C Reviews

Beloved Healer by Bonnie Dee

Posted on by Dirty Girl Anne

*Note – I generally try to avoid spoilers when writing reviews, but this one is chock full of them.  There were some things that bothered me that couldn’t be discussed without a full synopsis.  So, read at your own risk.

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Grade: C
Hotness Level: Blaze
Kink Level: No Kink
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
Published: 7/28/14
Reviewed by Anne
185 pages

I just read Beloved Healer by Bonnie Dee.  I’ve read books by her before and liked them.  They’ve always been on subjects that are just a bit off the beaten path, but I like that.

In Beloved Healer, Mason has healing powers, but they, and people’s demands on him exhaust him, so he takes a break, hiding out in a small town, working as a dishwasher at a local diner.

Ava works there, too.  She’s got and alcoholic drug addicted and probably depressed mother.  and she’s got a 12 year old brother (12 years younger than her) who she’s been raising since her mom fell off the wagon when her dad died, back when her brother was 2.  Are you still with me? Because there’s one more thing.  Ava’s brother has muscular dystrophy.  He walks with crutches and he’s doing ok, but it’s a downward slide for him.

So, Ava and Mason start to date.  Then there’s an accident at work and it comes out that Mason is a healer when he helps a co-worker.  That starts the rumor mill and people start showing up asking Mason for help.  He has a hard time saying no.  Ava hears about Mason’s healing ability, but she takes it in stride.  She decides not to ask him to help her brother, because she sees that everyone wants a piece of him and that he’s really tired.  Eventually they do talk about her brother though, and Mason explains that some things are just too big and can’t be healed.  This is especially true with things that start at the gene level, like her brother’s MD.

Mason goes on to explain that his mother died of cancer when he was in his late teens.  His two older sisters were both very angry with him that he couldn’t help his mom.  After she died he ran away from home and has been drifting ever since.  Ava encourages him to reach out to his sisters.  He does and they make peace.

Meanwhile, the people of the small town keep asking for healing and Mason is feeling trapped, like it’s time to move on.  So he explains to Ava why he has to go and they break up amicably.  Ava really wants to ask him to stay because she loves him, but it feels really selfish to her.

On the way out of town, he stops by a revival healer tent show where he used to work and gets conned into working just a few more shows.  Ava’s brother has an acute illness, and on the way to the urgent care center she decides to pull into the revival instead.  (And at this point I’m mentally screaming “What in the hell are you doing????”)  Mason is exhausted but goes ahead and heals her brother’s developing pneumonia anyway.  Then he decides, what the heck, he’ll try to heal the MD because he loves Ava so much he wants to do this for her.  He does his healing mojo until he passes out, and he thinks to himself that he may have died.

But, Ava and Mason have some sort of woo-woo connection they hadn’t realized was there, and she brings Mason back by willing energy into him.

So, that’s pretty much the story.  It’s the epilogue that I really have issue with (other than the idiot-ness of taking her brother to be healed by Mason when he’d already told her he couldn’t do it.)  So here’s the epilogue.  Mason is getting along with his sisters.  Ava’s brother is totally cured.  Ava’s mom is in rehab.  Mason no longer has healing abilities.  Apparently the deal with her brother just got rid of them.

And here’s my issue.  And it’s totally personal, and it’s because of where I’m at in life right now.  Why did everything have to be so perfect?  I wanted to see a story where the kid brother was still suffering/dying slowly, and life went on and the hero helped the heroine cope.  Despite the book being about a healer, I wanted them to have to work with the reality of NOT being able to heal everything.  I guess I’m kind of offended that they took the easy out on the healing.

And the situation with Ava’s mom was messy, but it just magically resolves itself.  Not only is she in rehab, it’s happening out of town, so they don’t even have to deal with her, other than phone calls.

And Mason losing his healing powers… throughout the story I thought he needed to learn some boundaries.  Get to the point that he could say no to people once in a while.  But no.  He just loses the powers.

And Ava needed to learn to stand up for herself and ask for what she needed.  But she never really did.  And all her issues were solved magically anyway.

So, all in all, the magical, easy way out, happy endings annoyed the heck out of me and ruined what could have been a good story.

How about you?  Have you ever read a book where the ending ruined the whole thing?

