Review: Book Review: From Author Unpublished
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 31, 2014
I received this book as part of the Fated Mates Box Set directly from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.This book really wasn’t for me. Having received this book as part of a box set, unfortunately I wasn’t aware of the synopsis for the book or what it may entail (other than it was a paranormal shifter romance). BDSM isn’t something I’m into (but to each his own right?) so the sex scenes where stringing up girls and hitting them with paddles/whips etc occurred made me cringe. If that’s your thing, you may enjoy this book a lot more than I did, but going into this review, understand that a good deal of my negativity towards this book lays in part with that aspect of the book. I don’t have anything against BDSM for those that are interested in it, it just doesn’t interest me, so the sex scenes and dominant/submissive scenes made me want to skip pages. Other people may find those parts far more interesting than I did, but for me, a large part of the book wasn’t appealing.That aside, there were parts of this book I liked, but there were more parts I didn’t. The dialogue was sometimes a little cliché and didn’t come across as natural to me. There was a lot of judgment getting thrown around between the characters, and cat fights seemed to be common. The characters seemed to be constantly bickering—and I think up to a point, that’s okay, but there was so much of it that it just got tiring after awhile.Like the dialogue, the characters also came across as cliché. There was the self-righteous virgin, the slutty girl, the outgoing girl who thought she was too good for relationships, the meddling mother and grandmother, the boy-next-door southern sheriff, even the too-nerdy-to-understand-normal-people anthropologist…. I could go on for ages. The roles were all typecast. The character didn’t seem like real people, and there were so many of them that I never got a good feel for any of the characters individually. Most of the characters were small cameo’s thrown in for witty dialogue or drama, but overall didn’t have a huge impact on the story. I really almost wish the cast had been smaller so that the author could have fleshed out their depth a little more.Another thing that stuck for me was the way the author handled the BBW aspect of the book. The main character was a larger girl, and that’s awesome—but the author made the choice to not only turn her weight into a positive, but pushed the issue so far over the line that it became unbelievable. For whatever reason, the entire town was infatuated with Ginger because of her weight. I think at the point  where people are drawn to the character just because she’s overweight, we’ve crossed the line. All you’ve done is trade out “skinny” for “overweight”. I wish instead, that Ginger’s weight issue would have been handled in a more positive, healthy way. Rather than making her the sexiest thing to walk into town, it would have been nice if people had been drawn to her due to other aspects of her personality, or people had fallen in love with her despite her weight, where her size just became a non-issue, or she became attractive because they were in love with her. As it is, people are still judging her on her size, and still objectifying all the other women in the book. I think this was more of a “wish fulfillment” situation that the bigger girl suddenly became the hot girl, but it makes the characters seem shallow.Regardless, it was a funny, sometimes silly, book. It was short, it was cliché, and the characters were sometimes absurd, but it was still a fun read up until a point. Would I read it again? Probably not. I just didn’t care for how the story was handled. I’m sure there’s other people out there who would enjoy it much more than I did. This one just wasn’t my cup of tea.