2.4 Review: Animus by Ophelia Bell

So I get newsletters from instafreebie for romance,  mystery and fantasy novels every few days. 

Most of the time the books don’t draw my attention. But I will almost always give any paranormal book a brief look-over because that is definitely ‘my thing.’ I like vampires, shapeshifters, anything supernatural or mythology based.

This particular book is an ero romance, tick, with dragon shapeshifters, also tick. It has archaeologists discovering long lost civilizations, also a tick. With three of my boxes ticked, I got my paws on it.

Okay, so the thing that was good in this book was the main character; she was a strong, self-assured woman who wasn't afraid of her own sexuality.

I sort of forget that the shy naive, chaste virgin is the cliche until I read a story where the main character doesn't have these over-done hang-ups. This is a great idea and done right, done strongly, can really empower ladies.

I've always figured this is kind of how my friends see me; the strong sexually secure bisexual who isn't ashamed of her gender, wants or bedroom taste. I'm more like a rude gopher, but anyway...

I didn’t like the book for a number of reasons.

I uhmed and ahh’d over this review. I prefer to be upbeat and positive and only report things I do like, because constant negativity creates a toxic environment. However, occasionally sharing a less than stellar opinion of something also shows balance. So this is where I fell on the radar at the end.

I’m well aware of the thin veil of causality that binds erotic romance. If slow motion jazz music were converted to text, it would be most of these books. You have to accept that there will be a lot of suspension of disbelief with giant dragons turning into smouldering hot menfolk and that for some obscure reason, they have waited hundreds of thousands of years to be with a modern woman. These are acceptable suspensions for me.

I dislike the soulmates trend in shapeshifting romance. I don’t know what exactly started this fad, but I’ve never seen it done well. It smacks of lazy writing and is often punctuated with red flags like ‘fate and destiny’ which send me running from most books. I would like to name a time I've read a romance where two fated mates has been done well.

I can't.

I also dislike a book that lacks a beginning, middle and end. 

I know it’s a freebie and the like, but this was about sixty pages of prologue. Unnecessary prologue where we went over things that were placed in the blurb. 

No resolutions were reached, no characters were really explored. A few ‘definitions’ were established and that was about it. I finished the story and felt like I had just read an over-long setup teaser.

I know it’s an emerging trend in self-publishing to serialize a super long story into a ‘collection’ this generates more money and also allows the author to give the teaser away for free. 

My problem is I can’t call it a book if that’s what I’m reading. 

So I didn’t really like this book. It was not a book, it was part one of a giant long story that had been arbitrarily broken up into sections.

There were other problems; a ‘smart science orientated woman’ accepting ‘because Fate’ as an answer to her anthropological questions. 

I'm a religious girl; I don't believe that science holds all the answers. But I'd like to think I'm also reasonably intelligent.  If someone told me that a computer fell off the local network 'because of fate' I'd look at them like an idiot and then check the ethernet, network card and port patching. Because I understand how computers work.

I'm not saying that a character who has studied ancient religions and cultures and general study of historical significance wouldn't believe in Fate. I'm just saying she wouldn't accept that as the reason for why a stone statue was carved the way it was.

A team of archaeologists all being super-hot, super sexy and humping like bunnies constantly was stretching my disbelief thin by page three. The main character 'hand-picked' this team of super-pretty people and it made me wonder if she'd done it that way and discounted others who were just as good if not better at their jobs in order to have the aesthetically pleasing group with her. Once that niggle of weird unprofessional discrimination was raised in my brain, it was never answered and it never left.

Overall, I was curious about the next book, but not curious enough to pick it up in case I would read sixty pages of an intro after this prologue and that would be it.