LynneC’s review of His Darkest Embrace (Jaguar Warriors, Book 1) by Juliana Stone
Paranormal Romance published by Avon Oct 26 10
Juliana Stone – His Darkest Embrace – A Cock and Bull story
This wasn’t the worst paranormal romance I’ve ever read, but at times it came close.
I loved the cover, knew nothing about the author, so I ordered the galley. Because of that, I feel I have to review the book.
I have to say that some of the blame for this book has to go to the editors. I don’t think the book was edited properly, and although I have read several galleys this year, I’ve never read one with as many errors as this one.
It starts with humongous chunks of backstory and explanation, which slowed the beginning considerably. I’d rather learn as I go, but I know there are readers who like all those explanations upfront. Maybe a glossary or a prologue.
If you’ve read Christine Feehan’s jungle stories, then you’re familiar with the basic premise of this book. But why should Feehan have all the fun of writing about shapeshifters in the jungle? Our heroine, Skeye, is an eagle shifter, and our hero, Jagger, is a jaguar shifter. Eagles and jaguars are enemies, but these two are so hot for each other, they eventually ignore that. The sex is pretty conventional and predictable, with phrases you’ll have read elsewhere and similes that didn’t quite come off. My favorite was “his cock jutting straight out like a bull about to charge.” The cock was charging? The more I thought about this one, the less I could understand it. Unless she was referring to the bull’s cock, and that is so not the image I want when I’m reading about hot sex.
The rainforest seems to be populated by shifters who all come from urban America, from their speech. While the narrative was usually “classic” prose style, they spoke in distinctly urban USA styles, with expletives that didn’t always seem to work in context, as if they’d been inserted there to keep the “fuck” quotient up. And there was a preponderance of “hell”s. It meant the connection between the narrative and the speech seemed disjointed.
Our heroine has to discover a portal and close it, and she expects to die in the process, so she can’t see a future with Jagger. At first, when they’re enemies, they have that sexual attraction to each other, but there is a succession of “I hate you-I love you-I hate you” scenes which can become exasperating. And full-on sex didn’t happen, with a series of “telephone” scenes, when they’re interrupted from getting it on by their own thoughts or by someone else.
Apparently this means the heroine has spirit (that’s what I was constantly told). If her mission was so important, I’d have thought she’d have welcomed all the help she could get, but apparently not. Especially since she is trying to save the world. Jagger was in the rainforest after being a soldier (or “solider” as it appears in the text) and going to Afghanistan and Iraq. Rather unfortunate for him. He lost a young female colleague and feels very guilty about it. Eden’s the one he remembers and regrets. So he can’t get involved with another warrior. Not a cock and bull story (sorry, couldn’t resist!) Jagger chases after Skye after she runs off, for no real reason that I could discern. They meet various characters, some of them sequel-bait, I suspect, including a vampire, a demon or two and various other characters, like “magicks.” (I dislike magic spelt with a k, but that might be just me, so I didn’t hold it against her).
The feature I found most off-putting was the “Telling” instead of “Showing.” Combined with the constant use of passives, where people and things are having things done to them, rather than actively doing, as in “He felt guilt as he thought of his family” (telling – cue for another plunge into backstory). I’d rather have Stone show the reader his guilt, or leave it out. Distancing words like “she felt” kept me away from the characters and entering fully into their dilemmas. Because of this, I never felt fully involved in the action scenes, which seemed to go rather slowly.
Stone seems particularly fond of disembodied body parts, where a person’s eyes, arms, etc, seem to go off on their own and do stuff. As in “The man’s eyes continued to search along the path she’d taken and his mouth split into a grin.” Or “Frantic, she searched the immediate area with her eyes.” There are lots of examples, and while a few are fine, it got a bit tired after a while. Or maybe it was that the story didn’t engage me as much as I wanted it to.
And while I read, I noticed a few other things.
After every question with a tag, the speaker was capitalized. So “Are you right?” she asked would come out as “Are you right?” She asked. How could that get through a decent line editor? There were a few pov shifts, especially with characters describing their own appearance, or their eyes, which they couldn’t possibly have seen for themselves. Run-on sentences could also distract, and sometimes I had to read a sentence a few times before getting the sense of it. “Peek,” not “peak.” “Viciously” and not “viscously.” Adverbs were sprinkled lavishly throughout the text, especially adorning speech and thought tags. These could have been cut for a smoother read. The past tense of “spit” is “spat.” That one turned up several times, and irritated me every time.
So I can’t say that this was a particularly enjoyable read, much though I really wanted to like it. It seemed a great choice, with adventure, hot sex and shifters, but the style and the slow pace eventually beat me. I did finish it, but it was with a sigh of relief that I put it down, not a sigh of satisfaction. A good line editor could have sorted out a lot of the problems, and the typos were worthy of an early ebook.
I hate writing bad reviews, but I couldn’t avoid this one. Still, I’d advise you to download a sample and have a read, to see if what didn’t work for me would work for you.
Grade: D-
Summary:
A solitary hunter with no regard for the human world, Jagger Castille is a shifter living on the edge. It will take the woman who calls him enemy to give him a reason to live.
Jagger is a creature of the night—Skye Knightly soars in the sun. Natural adversaries, they have been joined by destiny in a mission entrusted to Skye’s family centuries ago: Nothing less than the salvation of the Earth.
Wounded and bitter, Jagger sought escape in the solitude of the jungle, driven by a need to disappear forever… until a mysterious shifter who calls to his soul and feeds a yearning long forgotten, pulls him from his dark path. A courageous warrior, Skye’s passion is equal to Jagger’s own—but can she trust a man on the edge? A man whose secrets are as devastating as her own?
Each is the other’s sole hope for survival. But a dark and twisted truth is leading them toward the ultimate sacrifice for a love they may never live to claim.
Other books in this series:
