Fotografía de autor
14 Obras 81 Miembros 23 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Incluye el nombre: Charissa Dufour

Series

Obras de Charissa Dufour

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Not great, not terrible. Not original and clichéed as fuck.
The weakest part was the romance which seems to also be the linchpin of the story.
It's classic lust at first sight with no good reason. She starts to feel inexplicably drawn to him and crave his touch and so on immediately while first meeting him even before they ever exchanged a single word really. There is bad insta-love and then there is this book.

The other problem I had is less with this book specifically but more with all the plethora of books that follow this same formula.
Magic races have been unveiled and forcefully deported into containment zones (call "reservations" in this case) basically like a prison city.
But it is never explained why the hell any of these incredibly powerful people should accept this completely inhumane treatment. It's not only the extreme segregation but also the casual and severe mistreatment of the inmates.
If it was just a single race with some very specific but very easily exploitable weak point or a sci-fi setting with much more advanced tech, sure, maybe.
But in modern times?
This stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic social contract of countries.
The reason why modern governments work is that the citizens get rights and certain guarantees from the government body in exchange for giving up certain freedoms. You don't need to abide by the rules of a government if you don't get anything worthwhile in exchange and if they can't suppress you by force. This is why corrupt governments always lead to high crime rates. If you apply this very basic societal model to books with a world-building setup like this everything falls apart.
Only those who can't fight back or have exploitable weaknesses would end up in reservations like that. Most others would either end up in resistance groups (guerilla groups or outright war) or move to places where they can get a better social contract.
The idea of working camps is to extract as much value out of your prisoners as you can. And these people have literal magic. Why the hell would they have them wash cloth diapers by hand?
And if it's just outright bigotry with nobody in power prudent enough to exploit the potential then they would just be killed. Done. They clearly don't care and are not made to care by human citizens either. So why go through all the hassle of keeping them contained?
Regardless of how you look at this basic setup it just doesn't work.

But after this long semi-off-topic rant I want to make clear that this was not particularly good even ignoring the flawed world-building setup.
It's just tired tropes and clichées all the way down.
I could have partially forgiven this with the excuse that it's hard to cram an entire story into 100 pages without heavily utilizing tropes, but this is not a complete story. It's only the first third of one. I expect this is literally a 300-page book released in 3 100-page chunks.
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Denunciada
omission | 7 reseñas más. | Oct 19, 2023 |
A naive, self-sacrificing idiot is naive and stupid. That is the plot. Wow.
TSTL all the way.
But I guess that is the only way for the mysterious and sexy master magician to rescue his damsel or somesuch. I don't actually know, I haven't gotten that far.
 
Denunciada
omission | 2 reseñas más. | Oct 19, 2023 |
This is an interesting one.
On the one hand, it's not that good on the surface.
But on the other hand, there is clearly a deeper underlying understanding of the genre and its tropes that keeps the story interesting in a meta-way.
It's immediately clear from the blurb that there is some sort of genre meta-writing going on but it goes far beyond just being the hook to draw the reader in.
It feels like it was written for people who already understand the patterns in urban fantasy and it at least seems like there is a lot more depth to it than at least 98% of books in the genre have.
I am not sure if I am just projecting my own experience with the genre into the story but it very much feels intentional.

One repeating theme is that the author tries to depict a sort of shocking realism in terms of learning to cope with being a vampire and all the things which this might entail. A lot of innocent people die. Quite a few were accidental by the MC's hand.
And in the moment the author does a stellar job of delivering the emotional impact of many different traumatizing events that a typical heroine would just shrug off (or justify poorly or something of the sort).
But she fails at following through with this in the long run. The almost indifference towards these traumatic events has a kind of delayed onset but ultimately ends up causing the exact same loss of suspension of disbelief anyway.
But because of the implied promise of realism, the negative impact on my enjoyment ended up being much worse.

Definitely worth a read if you are a bit tired of the same old same old urban fantasy/pnr vampire story but be aware that the technical competence is lower than the ambition of the series.

I very much hope she didn't give up on her writing career (as the last publishing date I could find was 2016) because I very much love to see more unique and interesting stories like this and this has potential but I expect she just has to acquire the technical skill first to live up to her ambitions.
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Denunciada
omission | 2 reseñas más. | Oct 19, 2023 |
Short prequel from the - That Just Plain Sucked - series.

It has a few typos but is a good teaser read if you like vampire novels.
 
Denunciada
Tonwand | Oct 7, 2021 |

Estadísticas

Obras
14
Miembros
81
Popularidad
#222,754
Valoración
½ 3.7
Reseñas
23
ISBNs
2

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