Review: Too obviously co-authored
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 08 13, 2012
I was sucked in by the description of Heidi Belleau and Violetta Vane's The Druid Stone , which I received from NetGalley for review. How it sounds: Sean O'Hara is cursed after he receives a Druid stone from his great-grandfather and heads to paranormal investigator Cormac Kelly over in Ireland to find out how to have the curse removed. I hear: male/male romance with a cursed American and an Irish Harry Dresden. I got: something else entirely.I'l be blunt; Sean is sort of pathetic. His entire curse consists of realistic nightmares he has over and over again, which seem to be telling of real killings. He's been to therapists, taken sleeping pills, and done everything, but nothing gets rid of them. He shows up on Cormac's doorstep as his last hope. Cormac, on the other hand, is a stereotypical alpha male slut; he's had something bad happen to him, so he hides in meaningless sex. Stop me if you think you've read this one before. Oh, and did I mention that Sean isn't gay? Cormac should be alpha male enough to turn him for the purposes of this romance.Even if you work your way around the M/M romance tropes here (and get over your disappointment that you are not, in fact, getting a gay Harry Dresden), you might be okay, you think. Until you realize that the romance is really only half the book. The other half (which is a completely different book altogether) is a fantasy novel involving time travel, fairy wars, and a whole hell of a lot of I-don't-even-know. There are multiple trips into fairy realms that must be escaped from, and then once they escape, they have to go back to rescue someone who got left behind, and you get the feeling that there's a lot of filling-in here because the authors couldn't decide what kind of novel this was supposed to be. Then they complicate it further with a woman they drag out of her own time, and rescuing Cormac's ex-boyfriend to add some complications to the budding relationship.In short, there's a lot of confusion here. Had it been just the romance or just the fairy story, it might have been okay, but you end up feeling like there's a book within a book and one doesn't go with the other.This review appeared previously on Goodreads.