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Not for me

Revisado: 04-24-25

I really had a hard time with this one. I’m not sure if the narrator reading everything a touch too dramatically made this whole book feel off-kilter to me, or if this is the sole fault of the book. The plot and stakes of this are very simple/mild, so the dramatic reading (all the men are a bit breathy/whisper urgently) made it feel like everyone was making a really big deal out of everything at all times. I didn’t buy the romance between Elspeth and Rayvn either. Maybe they weren’t given enough screen time as a pair, I don’t know. I got sick of the Nightmare constantly talking in rhyme. The whole thing just fell flat for me, sadly.

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Ton of fun

Revisado: 01-02-25

I really enjoyed this one. Loved the grumpy x sunshine friend dynamic between the grouchy warlock PI and the young daughter of a murder victim. The mischievous shapeshifting spirit was a fun addition, too. (I also appreciate that, as a NorCal girl myself, seeing a setting from my neck of the woods.) Soundbooth Theater took an already well-crafted book and elevated it to another level. Recommended to fans of urban fantasy. Looking forward to book 2!

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Strangely adorable?

Revisado: 12-16-24

So. This is a stalker romance. And somehow very cute? And sweet? And a little disturbing. And hilarious. I don’t know what sorcery this is, Navessa Allen, but good work.

The narration (duet forever!) and production are excellent.

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Zodiac Academy

Revisado: 11-25-24

I’m having the wildest time with this series. It’s undeniably flawed in so many ways and yet I can’t seem to stop. I’ve quit much better series after book 1 for far fewer offenses. What is happening?!

It’s a series set at an academy where the schooling itself doesn’t make much sense. I mean, the girls recently started a class when there were only three months left in the school year. The vast majority of the classes are about fae controlling their magic, which is obviously useful, but this is essentially a college. People go to college in pursuit of knowledge that will land them a career. Aside from the heirs who have a clear path forward, what are the other 99% of the student body going to do with their lives? What are they preparing for? If there was some sense of what these kids do after they graduate, it could provide some insight into what “taking the throne” actually would look like for the heirs and/or the Vega twins. What jobs exist in this world? What does having strong magic look like on a day to day basis for the average person? How many kingdoms are there? Hell, how many academies like Zodiac are there? Even pitball could have been used to show other parts of the kingdom. Does Zodiac ever play away games? What is a school like Zodiac like when there *aren’t* celestial heirs running the place?

I don’t need a dissertation on the economics of Solaria or anything, but SOME insight into what this kingdom is like, or what job they’re all preparing for would help make this fight for the throne (which is the cornerstone of the whole damn series) come off like more than a barely conceived concept. I get that the plot in a lot of romantasy is more *vibes* than anything, but the lack of big picture…anything…after five books is getting harder to ignore.

I also honestly question whether this series has an editor. I can *hear* the grammatical errors, so I can only imagine there’s far more in the actual books. The number of times “flesh” is used in each book is alarming. Between the smut and people shifting into their order forms, there’s a lot of flesh. So much flesh. It’s distracting. There are fact-checking things that an editor could catch, too. In book 1, Tory is trying to steal money she left in a former foster care home that she and Darcy needed to afford rent. It was $2k and Tory claimed it would buy her and her sister *six months* of rent. In Chicago! I know the authors aren’t from the States, but a quick google search could have told them if that figure was remotely accurate. In one scene, there was a thunderstorm. Thunder came before lightning every time. An editor could have let them know that’s reversed.

The shining star of the series is obviously the characters. I’m straight trash for Darcy and Orion and they’re the main reason I couldn’t let the series go. Darius is growing on me. The other guys are honestly pretty interchangeable/forgettable. They’re all basically the same guy with different order forms and hair color. They’re assholes because they’re under “unbelievable pressure,” yet all we ever see is them screwing their way through the student body, practicing advanced magic, playing pitball, and using cringey hashtags on Faebook. Since we aren’t shown what them being heirs even means, they just come off like whiny trust fund boys who are mad they aren’t the most popular anymore. Sometimes they go to fancy dinners in expensive suits.

