The enemy was more intriguing than the heroine
355753
This should have had everything I love in a space opera a war, a strong heroine, space battles, but many items caused this book to be very disconnected from the reader.

One is the main character, her motivations, her insights, we receive no real connection to her. Also she is very borderline with her acts of treason in my opinion, with her attacks on civilians (Yes I know what really happened and that is why it is borderline and not truly evil).

Furthermore we don't know the reason for this war. In fact I sympathized more with the enemy commander than her. I sincerely hope he wins and defeats her. Emmerich was a character I could relate to. A family man, who is trying to save the empire from those who would attack civilians.

Jessica on the other hand uses questionable tactics to hurt innocent people, and we don't know what makes her tick.
4054557
First the pros:
- I really enjoyed our heroine, Vicky. She was powerful, funny, smart and kicked all kinds of tail. Not quite as awesome as my current favorite, Kate Daniels, but I would say that she's not too far off.
- The plot was interesting, moved quickly and concluded well. The menace was believable, the dramatic elements were clever and I just liked it. I thought the premise was an interesting twist on the old favorite. And that is getting much harder to do lately.
- World-building. We didn't get to see as much of the world as I would have liked, since the focus was mainly on the action, but what we saw was interesting and original.

All this counts for a lot, but with the urban fantasy market as crowded as it is, it takes that extra something for a book to go from good to great in my view. And the one, massive con was something I couldn't move past: the cast.

I did not like any of the supporting cast. They were, almost without exception, untrustworthy, evil or plain old jerks and they made the book a lot less believable. The one I took the most exception to, and will use as the example to illustrate my point, is Tina.

Tina the zombie sidekick is actually a potentially interesting and original new character. Unfortunately Tina completely lacked charm. Every time she appeared on the page I wanted someone, anyone, to slap the heck out of her. Not for being a smartass, but for consistently pulling crap that could get our heroine killed. She's a danger to pretty much everyone around her, literally from the first chapter. The heroine can probably empathize, since she was something like that as a teenager, but Vicky's actions as a teenager actually DID cause a tragedy. Every time Tina appeared and did something stupid that could get the heroine killed I wondered why the heroine would ever agree to train her, knowing that the attitude could get someone killed. It didn't make any sense. I cant imagine her associating with, much less training, someone who doesn't listen, will STEAL from her, and is a danger to her AND her clients. She has experienced the consequences of such a lack of control and unwillingness to listen in her past and out to know better. It ripped me right out of the story, as I spent the time thinking WTF!

Tina was the character that aggravated me the most, but far from the only one. The client and politicians were a cliche, the lawyer boyfriend plain unlikable, and the human love interest was boring. If we must have a romance (and I know it's pretty much a given in this genre- I don't mind it when it's done well), I  hope the author will introduce a viable third candidate in the next book. The closest I came to really liking any character other than the lead was in flashbacks to Vicky's dead relatives.

I will certainly check out the reviews of the second book in this series when it is published. I hope that further development will make the cast a bit more interesting and fun to read about. There are just too many good urban fantasy books out there right now to buy one that doesn't get me interested from the beginning. If the cast issues are addressed, I will absolutely buy the next book.
4197093
When I started reading the Legendary Lord my first thoughts were that this was going to be an engaging read with an interesting heroine and hero and it was for the first half of the book and then the story lost my interest because the heroine became less interesting and rather predictable.

Set initially in a comfortable hunting Lodge in Scotland, our heroine Lady Sarah meets the owner of the hunting lodge Christian, Vicount Berkely in less than ideal circumstances. She has run away from a betrothal to a boring but not unkind Marquess.  Sarah is alone in the lodge because she and her chaperone lose their way (she was on her way to her own familys lodge) and her chaperone is injured requiring the hunting lodge caretaker to take her feisty chaperone to a local doctor.

Christian is startled to find the young and beautiful Sarah in his lodge. The two though realize neither one is there for nefarious purposes and they establish a very nice friendship, something that Christian laments as he is always the friend of beautiful women. He wants a wife and family but he is shy and stutters around beautiful women which never happens around Sarah or anyone else in the book for that matter.

