AUTHOR: Sydney Somers
PUBLISHER: Samhain Publishing
LENGTH: Novel (roughly 72k)
GENRE: Paranormal erotic romance
COST: $5.50
When her lover and partner dies in her arms, cop Jordan McAdam’s life is changed forever. Absorbing some of the essence of the demon that killed Gage, she takes a new direction and becomes a Rogue Destroyer, intent on killing off the Shadow demons that stalk the earth. She’s not prepared when Gage shows up five years later, however, alive and hunting demons himself. With a new threat on the loose, can they work together to stop it? Even more, can they get past the pain of their separation to start over?
On first glance, this seemed exactly my thing. I love urban fantasy. I love heroines who kick ass. I love reunions. But by chapter two of this book, I seriously contemplated not bothering to finish it at all. Only my own stubborn nature kept me plowing through.
Before the real story even starts, before the prologue, the author provides a little history into the creation/source of the Shadow demons. It’s told in third-person omniscient, kind of like a formal lesson: Four thousand years ago an ancient civilization was marred by a history not unlike our own past… Then, the author has a prologue on top of that, where the reader gets introduced to Jordan and Gage and has us seeing him die in her arms. So before she ever gets around to modern day, she’s had over 4k of story told, of information dumped into my lap in not necessarily the most graceful manner. Even more gets dumped in the interminably long first chapter (almost 5k). And my attention is lost. It’s too much. I have little doubts from the way she presents Gage’s death in the prologue that that author intends this to be suspenseful, action-packed, and yet, by the end of the first chapter, any tension she could have built is gone.
It’s not just the information dump that’s at fault here. While there aren’t enough spelling or grammar mistakes to make note of, there are constant missing articles like a or the, or prepositions, even added verbs once in awhile. It’s like somebody was only skimming the story in editing, instead of reading it word for word. On top of that, the author makes the decision midway through the first chapter – after having been entirely in Jordan’s perspective for the entire prologue and first half of the first chapter – to switch to Gage’s POV. We get their first face-to-face with Gage seeing Jordan for the first time in 5 years –when he knew she was alive – rather than the much more dramatic, and more emotionally invested, perspective of Jordan’s. Why? I don’t get it. Why toss away all that potential drama and water it down by letting the reader know about Gage too soon? It completely didn’t work for me, and any ties I had to the story were loosened enough by that point so that as it progressed and the characters alternately annoyed or bored me, they disappeared altogether.
About two-thirds of the way through the story, the author starts to really find her stride, balancing action with character scenes with exposition far more gracefully than she did in the beginning. For me, however, it’s too little, too late. I couldn’t help but feel that this should have been a first draft. The beginning feels too much like the author in search of her story. When she found out, she should have gone back and chopped off all the extraneous stuff in the beginning and found more strategic ways of placing it throughout her story. She wouldn’t have lost me as a reader then.
| Readability | 6/10 – A massive information dump at the top of the story along with editing issues throughout had me fighting not to skim by a third of the way through the story |
| Hero | 6/10 – Consistent, but nothing original to catch my attention |
| Heroine | 6/10 – The anger gets really old and heavy-handed after awhile. |
| Entertainment value | 3/10 – Boredy McBored. The elements are there, but by the time the author got around to finally presenting them in a way that engaged me, I didn’t care anymore. |
| World building | 8/10 – Considering how much information is dumped on the reader in the beginning of the story, it would be impossible not to know this much about this world. |
| TOTAL: | 29/50 |
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