2 posts tagged “jocelynn drake”

Dayhunter (Dark Days, Book 2)

EDIT: to be fair, i do know i was overly harsh in this little rant here. it's just so hard not to be, when i was expecting so much.. and the characters keep changing faces on me, which frustrates me beyond belief and seems to be for no other purpose than to make me pull my hair out. but to be honest, i can say this was mediocre at best.. while i was expecting a whiff of fresh air, like the first book in the series. didn't happen. i will, however, still read the third in the hope of some kind of redemption, and so whoever reads what follows here.. if you don't feel the same, i'm sorry, and i do know i overreacted.

it's been.. *checks last post* wow, almost a month since i read the first book! i know i said that book really showed promise, and i was completely itching to read this one; unfortunately, the promise from the last book wasn't ever really carried onto this. my thoughts are that it might be that the first book was written in a leisurely manner before she got signed with the publishing company, because everything in this installment of her series spells of a rushed job to me. because i took so many breaks while reading this one.. there were many details that i might not completely remember. what's-her-name.. mira, i believe?--was annoying the pants off me. and the entire cast of characters, and the random introduction of some newer ones.. it just kept teetering on and going not much of anywhere. here are some minor fault points:

• mira and danaus's relationship starts off back to square one, which is to say, homicidal. i thought they'd gotten way past their "i want to kill you" phase by the end of the last book, but in this book it's almost like the author either forgot she had written them beyond that already, or she wanted to hang onto it as a sort of joke between the characters. whatever. one, that would be sloppy writing, and two, if it's a joke, not close to funny. seriously though, bravo on leaving the reader hanging onto every word and wanting more of danaus and mira.. but starting it like this? it's like shitting on all the character buildup from the last book.
• right after they land in venice, or a bit after, i smelled a bit of half-assed editing. she mentions something about having worn the same outfit throughout all her fights, but that is simply untrue; she changed into that girl-on-vacation's shirt and used her shower at the themis compound, remember? tsk tsk, i say.
• the mention of there not being as rich a history in the americas as europe is repeated throughout, and i wonder if anyone out there would take it as an insult; the native americans especially, considering that nothing in their culture qualifies as "history," or in danaus's words, that there isn't a sense of "history or identity" there. come on now, play nice.
• if the bori being a parasite to danaus's soul is the only thing giving him his powers, assuming it's also what gives him his immortality--saving the world from the bori and destroying the bori within him would render him completely mortal, and he would be weak and capable of dying. that's kind of a potential downer between mira and danaus's relationship, and it'll have to be explored sooner or later.
• whenever danaus defends her, she always inserts some private commentary stating that they're still enemies one way or another, and still want to kill each other. after about the tenth time, i honestly wanted to rip the page out; way to abuse the narrative voice, sheesh. it got tiring by about the second time.
• i honestly don't think rowe is as evil as he's made out to sound, and mira obviously has serious prejudices against the naturi. what if rowe has the same reasons as she does to be prejudiced toward her kind? frankly, for a second book with villains that are just as as single-faceted as they first seemed to appear spells lack of effort to me.
• i laughed out loud when she mentioned that danaus's outlook on a sentient being owned by another is wrong; technically, that would make domestication a sin.
• at two instances, she wakes up early in time to watch the sun set. the thought i had was, if the vampires in her universe are burned by sunlight, why did she have no problem walking over to a giant bank of windows either time? i mean, sure, it makes for a dramatic scene in the reader's head, but...
• here's another thought in the same line of context: she mentions that elders can teleport, sort of. if it's that instantaneous, with no distance limit, they could be continually teleporting to areas where it's still night, and not have to sleep/die at all. wouldn't that work? hell, they could freaking space travel, considering they don't even need to breathe. sci-fi vamps, here we come.
• there are too many hints that danaus likes mira, but nothing comes from it. a subtle touch here, a bit too much concern there, and it builds up, but with no outlet throughout the entire book, and it's frustrating. to make things worse, she goes and pairs her up with someone else. great.
• the one sex scene in here was so out of the blue and random that i can't help but think that she added it for marketing's sake, and not until after the book was finished, because it completely threw the pace of the plot. i wasn't even close to appreciating it.
• "I walked over to the nightstand by the bed and picked up my cell phone. Nicolai covered my hand with his before I could pick up the phone." umm.. more careful with the editing please? she picked it up, and then he stopped her from picking it up? what the hell?
• i remember it being like two-thirds of my way through the book already, and in the middle of the chapter she's still reintroducing events from the last book. first, she had already done that within the first few chapters. secondly, YES, we do happen to know who ryan is already, so christ, stop repeating yourself!
• the analogy of the night 'dying' is milked to death and back. when an author repeats her own little poetic phrasing over and over.. it was nice throughout the first book. when no new creative phrasing comes about, it spells writer's block and half-assed writing to me.
• funny thing: they have enough money to keep flying all over the place and stay at all the fancy hotels in the world--but no one gets anything laundered. she keeps mentioning she's down to the last clean garment and whatnot; well, hello, the hotels offer laundering as a service. geez.
• Chapter 19, and she's still reintroducing Ryan. again, i think i got the memo the past bajillion times.