Sarah decides she wants to go back to London and be the dutiful daughter but needs to avoid a scandal and Christian needs advice on how to be irresistible to the ladies so they make a bargain to help each other. They both get their wishes and Sarah does get back to London and Christian does become a suave debonair guy.

SPOILER Sarah undergoes a radical personality shift when she returns to London. Where is the girl who ran away from an unwanted marriage, the girl who brandished a sword. She is replaced by a dutiful, dull version of herself who is so stubborn that she is nearly unlikable. People have to do her thinking for her. Also, I had a difficult time believing this girl really suffered from panic attacks. She supposedly cannot breathe when she is engaged but can walk down an aisle without having a major melt down?

Christian is a dream in this story, so kind, thoughtful and considerate of others. He is a gentleman in every sense of the word. In many ways he is too mature for the immature Sarah. By far the most intriguing women in this book were the side characters who were bold and confident. I liked the early Sarah, the Sarah in Scotland but the later one was one who was obstinate and willfully blind to her own feelings and Christians too was not someone that I admired.
1178822
Intriguing storyline, but hated the main character.
3849852
Catherine Bellamy finds her deception unmasked when she takes her brother's place at an exchange of information during the pre - Revolution days of the colonies. Worse than Merlin, the agent with whom she meets, the British find them and arrest them for treason, with hanging the penalty.
They escape, and think never to see one another again, but when Catherine entreats her brother in law, an English nobleman for help in her impoverished circumstances, he recognizes her as the woman he met while disguised as the mysterious Merlin. What's worse is that he finds himself attracted to his brother's widow.
*** A complex web of deception and secret identities make this novel at times confusing. Julian, the hero, is often brusque and though sexy, hard to find endearing. Though Catherine has fire and spunk, even in put upon conditions, the multi faceted plot does not allow for enough character development to truly warm up to her. ***
Reviewed by Amanda Killgore.
3682400
Some of the characters were well developed however the main heroine was not one that appeared to have much empathy or warmth for others with the exception of the servicemen that she assisted.  However given the behaviour of her father following the death of her mother made her more understandable.
4596830
It tried a little too hard for some of its humor, and the heroine acted more like a teenager than her twenty-six years. I also never really had a good idea of what the hero looked like and got conflicting impressions of him. But it has some intriguing secondary characters.
The story needs one more round of proofing to fix the last of the nuisance issues.
I look forward to seeing more from this author in the future as she polishes her craft.
I received a copy of this book from the Kindle Scout program.
469816
We're in the year 2060 or so. All forms of paranormal ability are shunned and outlawed. The heroine, Paige, is a dreamwalker  a particularly rare ability  and she has joined an amiable crime syndicate where she's relatively content. But she's caught by the government and shuttled off to what she imagines will be torture or death. Instead, she's transported with many more of her kind to a secret city run by mostly malevolent aliens, who use the "voyants" to fight off some flesh-eating beasts.
It's an interesting world into which the book throws you right in, "Clockwork Orange"-style, with its meta-arcane terminology and accepted norms that are anything but.
However, I was disappointed that the captured voyants weren't more formidable  they should have been able to combine their talents to fight off their oppressors in dazzling ways, instead of plotting half-baked "Hogan's Heroes"-caliber maneuvers. I guess the epic team-up rebellion is being saved up for later in the seven(!)-book series, which seems like major overkill, as book 1 alone dragged a fair bit.

