Review: Amazon's Companion fell short of a great concept.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 2, 2014
********************Light Spoilers Ahead************************************I was intrigued by the concept of this story. I enjoy a good adventure/fantasy lesbian story. What better way to delve into one than with lesbian Amazons! What promise this story had! A young village school teacher forcefully taken from her home to end up being the Queen's companion. She'd have to endure harsh training to possibly fight so called demons she's never seen nor believes in, solely based on the word of a group of people she does not trust. As you can see, there was so much potential for this tale.I REALLY wanted to like this story, several things bothered me, the overly detailed descriptions of practice fighting scenes and lengthy conversations between the characters about placing bets on their warriors for competitions, and what each person was willing to wager. On and on it went and it was exhausting after a while so I just skipped ahead. Another irritating thing was the grammatical errors. For example, Nori, Malora, and Maya were having a conversation and whenever Nori spoke at times, the text would read "said Maya," when it was clear that Nori was the one speaking. I encountered this in at least two chapters. Also, the words the author used like "cute" and "ass." I just find it hard to believe that Amazon people would say, "she touched my ass." Too much of the words used were modern language context. I'm not sure if this was suppose to be an historical or period story, but even if it wasn't, those terms don't fit with this story's tone. Something else that bothered me was lack of character description. Why don't we know what any of the Amazons look like? Queen Malora has short blonde hair, that's it? Her age was likely mid 30's? We don't know!. There were no other real descriptions of the characters to differentiate them from one another. We are left to assume that Maya Softpeace looks Native American? Maybe? And that is just because of her name! Lol. This author was not descriptive enough about her characters to give them much substance, with the exception of Maya and Nori who came off stronger than even the queen. For some reason, she made those two characters jump off the page. Otherwise, the characterization was weak.If your expecting sex in this book, you may be disappointed. This is not much of a romance, this is more of an growth/adventure story and while romance builds slowly between the two main leads, the sex is only mentioned, referred to, or implied, not described in any detail or with passion, simply glazed over. I am not saying that this had to be filled with gratuitous sex, all I am saying is where is the passion? The connection between the leads that makes it electrifying? My lesbian romance MUST have detailed sex at least once. Hell, if the author writes well enough, I don't even need to have a story with sex. This author unfortunately does not write well enough for me to not care about the lack of sex. I kept hoping this book would get better as it went along, soon I just started counting down the chapters until the end.  It only really got exciting when Maya first sees the demon, then the story just gets more interesting after that and of course it happens toward the end. The ending was the best part, Maya redeemed herself and she grew, but still the story ended abruptly. It ended as if it was being left open for a sequel, which I'm sure could happen since some issues were left unresolved. The author had a great idea, it just was not developed well enough to fly and lacked so much that could have elevated it to more. I don't feel like I read the same book as all the others who have given this 5 stars.2.5 stars for a good concept and ending. Only 2.5 stars for grammatical errors, weak characterization, lack of proper development of the idea, and just being left with the feeling that it could have been more.