you know what else i just realized? ryan mentions somewhere along the way, either in the first book or in this book, that danaus thought she was the perfect embodiment of evil because she was both a vampire and controlled the fires of hell or something, and that really makes absolutely no sense. fire has got to be the most purifying element there is, since it's composed of pure energy, and secondly, in the bible, fire is used all over the place by the agents of good. what happened to god and his burning bush? whatever version of the bible danaus has been weaned on, it doesn't sound close to christian.

i will give this 3 stars since i do like the characters so much.. but nothing about this book really merits a 3-star rating, to be honest. the plot was jagged, there were holes all over the place, and almost everyone acts out of character. but then i guess i wouldn't know what their characters are anyway, considering i only really have the first book to base my judgment on--but hey, it was a good book, and i'd rather use that as a guideline to their true characters than this disjointed lump of text. despite all these faults (and boy, that's more than a couple) i still enjoyed revisiting mira and danaus again, depsite danaus's random homicidal bouts. i understand that's probably something mira and danaus can work through in the next book, unless the author contracts amnesia again and decides to take them back to some point where either none of this happened or she'll invent some other version of the events that she's written and that no one has ever read about.

sigh.

okay, i understand i'm being harsh. but that's what happens when you raise my expectations with a good first book and leave me with what's in the second for a follow-up. redeeming qualities? there aren't any yet. what danaus is was blatantly obvious from the first book, so having solved that particular "mystery" is no great feat for me. even what mira is seems blatantly obvious to me, unless the author decides to pull a fast one on me and slap me upside the head with something entirely new--but at this point, i kind of doubt it.

again, i re-sigh.

so disappointed.

well, hopefully, i'll lighten up a bit when the next book hits the shelves, and maybe i'll be able to reach for the next one in good faith by then. that's the best i could hope for right now.

Nightwalker (Dark Days, Book 1)

to be honest, i'm not even really completely sure why i decided to start reading this book. aside from hearty blurbs from kim harrison and vicki pettersson, there was no other real reason, i guess; the plot sounded somewhat cliched and cheesy, and i didn't think i was up to more paranormal pretension or the disguise of bad writing behind drama. that, fortunately, was not the case with this book, and it gives me a little bit of delight to admit that i can still find new series to enjoy aside from those few authors i religiously follow.

the way it starts is quite weird enough, because it leaves you not quite knowing what to expect. the heroine seems like the typical villain in most of the other stuff in the genre, so there's a bit of confusion for a while over how this is going to work out. as it progresses, however, the picture is painted increasingly more thoroughly, and i really liked the way all the circumstances that have driven mira to become the character she is comes together, and she doesn't seem as bad a protagonist as first impressions would make her seem.

i don't think the book places as much importance in the moral uprightness of its characters as other books tend to, since most of the characters in this book seem to have issues, one way or another. it's not so much a matter of right or wrong, but it seems each character, including the villains, have their own agendas, and they all seem equally justified in some light somehow. at this point of having finished the first book, i think it's pretty apparent what danaus is, and there are even abundant clues offered as to what mira is, though that question was never quite outright asked. maybe it's just strange to me that mira seems more concerned about what danaus is than what she herself might be. on the other hand, the vampires do begin to look more and more like the bad guys here, because it seems their sole strength is in manipulation, and almost everything they do is done in an unnecessarily backhanded way. and yet mira's loyalty seems to be toward the vampires, although maybe that will gradually come to change in future books? one of the main flaws of her character is not being able to figure out the obvious though, so i wonder how long that will be allowed to play out. it also didn't seem much like sadira and jabari were necessary for the triad or whatever, because they really didn't seem to play much of a part in there. i think mira is more important than they would have her believe, or perhaps more than they themselves would prefer to believe.

anyway, at this point, i can't really directly critique the writing style much, since i'm still so enveloped in the story in general. i will say that the prose tends to be beautifully written, with some descriptive abstracts painted here and there that were so poetic in nature that i ended up going back and rereading them just for the pleasure of it--that was certainly not expected. the tension between mira and danaus was also nicely portrayed; i actually found myself being frustrated right along with them when events would pull them apart from their fascination with each other, and it's usually pretty rare to get me to be that involved in any characters' relationships in that way. what's rarer still is my level of involvement with these characters apparently have nothing to do with how much i like these characters, considering that they're all quite flawed, and so i have to respect the author's ability for whatever little additional touch she added that made that possible, at the least. in fact, that fondness for her characters' interactions even overshadows what plot holes i might have picked up from time to time, and it's quite impressive that the characters alone carried this book through a somewhat average premise, and left me wanting more.

and to that end, i'm still quite happy, because the next book in the series is already out. my dilemma now is whether i should move on to that next book, or read the increasingly large pile of books i have checked out from the library. tough choice.