* Simon Pegg's "The World's End"
2566216
I read this book. The plot was OK.  I felt that there were just too many spies to keep track of.  I did start to lose interest towards the end.  I did figure early on in the reading of this novel the person who killed the victim. I would like to have read more descriptions of the heroine's home life.  The color of her carpet, furniture, bedroom, etc.  along with the gowns and accessories while the heroine attended the requried functions.
It just got to be a bit dull.
768310
This book has an intriguing premise: A society of anthropomorphic felines based on an amalgam of Asian cultures. Throw in some human efforts at surviving some mysterious catastrophe and both tech and evolution gone awry and you should have the elements of an interesting story. And it was, for the most part. The thing that disappointed me was a story that began as a 5.8 on my fiction scale became a 3.5 by the end of the book (see my profile for an explanation of the fiction scale). The mystery and the quest and the action began to be eclipsed by the jealousies and romantic entanglements of the characters. I began to lose interest about three chapters from the end. I candidly recognize this as a gender factor. This is a female author writing about things that are thrilling to her and not so much to me. The book is well written and the culture fully realized in a marvelous display of world building. I just wish that either a) the author had stuck to the story she set out to tell at the beginning, or b) I had not been misled into expecting a story she really wasn't interested in telling.

I believe that most female fantasy readers will find this book to be exceptionally good.
1369563
This book moves along quickly, and there is some amusing dialog in it, but it wasn't one of my very favorites.  The characters were not fully fleshed out, and even the two heroines remained a bit of a mystery when I finished the last page.  The plot was a bit thin. The characters didn't sit still long enough for me tell much about them. There were more questions than answers. I think with more of a backstory, and slowing down the non-stop action a bit might have served the story better. I never had enough time with the main characters to really care about them.  It's readable, but forgettable at the end.
4530072
Interesting premise, but hard to maintain interest. Hard to understand heroine's relationships and didn't see much development of her character
4572976
I did not care hugely for this story,  I did not like the heroine, what an awful little girl she was, not that the fellow was much better. But that is not really why I did not enjoy this read, the whole ton thing and debutantes finding husbands was boring. The historical aspect of it was written from a modern person's perspective as if they were somehow thrown back in the past, and I am by no means a stickler for historical accuracy, this is fluff romance after all, but it did not work for me, it was mostly annoying. I don't mind a tomboyish, independent heroine, but sometimes they can be very annoying and cliche. Overall, not one of my favorite RLM books.
3130159
Henry Lidge hears that a foreign agent talked about 'the whore' before he died and automatically assumes it must be Lady Kate. Without further ado he kidnaps her and decides he's going to intimidate her into revealing a poem the baddies want to get their paws on. His technique involves deprivation of liberty, starvation and sexual harassment.

Henry comes across as a fairly brutish and vindictive thug even though Dreyer threw in nightmares as a way of humanising him. I honestly have no idea why Kate was remotely attracted to him but perhaps it is because she remembered the decent young man he used to be rather than what he became. If he had done the slightest bit of investigation before kidnapping Kate or taken slightly less joy in her suffering, I probably would have liked him better.

I have a bit of a problem with the way Kate was able to overcome her problems with intimacy (stemming from her late husband's abuse) by submitting to Henry's attentions. He seemed way too aggressive to help her.

The espionage plot continues to limp along and the snippets we get from our psychotic baddie don't really add to the story as a whole.  I think that you really need to read the books in order to understand how the espionage is progressing as the events in the books dovetail quite neatly.

Lade Kate might be a lady but she is as tough as bootstraps. Throughout the novel she is forced to defend herself from a variety of men who are eager to gain control of her. Many women would be completely cowed by this but Kate decides to live her life in spite of them. She dons a fairly frivolous outer persona like a cloak and bit by bit we get to see snatches of the real woman.

All the women in this series are stronger than their male counterparts. I really liked Bea, Kate's sidekick, who suffered a serious injury some years ago. She tends to make very random statements but always manages to get to the heart of the issue. Bea's loyalty to Kate and slightly impish ways was just the tonic the book needed.

I struggled a little bit with this one because of dichotomy between the leads. Kate was an interesting and multi-faceted lead but Henry operated at a much lower 'me no like', 'me want', 'me take' and 'me sorry' level. I realise that Dreyer needed some way of throwing the two together for a length of time but she made it really hard to like Henry on any level.
3423184
Dare You To Run in the second novel in the Unbroken Heroes series, and I was looking forward to reading it since I very much enjoyed the first book in the series, Dangerous to Know, but I found myself hard-pressed to give this novel more than 3 stars.

