Review: Great Hot read.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 30, 2014
Book – Dark Indiscretions #1Author – Shakuita JohnsonStar rating – ★★★★☆Plot – good, uniqueCharacters – good variety, could use more explorationMovie Potential – ★★★★☆ – a lot of swearing and sexEase of reading – very easy to readCover – ✔Suitable Title – ✔Would I read it again – ✔** I WAS GIVEN THIS BOOK, BY THE AUTHOR, IN RETURN FOR AN HONEST REVIEW **Let me start by saying that I really enjoyed this book. The concept of Mystics and all the other ‘creatures’ is a really interesting concept. I like that instead of using ‘werewolf’, ‘witches’ and other common terms, the author has decided to branch out a create new formulae for these creatures, giving them new histories, powers, personalities and names. I think it shows the author has taken a lot of time, and spent a lot of time on research putting this new ‘world’ together.There are, however, a few things that you should be aware of. One, there should be a huge WARNING tag on this, because there is a truck load of swearing and explicit sex. The F-bomb drops about every sentence, so if you’re sensitive to that, be warned.The story is clever and intriguing; it’s rather simply done, but it is easy to follow and kept my attention right the way from start to finish. I read this book in two nights; half one night and half the next.Jenny, our MC, is a Mystic, which is sort of like a witch but with more interesting background. Mystics are known as brutal and violent and Jenny has her own dark past that no-one truly understands. Throughout the story, we are fed little snippets of her past, when it is relevant to the story, which really works for me. We’re introduced to her daughter, Krista, who has her own secrets. The basic plot is that Jenny must confront her past, which leads Krista and Jenny to the two men that are their mates. Krista has two mates, as does Jenny, but the difficulty is in the fact that Jenny’s two mates are already mated to each other, so the transition isn’t exactly smooth.I do have a few small issues, however. The story starts a little jumpy. We’re introduced to Jack and Tay first, and they’re in a club one minute and then the next they’re suddenly at home, in their bedroom bathroom. It’s slightly confusing because we have no hint that they’ve even gone anywhere. One minute they’re giving each other ‘the look’ that says they want sex, and then the next they’re already in the middle of it and there’s talk of a bathroom. At first I thought of the club bathroom, but it just didn’t read right, and then later it shows them going straight to bed, so it takes a little more attention than another story to figure out where everyone is and what they are really doing.Also, there is a mention of 14 people fitting into a vehicle late on in the story. However, by my count there are 16: Jenny, Jack, Tay, Nathan, Taz, Kain, the twins, Nathan’s mum and dad, his two brothers, one sister, Billy, Bain and Brian.There’s also a plot gap that makes me wonder. We’re told that Jennifer can teleport just pages after she wakes up to discover herself surrounded by a crime scene. She panics at the crime scene about how to get out of the house without causing a scene from the blood on her. She also admits, earlier, that she’s cleaned up many crimes by her daughter. Why, when she finds herself in this situation, doesn’t she clean up her own mess and teleport back home? It would be a simple solution, but it also wouldn’t involve calling her daughter and getting her, and her mates, involved, which wouldn’t lead to Jennifer discovering her mates too. It seems a bit of a plot gap, because it would make more sense to use the teleporting, or admit that she’s so stressed out she can barely function, so that would make teleporting dangerous/something she doesn’t think about.One last thing was that there are ‘word meanings’ at the end of the story. I think it would have been better to have this at the beginning, so that when the new, strange words entered the story we would better understand what they meant. Sometimes the explanation of what they are is a little later than we need it to be and not as explicit as it could be.Overall, I really liked the book and the characters. I look forward to reading Book 2 soon and seeing how the story and the characters progress.