Review: Disappointing
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 19, 2014
Note: This review is based on parts 1-5 of this serialized story.I rarely write reviews unless I believe I have something specific to add to the conversation. In this case, I rather wish someone had warned me about some specific problems with this story ... and so here I am.There were a few minor annoyances - way too many missing word and missing punctuation errors which continually yanked me out of the flow, British vs.American inconsistencies as well as historical anachronisms, and the fact that the length of each part decreased as they continued (not counting the first, free section which is the shortest - but as I mentioned, free). But those were, overall, fairly minor. The true disappointment for me was the utterly unsatisfying way that an interesting premise and some very promising characters turned into cheap melodrama.The first two or three parts are really quite good. But around the time that the heroine decides that she is in love with the hero, her behavior and inner thoughts becomes so... so ... so incredibly *hokey* that I honestly thought it was a red herring and something else entirely was going on. Vampyre mind control, perhaps! It just felt so wrong for the character as I thought I had understood her.(I will stop and clarify here that I read a lot of romances these days. Sudden love and amazing happy endings are standard and expected. That wasn't the problem here. The problem was that her character became inconsistent - and really bloody annoying.)Other pieces of her character began to fall apart then also. Her reactions to things that frightened or worried her were downright histrionic ... until the next scene where none of that mattered anymore for some reason. Until it did again, and she burst into tears again - sometimes tears of pure joy - and we were back to the melodrama.At the same point, more or less, the action became more muddled - that, or I began to notice that the plot holes and questions from one part weren't being cleaned up in the next part as I expected, and in fact never were. Suffice it to say that things happened. Then other things happened. Then some other things. I'm not sure why, or why I should have cared about some of it, or what I was supposed to get from the events other than filler.I suppose it all worked out okay, though, since things magically resolved in the end. Fast, too! ... I shouldn't be so snarky. To be fair, the plot worked itself out pretty much exactly the way I expected, the way they had been telegraphed throughout the story - I just expected there to be some small amount of tension or excitement somewhere in that resolution.But the worst, the absolute worst, was watching some very promising characters - the heroine's brother, the hero's great-grandmother, the leader of the vampyres, even Count Orrloc - be at best left by the wayside and at worst used as a cowardly foil.I have to admit - I feel bad giving such a bad review. But I'm just so d**ned disappointed! If it were just a bad book I wouldn't have bothered. The characters were there. The premise was there. The execution started off well. ... And then it flubbed.