Sandy M’s review of Seducing the Stones by Kathy Kulig
Erotic romance eBook novella published 17 Oct 07 by Ellora’s Cave

I’m always so eager to start reading a shapeshifter and/or time travel story.  Wolf, lion, jaguar, deer, travel through time to anywhere, it doesn’t really matter to me.  I usually enjoy them all.  It only matters when I’m disappointed, and I was sorely disappointed in this book.  The concept of the story is fine, the idea behind the time traveling works to a point, but it’s the characters that I never could warm up to.

Blurb:

Enslaved by a Sidhe curse for over three hundred years, Rory Donovan desperately wants to be free of the ancient Druids’ Circle. But he must lure camper Carolyn Moyer into a sexual ritual during the blue moon on the eve of Samhain — or be trapped as a shapeshifting stag for another eighty years.

The unpredictable powers surrounding the megalithic structure plunge Carolyn and Rory through the veil between worlds, where they encounter erotic adventures, sensual pleasures and peril from ancient times to places far in the future. Dangers peak as the time for the ritual approaches and Rory realizes the ceremony will risk Carolyn’s life. But if he chooses not to do it, the curse will continue and he’ll be forever separated from her.

Reader Advisory: Contains brief ménage à trois and group sex scenes.

Read an excerpt. 

Carolyn Moyer is camping alone, trying to prove to herself if she can make it in the woods all by her lonesome for a week, no reason she can’t then travel abroad to Italy by herself.  Her husband has been unfaithful and that led to divorce, so here she is trying to get along without him. 

Through an encounter with a hunter and a wounded deer, Carolyn meets Rory Donovan.  He is a handsome man, but he rubs her the wrong way when he begins take control and demands she stay away from the Druids’ stones nearby.  She’s had a man tell what her to do before, so she’s not about to be in that situation again.

This is where the story began to fall apart for me.  Carolyn goes back and forth between not trusting Rory because he’s a stranger to thinking he’s hot, liking to watch him as he moves, resenting him telling her what to do, her knees nearly buckling at his nearness.  She goes from being a smart woman to a stubborn child in a matter of pages.  And there’s still the rest of the book to get through.

Rory has decided Carolyn will do just fine for a ritual to end his curse.  Before this can happen, they are thrown into different times and places by the Druids’ stones, each trip more dangerous and bizarre than the last, lust following each step of the way.

This is how the story goes, mistrust, then sex, angry, then sex, and on and on.  So much so that they never really click for me.  There just isn’t anything original or heartwarming between these characters until it’s much too late for either the characters or the book.

Grade:  D