no kink

Desired by the Deep by Lyra Fawn

Posted on by Dirty Girl Anne

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Grade: B+
Hotness Level: Inferno
Kink Level: No Kink
Genre: shifter, menage, serial
Series: Claimed by the Alpha Dolphins, Part 2
Published: 8/16/14
Reviewed by Kate

In part 2, Lucan and Dario (princes of warring pods of dolphin-shifters) have found Mona, the descendant of Neptune that they’ve been searching for.  Now they have to get her safely back to their homes.  Of course, she has to choose between them as well.  Her choice will bring an end to the war between pods, will bring one pod under the rule of the other.  But Mona is attracted to both of them, and choosing one prince means the other must be killed.  Can she find a solution to end the war and keep both princes?

My favorite character is Dario at this point.  His princely superior-to-everyone attitude had me cracking up.  He tells himself he has to quit referring to her as “the human” and start using her name.  He gets frustrated when she doesn’t just recognize his princely aura.  Poor Dario.

Mona has become quite a firecracker.  She’s been on the run with the princes for a few days and everything’s been overwhelming, but some of her spunkiness is starting to return.  It was great to watch her butt heads with Dario and Lucan.

And the ending!  Talk about a cliff hanger.  I find myself stalking the author’s website, waiting for the release date of part three to be announced.  Come on, Lyra Fawn!  Write faster, please!

Have you been won over by the trend of serials yet?  Do you read them as they come out or wait for all the installments to be released and then read them back-to-back?

The Year We Fell Down by Sarina Bowen

Posted on by Dirty Girl Anne

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Grade: A
Hotness Level: Ember
Kink Level: No Kink
Genre: Contemporary, New Adult
Series: The Ivy Years #1
Published: 3/24/14
Reviewed by Anne
193 pages

Corey should have been starting college on the hockey team.  Instead she’s starting in a wheelchair, hoping she might walk again some day, knowing the hockey is not in her future.  Her wheelchair means she’s been placed in the sparsely populated “gimp dorm” instead of one of the many large and not-handicapped-friendly dorms most freshman stay in.  Luckily for her, she got assigned an awesome random roommate, and the guy across the hall is Adam Hartley.

Hartley is a hockey player whose having a year off from the sport after breaking his leg in two places.  He and Corey become good friends as they limp and roll around campus.  They help each other work through issues big and small and start to wonder if their friendship might turn into something more.  Hartley doesn’t feel ready to leave his high class girl friend, yet, though, and Corey feels like Hartley is way out of her league.

Let me start by saying, in general, I don’t read New Adult books, and this is one.  I heard some good buzz, and specifically read a review by Jane at DearAuthor.com and decided to give this story a try.  I’m so glad I did!

My main complaints against New Adult romance in general are 1.) too much angst  2.) my inability to relate to characters.  I found Corey and Hartley to be relatable, and for all their issues, they were surprisingly low angst characters.  It certainly takes place in college, and in a college atmosphere.  It’s socially nothing like my geek experience was, but I know a lot of people who had experiences like those in the story, so that’s believable to me.

Corey is such a strong character.  She’s not perfect, and she makes some poor choices, but her attitude toward life is one of soldiering on.  She doesn’t just hope that better days are coming, but she makes the most of where she is right now.  Hartley is pretty messed up emotionally, and his friendship with Corey helps him to see things more clearly.

Without ruining things, I want to say that when Corey hits a major sad point in her life, I was impressed with how she handled things.  She made choices to improve her life.  She mourned her losses, and with the help of her friends, she moved on.  That kind of maturity was very relatable.

I also felt like the author did a great job explaining why Hartley was making the choices he was.  You could feel his confusion that his choices weren’t leading him toward happiness, and see him struggle to make changes that would.

I highly recommend this book.  It’s got great characters and a wonderful story.  It’s going on my best of 2014 list!  In fact, it might be the best book I’ve read this year so far.  How about you?  What’s your best book so far?

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?