse rep into his books. One of the Valkyries in Magnus wears a hijab and there's an elf who speaks with ASL. The kids in Kane Chronicles are interracial (half-Black) and the author makes a few attempts to kind of address some of the baggage that comes with that. The possible love interest of the male character is ethnically Egyptian. There's a lot of these moments and they seem effortless.
I just wish that they weren't quite so heavy on the slapstick, the winking at the audience, the needless (and endless) banter, and shallowly characterized. I actually had this problem with another middle grade series I used to like when I was young but didn't hold up over rereads: Alex Rider. I think whenever the banter starts to come at the cost of character development, I lose interest, because it's boring to read about people who always behave the way you expect them to and never fail to do the right thing.
But, again-- I'm not the target audience.
I was a bit torn on how to rate this book. Usually in box sets, I'll average my aggregate rating across all of the books in the series and then round up, but since I'm quitting four books in, I'm doing something I never do and just rounding up a half star since I know I'm not the target audience and anyone who has a young teen interested in fantasy (say, 11-14) will probably feel like these are a pretty safe bet. If you enjoy Artemis Fowl, Everworld, Animorphs, or Alex Rider, you will enjoy these books.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
Box sets are always tough to rate. Do you rate based on your feelings of the series as a whole? Or do you take the scientific approach and average out your ratings of all the other books in the box set? I personally take the scientific approach, which means that sometimes my rating for the box sets is lower than my ratings for various books in the series. Such is the case with Dirty Angels, as there were some books I liked, and other books I thought were really lame. The quality of these stories can be highly variable.
Dirty Angels is a spin-off series about Javier Bernal from the author's other Artists series. Javier is a crime boss who deals in drugs and power. The first book is about how he meets his love interest, Luisa. The second book is a secondary romance about Javier's sister, Alana, hooking up with one of Javier's ex-mercenaries-turned-traitor. The third book is about Javier and Luisa again, only now they're married and it's on the rocks, and Javier is on the verge of losing everything due to his ignorance and pride, when one of his associates decides to stage a coup.
Honestly, this book was close to perfect. I loved the romance between Javier and Luisa, and that it grows from such a dark place. He was cruel but still human, and even though he did terrible things to her as his captive, I thought that Luisa's vulnerability and isolation were really well-portrayed. She was already a survivor of abuse and strife, so it made sense that she'd find his strength appealing. It's got a lot of violence, but it's used as a spice and not a sauce, so even though the scenes were unpleasant, the book never felt drenched with it. DIRTY ANGELS is mostly an edgy erotic romance.
I kind of hated this short story. It felt pointless and did not match the tone of the other books. Esteban is a bad man, and I did not want to read about his meet-cute with some lame artist in Hawaii indulging in cultural tourism as an attempt to cure her artistic ennui and suicidal ideation. After reading about Esteban in DIRTY PROMISES, I actually wanted to go back and deduct the half-star I'd added in my original rating to round up because I was so mad to see him romanticized. Yuck.
This was another story I didn't like. It has nothing to do with the first book - instead it's about a mercenary who's mentioned a handful of times in Artists and Dirty Angels and one of Javier's sisters, Alana. Derek is supposed to kill Alana but falls in lust with her at first sight and changes his mind literally while he's on the job. It felt way too fluffy, which was jarring after the dark tone set by DIRTY ANGELS. There's a chase scene and fight scene at the end that have more of the action I was expecting, but most of this book was pretty boring and I didn't care about either character very much.
** In between the second book and the third book, there are two excerpts for books written by the author's fellow author friends. I didn't care for either excerpt, and I thought it was kind of sneaky to put them in between the two books, as opposed to the back of the book. It felt like Halle was forcing us to page through these excerpts, which I didn't appreciate. Ads should go in the back, and we should be able to choose to read them if we want instead of having them forced upon us. #JustSaying
The most violent book in the bunch, by far. Any trigger warning you can think of, this book probably has it. The violence fits the tone of the first book and is probably realistic for this kind of setting, but it's definitely hard to read and people who are sensitive to content involving rape and gore should exercise caution when picking up DIRTY PROMISES. I was actually not displeased with how this ended the series, and thought it struck the right balance between hopeful and depraved.
Also, it addresses the events in DIRTY DEEDS, which is that Alana isn't actually dead. (I don't think this is a spoiler, since she's in the second book and people are saying it has an HEA - I mean, duh.) That was a thread I was afraid the author was going to forget about, but she didn't. Only continuity error I actually spied was that she spells Derek's name as "Derrick" in the end of this book. Whoops.
