Review: Forgettable characters and an odd writing style
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 6, 2012
Warning: This review might contain what some people consider SPOILERS.Rating: 5/10PROS:- I've read a lot of shifter fiction, but this one was particularly interesting to me because I haven't read much about cat shifters. It was familiar but still a little off the beaten path. The story's lore is also pretty well thought out. There's a decent backstory to the main characters and a shifter history that's fairly detailed.- I'm used to reading stories in which newly turned (or maturing) characters either know what's going to happen the first time they shift or are accompanied by a more seasoned shifter. I enjoyed seeing the confusion and disbelief when Jacyn shifts for the first time and has no advance warning.- The scene in which Jacyn is reunited with his siblings (from whom he has been separated essentially his entire life) is very sweet. I liked those secondary characters.CONS:- The writing has a disjointed feel, not because the thoughts jump around or don't connect to each other, but because the construction of the sentences themselves isn't all that smooth. There are grammatical errors, punctuation issues (mostly in the form of missing commas), and awkward phrasing every few sentences that kept jolting me out of the story. Here are a couple of examples: "Jacyn realized that his savior was every bit a threat as the gunmen"; "By the way he carried his weapon in a death's grip and how his black eyes were nearly bugging out of his head, it screamed his inexperience."- Some of the things the guys say are so corny and/or silly that I quickly lost the ability to take the story at all seriously. Jacyn's ambulance driver turns out to be a homicidal maniac, for instance, and Jacyn's response is, "He is so not getting a good evaluation after this." If I were in that situation, I would be thinking about survival rather than coming up with quasi-clever one-liners. Logan repeatedly refers to Jacyn's wicked sense of humor, but I didn't think he was very funny at all.- Sex happens when the guys have known each other for no more than about 48 hours, much of which is spent apart because they're separated or at least one of them is asleep. Then, it's not half an hour later before supposedly hard-hearted Logan is claiming to be in love.Overall comments: I honestly can't recommend this one. It's a fun little diversion, I guess, but the characters are not rational, nor is there anything unusually memorable about them. And the writing itself is oddly non-natural sounding. I wondered on more than one occasion whether English was the author's native language, especially when words were transposed ("It seemed all so useless" instead of "It all seemed so useless"; "This it is" instead of "This is it"). These might simply be editing problems, but they happen so frequently that I have to wonder at an editor's letting THAT many things slip by him/her.