Review: Decent series
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 04 16, 2013
I've now read all of the books in this series. What I first want to say applies to all of the books in the series (so am putting it in all of my reviews). I had to go to the author's website to try and figure out the best order to read them in. In the end, I went with chronological order: Bonded, The Mating, The Keeping, Betrayed, then The Finding. Overall, I think the stories were interesting. Clearly, if I didn't like them I wouldn't have continued to read the entire series. I was prompted to read them in the first place because of the good reviews and the price (can't beat FREE)! However, I can only give them 3 stars because they were so overly redundant I found myself skipping over a great deal and wanting to get straight to the point. I think they could have each been shortened by 30+ pages without losing anything of value. Many things were unnecessarily repeated and actually took away from the plot development. The author did a good job developing her characters and the storyline, so there was no need to repeat things over and over again. I'm thinking specifically of how she may have told a story about something that happened in a character's past multiple times throughout the text. If you told it once, you can just reference it or put a one liner in that will prompt the reader to remember. I felt she didn't give the readers enough credit to put things together or their own or connect the dots. Everything was explained in great detail too many times and some of the stories felt dragged out. Still, I was drawn into the stories and connected with the characters (hence the 3 stars). As other reviewers have said, these books are available free elsewhere if Amazon is charging for them!The Keeping was probably my least favorite. The actual keeping law was believable enough, but it was hard to imagine these packs going straight to such a drastic outcome. Having read the other books prior to this, I would have expected them to first get the werewolf Damage Control unit involved and gone about it in a different way. Because it seemed like they were overreacting about enacting the keeping law, it was hard to believe while reading the book that they might actually follow through with it. Because of that the emotional connection to the book was really lacking for me. Then there was the Mel and Ryne relationship, which was interesting enough but the twist with Mel was too far fetched, even for a paranormal text. Without wanting to give too much away, I'll just say that what happened with Mel and how she ends up is contradictory to something else that was said in the text and could have been much better developed. As a reader I was just unable to get lost in this particular story.