Review: ok
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 11, 2013
I'm not really getting the impassioned ravings for book. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either. I finished it with a bit of a 'meh' feeling, mostly because everything (characters, history, world, etc) felt sketched out instead of solidly established. Even the sex was little more than being told how amazing the feelings were and then "he shoved it in." Really? That's all?Eve was whiny and weak-willed. Her internal monologue was repetitive and generally consisted of 'I want to submit, but I'm a modern woman and therefore shouldn't desire to submit, but I do.' Around and round she went. She had no backbone. Not because she wanted to submit to Michel, that's a valid life choice. But because she didn't even have the strength-of-will to make a decision. And since she couldn't remember what made her that way, it all felt hollow. How can the reader know Eve if Eve didn't know herself?Michel was actually kind of cute in a damaged sort of way, but the whole Dominant/Submissive thing felt really, really forced. It didn't fit his personality. I understood what Lund was trying to set up, with his history and all, but the switch between normal, clingy, insecure Michel and dominant, demanding, master Michel was jarring and inconsistent. Plus, the whole insistence that Eve submit completely, in all things, made very little sense to me (and that's before I even get into the fact that they'd known each other for about a day when he started trying to demand this). As if there can't be a hierarchy of command between two people without one bending COMPLETELY to the will of the other. Hmm, makes me wonder about every soldier to ever obey his/her commanding officer. There could be an interesting M/M story in there somewhere.About the only character I got a firm grasp of by the end of the book was Julien (because of his manuscript) and he's not even one of the main characters, at least not in this book. There does seem to be an interesting battle of Biblical forces building. Perhaps it will come to fruition in the next book. It sure didn't in this one, since the book ended on a very abrupt cliffhanger. It was so sudden, actually, that I'd assert this isn't a whole story. It's half, maybe a third of one (if the next ends the same way.) Why do modern authors do this? It drives me completely bat-shit crazy.The writing was pretty good though. I did notice a few grammar/editorial foul-ups and the e-formatting was painful (no paragraph indicators, broken sentences, random spacings, once I even found the first half of a sentence relocated to the end of the chapter). But I will be reading the next in the series, Ascension.