Tag: supernatural romance

The Haunting of Beatrix Greene – Episode 1

Genre: Gothic Horror Romance

Pairing: M/F

The Haunting of Beatrix Green Episode 1 by Rachel Hawkings, Ash Parsons, and Vicky Alvear Schecter is a cooperative novel that is currently available through Serial Box where it is released in weekly installments.  I received the full novel version from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  The story revolves around Beatrix Green, a fake spiritualist, who makes her living providing closure to people who have lost loved ones.  As per the book’s description: “In Victorian England a savvy spiritual medium must outsmart the most important client of her career: a scientist determined to expose frauds like her,” and then something about wits and fatal consequences blah blah blah.   That just covers the first 10% of the book, we learn pretty early on that the scientist, James Walker, is only exposing frauds because he is in need of a real spiritualist and is under the belief that Beatrix is it.

James Walker needs someone to help exorcise spirits from his family home so he can let go of the past before he makes a new future for himself in America.   And this is where the bulk of the story takes place, Ashbury Manor. An ancient residence with a tragic past and evil within.  James, Beatrix, Harry, Beatrix’s friend and sidekick, Amanda Reynolds, an American photographer, and Stanhope all gather in the manor to try and communicate with the dead in order to rid the house of what haunts it.

It is during the first night in the house and the seance that is performed we learn, and Beatrix too apparently, that Ms. Green is not actually a fraud. She seems to have a connection to the otherworld that made it possible for spirits to communicate through her.   It is at this point that the book becomes more of a haunted house story with a smattering of romance thrown in, for no real good reason, than anything else.  It was also at this point and later toward the climax of the story that all I could think about was the movie “Monster House.”  Although I love the movie, I’m not saying that as a compliment.  Some descriptions of the going ons in the house were laughable at best.

It might just be my imagination but the slight shifts in tone between one chapter to the next when there was a switch in writers was kinda obvious.  This probably works really well as a serial when you have a week between episodes and don’t have two competing voices in your head.  It was an enjoyable read, but not one I felt the need to finish, I started this back before Halloween, so yeah, or to see what was going to happen.  It was predictable and at the end of the day couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a horror or romance, so it ended not being either.

Bane’s Choice by Alyssa Day

smh, Gena

Pairing: M/F Orientation: Straight Identity: Cisgender

Bane’s Choice is not the first Alyssa Day book I’ve read.  I read the first couple of installments of her Warriors of Poseidon series back when they were first released starting in 2007; I stopped reading them not because I did not like them, I remember enjoying them as I read them, but because I had caught up and honestly just forgot to go back and pick up the rest of the series when it was finished.  Having now read Bane’s Choice, I don’t find myself in much of a hurray to read her other books.

When I first saw the cover of the book I was excited, a vampire motorcycle club sign me up. I was hoping for exactly what that cover promised a vampire motorcycle club, but I didn’t really get that in this book.  The motorcycle club was pretty much nonexistent.  They made an appearance in the first chapter and then are not heard of again until the end.  What I wanted, what I was led to believe I would get, was a novel about the love lives of a motorcycle club that just happened to have vampire members, but what this book really was … wasn’t that.

About 80% of this book happens in one location, the house where Bane lives with his sister Meara and two other vampires, Luke and Edge.  I’m sure we will get their stories in upcoming books so I wasn’t really mad that we learned very little of any of them.  Except we learn very little of any of the characters including our two main’s, Bane and Ryan.  We don’t really learn much about Bane’s past, and what we learned is basically just told to us.  We don’t even know why they migrated to Savannah.  And we learn even less about Ryan.  Basically, Ryan is a doctor, her father was an asshole, although we don’t really know why or in which way, she lived with her grandmother, but we don’t know when or why, and she whines a whole lot about not being as pretty as or as thin as or as glamorous as Meara or her friend or some random person walking down the street.

The book itself was about Bane and Ryan falling in love after one day, and the vampires battling an evil organization called the Chamber and the evil necromancer they sent to take over Savannah.  I know this because we are told this.  There’s very little action in this book and what there is seems rushed and honestly boring.  I really didn’t care about the action; not even a werewolf motorcycle club made me care about how they were battling against the evil, scary necromancer.

I think the biggest issue is that in my head this was supposed to be a different book than what it ended up being.  It wasn’t a bad book, Ms. Day’s writing made sure of that, but it wasn’t the book the cover promised.  I’m going to read the next one because I really liked the secondary characters more than I liked the mains, and hopefully the next will be more motorcycle club and less angsty vampire.

An eARC of this book was provided free of charge by NetGalley and the publishers for an honest review.