Overall, the Dirty Angels series is a pretty good set of books to read if you like dark and edgy romances that feel borderline-realistic and don't try to be too neat. The first book is the best, and I think you could honestly get away with just reading the first book or, if you're not afraid of violence, maybe the first and the third, as one of my friends advised me. The second book feels kind of unnecessary, and along with the short story, drags down the quality of the series as a whole.
Three months of reading. That's how long it took me to work my way through this imposing omnibus of the first three books in the Flat Earth series. I've been really bad at finishing books lately, but it really helped that my friend Elena volunteered to buddy-read these with me, as I've had this tome on my shelf for years and never quite managed to have done with it.
This is a dark fantasy series for adults that has a mythological element to it. It's set on an ancient world where the earth was still flat (hence the title), and gods and demigods still wandered across its surface looking for mortals to screw with (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally). This anthology consists of the first three books in the series, written about the "lords of darkness" represented in each distinct book: Azhrarn, lord of darkness; Uhlume, lord of death; and Chuz, lord of madness.
One thing I love about this anthology collection is the gorgeous illustrations on the cover. It shows Chuz, Azhrarn, and Uhlume, respectively, and I thought the artist did a really great job representing the characters the way I imagined them in my head. It doesn't hurt that Azhrarn looks a little bit like David Bowie with his piercing eyes, hawkish nose, and chiseled jawline, because for much of NIGHT'S MASTER, I was picturing him as Jareth from Labyrinth.
So without further ado, let's dive into each book.
Obviously my favorite. Similarities to Jareth aside, this was just a really great story with great writing and seamless blending of each of the distinct fables as they wove themselves into an equally distinct whole. I loved each story in here, and thought it portrayed the fickle nature of gods really well.
I thought Uhlume, the god of death, was an interesting character and there were some great side-stories in here. Notably, there is a gender-fluid character who ends up becoming a flawed hero figure of the story. Some of the characters were great, but others were tedious, and towards the end I actually set the book down a couple times because the story was starting to drag. It's also the longest of the three (by about two hundred pages), which makes the slow pace even more notable.
Chuz is super creepy! I liked this story second best and almost gave it four stars because of the ending (it has the best ending of the three). However, like DEATH'S MASTER, I felt that DELUSION'S MASTER also had some really slow parts and some of the stories were a little too close to events that happened in the previous two books. There's also a story in here that I know is going to upset people, in which the rape of a developmentally disabled girl is "redeemed."
Overall, I did enjoy these stories and the creativity that went into them. A lot of the fantasy books coming out lately have been marketed with a heavy hand, while at the same time delivering chronically underwhelming and derivative stories. Lee, at least, remains authentic to herself, and doesn't appear to be afraid of causing offense. She's one of my favorite authors and I will read anything she writes, so if you're looking for something shocking and different, check her out.
This box set is a collection of Jennifer Blake's Gothic romances, most of which were published under the name "Patricia Maxwell." Unlike her bodice rippers, her Gothic romances are very clean and while they share features of her bodice rippers, such as lavish clothing and architecture porn and icy but misunderstood heroes, they are much more tame and inoffensive - at least in the sexual sense. There are other kinds of WTFery offered by these Gothic novels, as you will see.
BRIDE OF A STRANGER is definitely the most WTF in the collection. Claire is supposed to marry her cousin but ends up catching the eye of a scarred and dangerous rogue who spirits her away to his plantation mansion where all of the freed slaves still reside and practice voodoo. Claire isn't the only one feeling ambivalent about this abrupt marriage as it quickly becomes clear that someone on her new husband's estate is trying to kill her.
I'm a sucker for the "hero in pursuit" trope, so that opening when Justin made his feelings known to Claire and blackmailed her aunt into allowing marriage was, well, amazing. It gave me heart eyes, because I'm a disturbing individual. I also liked the prevalence of voodoo in the storyline, because that was a common trope with bodice rippers set in the Caribbean, so it was like seeing a bit of Jennifer Blake's bodice ripper future trying to crawl its way out through the pages. Likewise, there's a bit of orgiastic naked dancing and animal sacrifice - not a Gothic romance for maiden aunts!
This one was okay. Lillian's father is trying to force her to marry a local preacher and things get awkward when she refuses his suit. The two are riding home together, in awkward silence, when a storm hits, forcing the two of them to take shelter at a place called "The Plantation Inn." The Inn is quite crowded with a number of curious characters who all seem harmless until, of course, Lillian locks eyes with a dark and dangerous individual who sets her heart a-fluttering.
