Review: Cool Superheroes and a Nice Romance
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 14, 2014
I have to say that my favorite part of this story was the relationship that grew between Damien and Blaze. Damien is...if not broken, a little bent around the edges, and Blaze has chip on his shoulder the size of a tanker. Both of them have good reasons for their faults, but it doesn't exactly make them easy to be around. However, when they get together they seem to hold each other up, to keep each other sane, in the exact way that is needed. Blaze is a safe place for Damien, and Damien ends up being something solid, something Blaze can believe in. They certainly don't set out to like each other, hell they don't even want to be near on another, at the beginning, but by the end they come to realize just how essential they are to each other.And, ok, Blaze's whole underwear fetish was freaking hot. I do love a man who likes to have a little lace on him.I also really enjoyed the fact that the solution to the kids disappearing wasn't so simple that I had it figured out at any one point. I loved the twists and turns that this story took us on. Yet, all those twist where there to support the whole, and I never really felt like they were there just to play with us. Everything seemed to fit and to come into place at just the right time. I really liked that.There were some things, though, that I had some real problems with. The major one was that even though this is told in both Damien's and Blaze's povs, both povs read exactly the same. There is no real difference to the voices they lend the story, narratively. This really threw me for a loop, early on, when I didn't realize that there were two povs, and that we had switched from Damien to Blaze. I was really confused as to what the hell happened to the character. And while I didn't mind the shifts, as the story went along, I kept having to go back and check whose pov we were currently in. It really slowed the book down at some points.Didn't really care for all the comic-book names, either. Partly because it really started to feel like I was reading a dystopian X-Men story, and partly because it made all the characters feel a little juvenile. It didn't bug me when it was the kids, but adults going around calling themselves nicknames, just made them seem like children playing at being adults.The world-building was also a little to light, for my liking. It has a lot of promise, and I found the set-up very interesting, but the dystopian element kind of just popped up out of nowhere and it was frustrating trying to fit the world I had already constructed in my head to the one that came up on the page.This story was interesting. I liked the mystery, and loved the romance that bloomed up between Blaze and Damien. Their backgrounds and pasts were very nicely handled as well. It made them seem more real than the rest of the characters. Like they had actual weight, and not just names on a page. Had the povs been better handled, I think this could easily been four stars, or even higher, but I spent so much time retracing my steps that it dragged on too long. It lost my focus too easily, and I don't really like that in the books I am reading. Still, with all its faults, it was a fun read. 3.5 stars.I was provided a copy of this book as part of the M/M Romance Group's DBML program on GoodReads in exchange for an honest review.