Lizbeth Muses

Three and a half stars.

I won King of Wall Street in a giveaway. I gained the favour of fickle Lady Luck by expecting fish to grow legs and ride a bicycle before I win anything in a giveaway. In retrospect, winning was inevitable. This has nothing to do with the review I am about to write, except for the fact winning the book allowed me to write the review in the first place. It’s like the chicken and egg argument without vegans butting in. My opinions are my own, especially when I wear my tinfoil hat. During other times I am not so sure. I sometimes wake up in my kitchen with an opened can of cat food in my hand, surrounded by a horde of screaming felines and no memory of how I got there. But I digress.

I enjoyed King of Wall Street. It was fun, sexy, quirky, with a nice sense of humour and very few/tiny mistakes. Overall it was a very enjoyable read. If you want to relax your mind immersed in a modern-day romance story, look no further. Don’t expect to cry tears of enlightenment over it or gape with amazement at the sudden plot twists. It’s a very decent book for its genre, better than many others I’ve read, more freshly written, funnier and sexier. It’s also predictable for the same reasons most romance novels are predictable. I mean, you know that these two are going to end up together, just don’t know how they will get there and that’s why you read the book.

The heroine is admittedly a bit irritating. She makes the mistake of mixing business with pleasure with every unpleasantness this entails. Sometimes her reactions are immature, but since one of the basic plot elements is her relationship with her father, it makes sense. Or at least it did not bother me. I don’t expect heroes to be perfect. I only expect their actions and decisions to make sense according to what we know about their past and personalities. As such, she made perfect sense.

The only real complaint I have is the hero. Yes, yes, his fourteen-year-old daughter is his precious snowflake and if she wears a short skirt the firmament will tremble and the world will end, devoured by giant locusts or something. He’s a tough, tough mother… cracker, and he’s the best at what he is, the fear of lesser men, blah de blah. But. Although his daughter is as innocent as the driven snow and her purity must be guarded till his last breath, he sees the heroine as a magnificent a$$ and a perky pair of boobs that accidentally have a face and a name. Oh, and guess what! That tough guy is constantly bossed around by his female relatives. How this works, I honestly don’t know. Then again, it’s a trend in many romance books I’ve come across. Men at the pinnacle of success who are superior to other men, leaders of the pack, fearless predators, yet their relationship with women is either to cower in front of their female relatives or see orifices instead of people. I think that, too, is a result of the alpha male role model romance writers are desperate to incorporate in their books because it is the synonym of ‘successful’ and ‘interesting’ (=sales). Then they find themselves stranded with a caveman in a suit and desperately try to humanise him, turning him into a walking contradiction in the process, because they have to show he has a vulnerable side that does not fit anywhere in the previous picture. Whoopsie.

Yes, yes, I know. I went and wrote a feminist analysis on a romance book. Bite me, it’s really late. I am off to wear my tinfoil hat and feed my cats. Despite my complaints, I am looking forward to reading more books by the same author. I had lots of fun with King of Wall Street.

Widdershins by Jordan L. Hawk

(2.5 out of 5 stars)*

Hm.

I really enjoyed the Magpie lord series. I figured the series Whyborne & Griffin would be similar, and picked Widdershins, the first book. I was quite wrong. Here is a list of reasons I disliked it.

1) Percival, the protagonist of the story, has abysmal self-esteem. Page after page I kept reading his “oh, poor me” inner dialogue and wanted to slap him back to his senses, or just slap him. Poor Percival who can speak 13 languages, grew up in a rich family and yet he’s as socially adept as a mute blindfolded crippled orangutan. It didn’t make sense and quickly grew tiring and started grating on my nerves.

2) The handsome stranger (in this case, a detective) who enters his life has issues too, underneath the flair, swagger and bravado. I found it predictable and honestly, boring.

3) Percival’s only friend is a strong female character who quickly becomes insufferable. She is the voice of reason, yet she is overbearing and irritating in her own special way. I don’t mean she ought to be more lady-like and fragile. She barges into Percival’s office whenever she needs to unwind by ranting or use his services as a translator, and won’t take no for an answer. I would have politely told her to get stuffed and shut the door in her face, but maybe that’s just me.

4) The other thing I didn’t like was the mixture of romance and cosmic horror elements. I enjoy romance and adore H.P. Lovecraft. A good combination can make the romance hotter and the horror colder. In this book they have a detrimental effect on each other. More often than not, the two genres get in each other’s way, toning down the horror element and making the romance feel out of place. I felt I was reading two separate books that somehow got mixed together, and it did not get better. I had the mental image of a hearse driver and a can-can dancer playing basketball in a tiny room stuffed with furniture. Whenever one of them was about to score a point, they tripped on each other or the furniture.

5) Oh, by the way. The “world is about to end” thing… ugh. Generally speaking, the end of the world is not something easy to happen, otherwise it would have happened every Saturday night. Do you have any idea how many weirdos exist out there, and I mean in real life? If a team of occultists could bring about the end of the world just because the stars are are aligned in whichever way, we would all be screwed. If the stars were indeed at an unusual and rare position, I for one would have expected more ‘warnings’, in the form of natural phenomena taking place all over Percival’s world, i.e. earthquakes, volcanoes, strange plagues, rains of animals etc. It’s not an event like an outsider winning the badminton championship, that can pass unnoticed if you’re not into badminton. On a clusterfuck scale of one to ten this is a solid eleven, so let’s just treat it with some respect, OK?

To sum up, Widdershins  is not a bad book. I’ve read books that can open holes in reality by how bad they were. I sometimes think Necronomicon was in reality a YA abomination later to be turned into a fully-fledged franchise, and that’s why it drove occultists mad. Well, Widdershins definitely isn’t one of those. It’s well-written and it has its moments. I guess it just didn’t work for me.