Since I read Dangerous to Know more than 11 months ago, it was jarring to be dropped into the end of a scene at the very beginning of this novel, as Vitus Hale, backed up by his brother and fellow Navy SEAL, Saxon, rescues debutante Damascus Ryland, daughter of Congressman Jeb Ryland, who has been captured by kidnappers and held captive in a concrete cylinder for a week. Really? Damascus and Vitus? While I don't usually comment on the names of the main characters, accepting those two names was quite a stretch. Accepting the insta-love that followed was also quite a stretch, as was Vitus asking Damascus to marry him after knowing her for only two weeks. Expecting that her powerful father would accept this union was an even bigger stretch.

When, as expected, Damascus tells her father about her upcoming nuptials, as expected, he blackmails her into returning the engagement ring and cutting off all contact. She's not happy and neither is Vitus, who did see this coming.

Fast forward to three years later, and Vitus is about to be awarded the Medal of Honor, and who better to present it than Damascus, the woman he rescued. Still thinking that she believes he's not good enough for her, when he finds out that's not the case, the chemistry is still there and they are hot and heavy again, yet he still doesn't fully trust her and all it does in enrage her father.

What Vitus doesn't know, is that 3 years earlier, Damascus sacrificed her own happiness to keep him safe, and she will keep on doing that throughout the novel, as it unfolds, and it unfolds with a very large cast of characters, some good, some bad, and so many schemes, plots and subplots, double-crosses and triple-crosses that it's difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys and keep them all straight. None of this is helped by the fact that a Presidential hopeful, Carl Davis, wants Damascus as his trophy wife and bargains with her father that if he makes it happen, Jeb will be his choice for Vice-President. As if things weren't bad enough, Jeb Ryland also wants to see the Hale brothers dead, and Damascus will risk herself and her future happiness to keep him safe. What is clearly evident in this novel is that the author is well aware of the secrets, conspiracies and backroom deals made by the powers that be in our nation's capital.

What I found lacking, however, was any sort of relationship-building between the main characters. There's sex, and plenty of it, much of it rather repetitive and unimaginative, but it seems to be the only way Damascus and Vitus communicate. While I enjoyed watching Damascus grow a backbone as the novel progressed, it was too little to late for this reader, especially since the the action and suspense aspects of this novel overshadowed any type of actual romance between the two lovers, and the overly long episodes of chases, escapes, and deals did more to slow the story down rather than enhance it.

All in all, it was an okay read, and I'll be interested to see how the author deals with Saxon Hale in the next novel in this series.
3867489
The idea of this book is very intriguing. The manifestation of it, not so much. First, I found myself getting a little annoyed with the protagonist. There were times when I thought she should have been putting things together that she wasn't. Second, it seemed that the author was trying a bit hard at times - there would be a word or phrase that seemed to be in there just because it sounded more elegant, when a simpler phrase would have fit better. It was distracting. Finally, I listened to the audio book and didn't care for the narrator. I'm not sure whether it was because I didn't care for the protagonist (the story is told in first person) or whether the narrator was part of why I didn't like the protagonist. This is going to sound picky, but her diction was a bit too precise and clear, which I found annoying. Overall, it was not a bad book, just average.
1587010
This is my first Isabel Allende novel and I wish I had started with one of her other books. In the beginning, there are so many characters introduced that it was difficult to remember who was who. Of all the characters, the most intriguing was Indiana, Amanda's mother. The story line was good, but there were things that didn't seem plausible. For example, what grandfather would sneak details of a murder investigation to his teenage granddaughter so they can solve murders that the teen's father, a deputy chief of homocide, cannot figure out? Also, even though Amanda is supposed to be MIT bound, there was little else that made her intellect shine through. Thus, the end result doesn't flow naturally. While not all mysteries are page-turners, I had hoped this one would be, but it wasn't.