Somehow despite all of this, the pacing keeps me hooked in. There’s very little plot going on besides the relationship drama for most of every book. When there’s 1-1.5 hours left of the audiobook, suddenly the nymphs (the enemy who is conveniently there to provide danger when necessary) show up and our band of MCs need to fight them off. Someone usually dies, there’s a shocking revelation, and then there’s a massive cliffhanger. Then you’re forced to get the next one even though you tell yourself you’re stronger than this.

I am not stronger.

Off to start book 6. Stars help me.

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A lot of fun!

Revisado: 10-29-24

The narration took this to a whole new level (duh—Soundbooth Theater is amazing). Well, well worth the listen. Even though I wanna slap Garvis (who doesn’t?), I’d happily listen to his spin-off :)

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More cozy mystery than an urban fantasy

Revisado: 08-08-24

This is my second Heather G. Harris series. I think I have to accept she’s not the author for me. I liked the original Other Realm series (read the first 3) more than this one. I haven’t tried the spin-off Other Realm books, and Jilleen Dolbeare is new to me. It’s also possible that I might have liked this better with a different narrator. She’s a good reader, but she reads everything a bit flat regardless of what’s going on. There’s often a lot of weird editing issues—mostly too-long pauses between sentences, as if she’d turned the page while recording and didn’t cut out the dead air between lines. Sometimes the pauses are so long I’ll think the chapter has ended, but then dialogue resumes. The pauses can give a sense of hesitation from a character, or kill the momentum/cadence of a tense conversation. She’ll stumble over words sometimes. Toward the very end of the book, a door slams in the background. All of that paired with storytelling that doesn’t work for me probably means I should just scratch Harris off my list, especially if she’s going to stick with the same narrator for all her series.

The worldbuilding in Harris’s books are interesting and creative on the surface but key details are often missing. It sounds like a lot of details about Bunny being turned into a vampire and how she got her dog Fluffy were covered in the prequel, which I didn’t realize was available until after I’d read book 1 (it’s last on the series list on Audible). In book 1, though, other than Bunny’s fangs showing up at inopportune times and her drinking warmed-up blood, it’s easy to forget she’s a vampire at all. Her only power until 95% into the book is her eidetic memory, but it sounds like she had that prior to being turned anyway. Her being a “weird vampire” is clearly the series’ hook, but it also goes a long way in making this feel more cozy than a standard UF.

Bunny’s job is working as an assistant to a police chief (maybe how she got that job was covered in the prequel too?). Despite having no training—other than her boss telling her frequently that she has “good instincts”—she went from assistant to what amounted to a junior officer very quickly. She was interviewing potentially very dangerous perps on her own within a matter of days. This became some cross between a cozy mystery with an amateur sleuth and a paranormal police procedural. I’m sure that won’t bother everyone (or even most readers!), but when I’m reading something that’s labeled as an urban fantasy, that’s what I want. If I want cozy, then I’ll search for that. It never felt like the book knew what it wanted to be.

There’s a lot of telling in Harris’s books. Choppy paragraphs full of short sentences detailing minutiae. She went here, she did this, she picked this up, she went over there. Lots of declarations about how Bunny is a strong, independent woman who gets on her soap box about how women should be treated (all of which I agree with, btw), rather than *showing* us that she’s a badass. Write her like a badass and she’ll come off like one.

The telling becomes a problem with character building too because the side characters often start to blur together. This also happened in the Other Realm series for me. Characters with very simple names (Jack, Jim, Mitch, Chris) get introduced with very brief descriptions about eye and hair color, maybe their job, or what they were wearing, but nothing wildly memorable, and then when they don’t come up again until the end as part of the “Aha!” moment, I frankly can’t remember who they were, so the emotional impact of the whole thing is gone. Even now, after finishing the book, I can’t remember for the life of me who one of the baddies was.