 

Falling for Her Husband by Karen Erickson

Posted on by Dirty Girl Anne

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Grade: C
Hotness Level: Inferno
Kink Level: No Kink
Genre: Contemporary
Series: The Renaldis #3
Published: 7/22/14
Reviewed by Kate
172 pages

Vince, a rich Italian, and Amber, an up and coming super model, fell hard and fast for each other.  But despite being married, their jobs are pulling them apart.  When Vince decides it’s time to make a change so they can spend more time together, he discovers Amber is leaning toward divorce.  But an argument on a New York sidewalk leads to Amber being hit by a car and losing a few months of her memory…including any talk of divorce.

While predictable, this one kept me turning pages.  I loved Vince’s dedication to this marriage.  When Amber can’t remember what happened before her accident, Vince decides not to tell her that she had been thinking about divorce.  He’s committed to fixing their relationship and doesn’t want to bring any negative feelings into Amber’s recovery.  I will say, while I understood his motivation for not telling her, I really got tired of all his inner turmoil about not being honest with her.

I didn’t click with Amber’s character like I would have liked to.  There were things I felt she gave up too easily and things I thought she held on to too tightly.  But when she was together with Vince, he seemed to balance her out a bit.

I would recommend this one to anyone who likes low conflict husband/wife romances.

Bliss by Lisa Henry & Heidi Belleau

Posted on by Dirty Girl Anne

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Grade: C+
Hotness Level: Inferno
Kink Level: Moderate Kink
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, m/m
Published: 8/18/14
Reviewed by Anne

When I read the blurb for Bliss I was really intrigued!  The set up is a bit complicated, so I’m going to use the official blurb to explain:

They’re always happy.

Rory James has worked hard all his life to become a citizen of the idyllic city-state of Beulah. Like every other kid born in the neighboring country of Tophet, he’s heard the stories: No crime or pollution. A house and food for everyone. It’s perfect, and Rory is finally getting a piece of it.

So is Tate Patterson. He’s from Tophet, too, but he’s not a legal immigrant; he snuck in as a thief. A city without crime seems like an easy score, until he crashes into Rory during a getaway and is arrested for assaulting a citizen. Instead of jail, Tate is enrolled in Beulah’s Rehabilitation through Restitution program. By living with and serving his victim for seven years, Tate will learn the human face of his crimes.

If it seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. Tate is fitted with a behavior-modifying chip that leaves him unable to disobey orders—any orders, no matter how dehumanizing. Worse, the chip prevents him from telling Rory, the one man in all of Beulah who might care about him, the truth: in a country without prisons, Tate is locked inside his own mind.

 

I’m so conflicted about this story.  On one hand it’s really well written, on the other it’s terribly dark and the romance is pretty weak.  It actually read more like horror to me than sci-fi.

The thing about the story is that the chip doesn’t just make Rory unable to disobey orders, it leaves him craving Rory’s happiness and desperate to get any orders he can from Rory.  However, the whole time he following orders and trying to find anyway to make Rory happy, the real part of him suppressed to the back corner of his head is screaming.  Sometimes it’s screaming in disgust, sometimes in pain, sometimes in horror.  His personal morals just don’t matter in the face of avoiding the pain the chip will cause him if he even considers something against its programming.

And that’s where things cross the line for me.  Rory is very clear to himself that he is not gay, yet he finds himself compelled (and instructed) to seduce Rory.  Even when the act is painful for him, he knows it will be worse if he stops, so he tells Tate he’s into pain in order to get him to continue.

If that whole thing wasn’t horrifying enough, things get worse when a third party is involved.  At least when Tate and Rory are together Tate isn’t looking to hurt Rory or go against his will – he just doesn’t know that Rory isn’t in control.  When this third party comes in (I’m being purposefully vague to avoid spoilers) he seeks out painful and humiliating things to have Rory do.

So, one major problem I had with the story was that it’s just so much darker than what I enjoy.  The second problem was that almost the entire time Rory and Tate know each other, Rory is chipped, and basically being tortured.  And Tate is unknowingly one of his main torturers.  That makes it really hard to believe that any kind of healthy relationship could grow between them.  And truth be told, I wouldn’t have minded reading the story of how they overcame that start, but the story is all but over when Rory’s chip comes out.  That made the HEA pretty unbelievable for me.

The thing about this story is that despite all those negatives, I just couldn’t put it down.  It was horrifying, but I had to know what happened next.  Also, what little I saw of unchipped Rory I really liked.

However, in the end, I think this would have made a much better non-romance sci-fi book.  Honestly, I’ll probably be avoiding Lisa Henry in the future.  I’ve read and loved Heidi Belleau before, so I’m going to blame Lisa Henry for the darkness that still haunts me.  If you like darker evil stuff, though, this is would be a great book for you!