Review: Not great
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 09 20, 2013
The basic storyline in RIVER'S RUN is a Fantasy Romance staple:  Human women whisked away in some fashion by aliens.  The author incorporated a plot device that I thought was pretty clever -- the women were circus performers -- which allowed them to have some skills, such as knife-throwing and acrobatics and even pyrotechnics/explosives, which your average human woman-off-the-streets wouldn't have (though having them be incredibly skilled in all the areas, and more, was over the top; and each of them spoke six languages, really?)I thought the writing wasn't bad.  Not fabulous, but not the really atrocious writing so often found in e-books.  There were the usual proofreading errors and a couple laugh-out-loud misuses of near-homonyms (note to authors: know the meaning of the words you use), but again, I've seen much worse in other e-books.There were a couple big problems I had with this book which caused my two-star rating.First the sex scenes.  The cave-man dominance, pain/"pleasure" type of sex isn't attractive to me to begin with, but what is with modern authors thinking anal intercourse is sexy?  Most of us are grossed out by the thought of someone not washing their hands after using the bathroom, yet somehow the hero sticking his fingers in the woman's anus (she, of course, loves the "pain/pleasure" of it) and then using that same hand to continue with "lovemaking," that's supposed to be sexy?  I admit this was the point I began skipping through the "love" scenes, but I don't think I missed the part where the hero got up and sanitized his hand.  Ick, ick, ick.I also found the hero's instant lust/"mine!"/mate reaction particularly unappealing.  Throughout most of the book he vacillated between cave-man physical and sexual dominance (because everyone knows when a woman says "no" to a man, she really means "yes, please"!) and moments of complete turn-around sensitivity.  That just made the relationship unbelievable.There were some things I liked about the book.  The women confounding the macho aliens with their circus skills was pretty fun.  Okay, now that I think about it, that was pretty much what I liked about the book.  The alien world, the various aliens, all of them weren't really given much depth.  I wish the author had cut the sex scenes down about 90 percent and used those pages to develop the relationship between the lead characters, as well as further developed the secondary characters and the alien society.All in all, I recommend readers pass on this book unless they're looking for pain/"pleasure" erotica in a generally retro-mentality fantasy futuristic book.