Review: Willing to try the next one, but this one...
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 9, 2012
Im willing to try the next book after this even though this one wasn't...Let me start with the positive.It's a great second act. If you take the first book and smoosh it with this one it will read as one great story arc.The thing is though, you need that first book to like this one at all. As a standalone book it just doesn't work. All the good character building bits were in the first book and if I didn't have a history with these characters I couldn't care less about what they were up to.The feel of the leads in this book were a bit off. The character of David especially, wasn't quite like the one in the first book. It's true that he was barely mentioned in the first book. As I remember it, there were three guys in the original book the first was the lead (Auric), the second was the cocky one, and then the eloquent one. I'm pretty sure David was the eloquent one but he seems so different here.The sexy bits were all over the place in this book. Where the first book had great emotional pacing that allowed for the logical conclusion of having sexy bits, this one was all wham-bam-thank-you-mam rinse and repeat. It did have the occasional story-building part, but just barely.Maybe the biggest turn off for me was the threesome emotional justification that the lead (Muriel) goes through. I don't think I'm a prude by any means (for crying out loud I read books like this) but I think threesomes are very difficult to handle from an emotional standpoint. From a physical one, I get it, two attractive people having fun with you, what's not to get. But from an emotional one, that requires a way of thinking that only very specific characters and writers can pull off right.The Muriel of the first book was not one of those characters. It seemed disingenuous to her core personality to even consider something like that. Yes, she does point this out in this book but her reasoning and final resolution just didn't sit well with me.I'm still willing to give the third book a go. I'm invested in the characters of the first book and I'd like to believe that they'll go back to their original characterizations for the third. I really want to believe this because this is the third book that I've read by this author and the first two were great books. I'd like to believe she was just so excited about writing this sequel that all the possibilities for where the characters could go overwhelmed the writer. So much so that she wanted to throw everything she could at it including the kitchen sink. "It's the sequel, It has to be bigger, and badder, more explosions everyone! More everything!" -kind of thinking... Now that all that's out of the way I believe the third should be awesome.3 stars total. In this book, author's prerogative outweighed character honesty so 2 stars for that. And 1 extra star just cause the first book was awesome.