Archive for July, 2006

I'm reading Entangled (a Berkley Heat book) by author Kathleen Dante. (Due in September.) I just started the book, in fact. I haven't yet made it to chapter 2.

I'm a little concerned that the story started with such a strong but unexplained element of the paranormal. Don't get me wrong, I love paranormal and sci-fi romance. But when the story starts right in the middle of something that I can't understand—haven't been given enough info on to even know what the hell is going on—I get a little aggravated.

Obviously in this world (the world of Entangled), the paranormal is quite normal (or I would think so from what I've been shown so far). This takes me far enough away from how I see the world that I'm interested to see if the author follows up with any good explanation of why things are different in this story.

Really, though, it's too early to say much about the book. I'll follow up with a review soon!

Ah, another day, another read.

I finished Jared's Wolf this morning, and although I liked the story, I'm not sure why (from Secrets, Volume 8 (paperback)—it's a story of a female werewolf trying to discover why Jared Rocke, a human, is so intent on finding her family and killing her pack leader).

The truth is, I didn't care for most of the characters, each with their very own ego problems, as unlike real people as they can get. Too much of the action is glossed over and written in such a way that I couldn't buy into most of it. However, the sex was well-written and hot enough to satisfy.

I wouldn't read the story again, but I wouldn't tell someone not to read it the first time.

I think, ultimately, it comes down to me feeling like the characters were all too much alike—everyone was a wisecracker and no one took anything seriously. Although I love books that can make me laugh, I don't like stories without a grain of seriousness in them. This story had none, despite the talk of revenge and murder, blood and gore. I want to care about the people in the story, and in this one, I couldn't.

More: Secrets from Red Sage at The Erotic Reader site.

I've had this book on my bookshelves for a couple of years now and I've finally gotten around to reading it—or some of it. :-) There are four stories in the book, and I've read two: “My Champion, My Love” by Alice Gaines and “Kiss or Kill” by Liz Maverick.

My preliminary thoughts are that Kiss or Kill was the better of the two stories. I liked the rawness of the emotions and the futuristic setting.

In My Champion, My Love, I was disappointed by the sex. The premise of the story (a historical tale of a woman who has been committed because of her appetite for sex) was quite interesting, and I thought I would like it a lot more than I actually did. I picked it to read first based purely on the description. I guess this is why reading descriptions is never as good as reading excerpts!

Another comment about the sex in My Champion, My Love—it involved food. As I've mentioned in my view of erotic romance, I don't have a thing for mixing food and sex. When whipped cream in one's pubic hair becomes sexy to me, I'll know I've finally flipped over the edge of my sanity. :-)

In Kiss or Kill, on the other hand, the sex was raw and passionate, and much more to my liking. This story is about a woman who wants to graduate from a military academy, but first she has to prove she is “hard” enough to make it through. How to do this? Decide if Meat (a man with robotic enhancements) should be reclassified or terminated.

Although I wasn't fond of Meat's name at first, I thought the author did a spectacular job of making me care for him. By the end of the story, I couldn't think of Meat with any other name. He's who he is and I'm perfectly happy with him as is, name and all. ;-)

More: Secrets from Red Sage at The Erotic Reader site.

I've introduced a new feature to the site (I should say, I think of it as a new feature)—categorization by subjects.

I haven't implemented this on every book page yet, but on those that I have put it on, I'm very happy with it.

What I hope this does is offer a way to find related books, by subject. Say you like vampire books. You can go there to find erotic romance books with vampires in them.

I hope you find this useful! Let me know what you think of it.