Oh well. I may still try a Jilleen Dolbeare book.

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Wild Knight

Revisado: 07-30-24

I’ve read a few of Chase’s cozies and liked them quite a bit, so I wanted to give her UF a try. Sadly, this one didn’t work for me.

It was template UF in a lot of ways. Female protagonist who is magical/supernatural and has to keep the true nature of her powers a secret or her life is in danger. A broody love interest who is “dangerous” and beautiful and the exact type of person/being who would kill the protagonist if he knew the truth. There was a mystery to solve, but it often got derailed for the sake of random worldbuilding explanations, unnecessary flirting from Callen, random side jobs that didn’t serve much purpose, and sections about the protagonist’s menagerie. Now, don’t get me wrong. I loved all her animals! But they didn’t play a role in the story at all. What happened to Trio?! It just felt like a lot of distractions for a story that was already pretty short. When a UF is this length, I expect a hyper-focused plot and this meandered a lot.

The final battle was over almost as soon as it started. I never worried for London, the protagonist, throughout the book. Callen and his family are constantly described as being terrifying, but that’s never shown. Maybe if every sentence out of his mouth wasn’t flirtatious or an innuendo, I might have been able to take him more seriously.

The whole thing felt like a framework for a story (which is why it felt derivative), but everything needed to really flesh out the world and the characters to make this feel like a unique, immersive story in a cool new world were missing. It overall got the job done but it’s a bit forgettable. Which is a shame because the world really is interesting, but this failed to make me care about any of it.

The narrator was easy to listen to, but it was never clear if she was trying to do an English accent and kept slipping in and out of it, or if she has a natural accent that’s something other than American or English and wasn’t able to settle on a consistent one throughout. It wasn’t necessarily bad, but it was really distracting sometimes.

I may try another of Chase’s UF series, but I’m calling a quits on this one.

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Love it

Revisado: 06-27-24

Loved these books just as much the second time through. I hope there are many more to come (and more Frank short stories, too)!

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Quitting at 60%

Revisado: 06-01-24

Despite the insanely adorable cover, and a wonderful concept, this didn’t work for me. It didn’t feel like it was really going anywhere. There was no cohesive plot. There’s an upcoming war that’s referenced occasionally as if they’re expecting nothing worse than a bad winter storm in the next few weeks. The main characters are both inexperienced in relationships which is totally fine, but they often came off like they were 13. All the modern discussions about childhood trauma, the five love languages, and consent are things I personally agree with, but also felt wildly out of place in this context. It’s perhaps because the author was a bit too heavy-handed with everything, I don’t know. The whole thing felt like a series of disparate fun ideas found on tumblr or Reddit (what if there’s a demon running a dungeon, but he’s actually a therapist! What if the dark lord is feared by all, but he actually is a big proponent of snack/nap breaks and the four day work week! What if the guy falls first and he tells her immediately that he’s interested so there’s no “will they, won’t they?” causing unnecessary drama!) and then smashed them all together into something vaguely book shaped. I assume part of this lack of clear plot is that it was on Royal Road first and the one-off chapter/serial format worked better on that platform. Maybe I just like stories with more tension and conflict (even in cozies). As much as I’ve loved the male narrator on other books, his interpretation of Keith vs her interpretation were so opposite from each other (I liked hers better), that the dark lord comes off a bit bipolar. Boo. I had been so excited about this one.

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Really great

Revisado: 04-14-24

I loved so much about this! It reminded me a bit of the Veronica Speedwell books, but with a fantasy bent. It’s a bit too dark to be classified as cozy, but it wasn’t overly gritty either. My only issue with it was that the pace seemed a bit slow at times. I can’t really put my finger on why. It was one I was able to easily put down several times, yet I thoroughly enjoyed it while I was listening. I’ll eagerly keep an eye out for book 2.

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