She and the other tenants also quickly find out that a murderous outlaw made his escape from nearby and might very well be among them. Suspicion rises, reaching a fever pitch after several increasingly malicious acts that include smearing someone's destroyed clothes with poop and killing the inn's cat (poor kitty). The parlor mystery set-up makes this book feel a bit different from Maxwell's usual formula of the ingenue getting wrapped up in domestic politics and treachery but I liked it. The ending was a bit confusing, though, and this book was very, very light on romance.
I fully expected to like THE SECRET OF MIRROR HOUSE more than I did, but I felt like I'd read the story before in the form of Dorothy Eden's DARKWATER and Patricia Maxwell's own DARK MASQUERADE. DARK MASQUERADE definitely follows that ingenue-gets-involved formula I was telling you about earlier, but the characters were so flat that I didn't really care about what happened to them, sadly. I wanted to like this way more than I did, but the hot-and-cold hero and wimpy heroine killed this for me. The best thing about this book is the atmosphere.
I averaged out my ratings for this book and came up with 2.8, roughly, which I'll round up to three since the first two books in this collection were quite good. I don't always have the best luck with bundles but I got this one for free and I consider liking 2 of those 3 books a bargain, indeed.
I can't stop staring at the way that the box set is positioned in this photo because if you look at it from the side, it kind of looks like historical menage, with the dark-haired woman slowly edging in one the red-haired woman and the dark haired man, like, "I want in on that action! Is there room for one more?" Only it's kind of creepy to think about, because that woman is her godmother (more on that).
ROYAL PRINCES OF RUTHENIA is a duology by Jennifer Blake. The books are set in a fictional Balkan country called Ruthenia, and the hero of each book is a Ruthenian prince. Initially I was skeptical because I think the last historical romance I read that was set in a fictional country was by Christina Dodd. It was not good.
These books surprised me, though - both of them are beautifully written and the first one especially has amazing dialogue. The sensory descriptions are vivid and poetic, and I can't imagine how much research went into these books because the gala scenes, fight scenes, and day-to-day scenes are equally well done. So is the sex, if you're into that sort of think, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
Royal Seduction: ☆☆☆☆☆
This book was close to perfect, and you should really check out my full-length review on that book's page. ROYAL SEDUCTION is very much a classic bodice ripper, written in the vein of the other greats, like Rosemary Rogers or Laurie McBain. The writing is especially lovely in this book and the hero and heroine's witty repartee flew off the pages. There's a lot of sex but the romance doesn't really happen until later, because it's enemies to lovers - the hero thinks first that the heroine killed his brother, and then that the heroine is covering for the person who did. So yeah, he's not happy.
I seriously can't say enough about this book, although I would caution you that it does have forced seduction, so if that's something that upsets you, you should probably keep that in mind. It doesn't happen just once, either, but I personally felt like it fit the story, and that the hero was definitely being portrayed as a not-nice person for doing it. At its core, this is a book about vengeance and betrayal, so many of the bad things that do happen fit the theme of the story and the ruthlessness of the characters.
Royal Passion: ☆☆½
NOOOOOO, the first book was so good that I immediately launched into this one, and I couldn't believe the dip in quality. I don't think I've been this disappointed by a bodice ripper sequel since reading Rosemary Rogers's DARK FIRES after SWEET SAVAGE LOVE.
ROYAL PASSION is set thirty years in the future after ROYAL SEDUCTION and the hero is actually the child of the first couple. Overall, the plot kind of reads like a pale imitation of the first book: hero and heroine at odds, court intrigue, betrayals, final confrontation, near-death experience, nursing back to health, pledge to love one another forever and ever, etc.
There's also a shift in tone, which I think will please people who don't like the bodice ripper formula (e.g. bad things happening to everyone, all the time), but for me it felt really weird and jarring, because the first story was so dark and now suddenly we have secondary AND tertiary romances to pad out the plot, as well as animal sidekicks and villains who LITERALLY look like the devil. I go into more detail about my thoughts on ROYAL PASSION in my Goodreads review, but the TL;DR version is that I was expecting so much more and was delivered so much less. Boo.
I was pretty disappointed with ROYAL PASSION, but I'm rounding up for the hot lovins.
Overall, ROYAL PRINCES OF RUTHENIA was a fun, quick read. I got through this box set in just a couple days. Usually I say, "Go for the box set!" because it's such a great deal, but I feel like in this case, I'd advice you to just pick up the first book and have done with it. The first book is AMAZING.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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