Review: Not a Stand-Alone Story
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 11 18, 2013
In my review of Blind Wolf, I wrote how the piece felt incomplete. Perfect Mate completes what should have been a single novel, in my opinion, but leaves me less-than thrilled with the marketing behind these two books.Let’s start at the beginning – neither Blind Wolf nor Perfect Mate is a stand-alone piece. Each requires the other to get the complete story of Damien and Julia’s romance. Had these two been written as a single novel, I would probably have given the work three stars. Perfect Mate fills out the characters of Julia and Damien nicely, drawing readers in and bringing dimension to this couple after the flatness of Blind Wolf. The plot is finally complete, the story arc set at a nice pace and the ending wraps up the story beautifully.Unfortunately, this one story has been broken into two works and sold as stand-alone novellas which they absolutely are not. Perfect Mate drops the readers right smack dab in the afterglow of the sex scene in Blind Wolf. There’s no explanation for these two – who they are, how they ended up together, who all these secondary characters are and why they’re important. If a reader chose to start with this novella, they would have absolutely no idea what was going on.The same self-publishing errors occur throughout Perfect Mate as were in Blind Wolf – improper comma use, using the implied ‘that’ instead of letting it be implied, way too much telling instead of showing – though there is a publisher attached to this novella. I could have disregarded most of the errors had I not been so disgusted by the way these works have been marketed. If you want to charge $3.98 for a novel, then post it as a completed piece and charge me $3.98 – a totally reasonable amount for an e-book, in my opinion. Don’t post it as two separate works with two different charges and basically force the reader to make a second purchase to complete the first story while claiming “stand-alone”. All that does is make me – the person paying for the books, reading the books, talking about the books – feel cheated. Bad form.I’m giving Perfect Mate one star and closing out this series as one I do not want to continue reading.