Elaine White's Life in Books

Book – Genie's Wish (Lifting the Veil #2)
Author – Susan Laine
Star rating - ★★★☆☆
No. of Pages - 200

Movie Potential - ★★☆☆☆
Ease of reading – moderately easy to follow
Would I read it again – Probably not.


Book 1 gave me such high expectations and that may be why this one fell a little flat. I still love the originality of a Genie/Jinn and a Norse God, and I especially love archaeology, but it didn't have the same pizzazz or feeling that book 1 had.

The characters were strange. I find Pip really quite naive and a muddle of strong and weak characteristics. He's skittish, frightened a lot of the time and a geek with self esteem issues. He cries a lot, he panics a lot and yet there are times of strength, when he's the only one making sense. Strangely, though, Pip was my favourite character. Jinn was a little too mysterious and all-knowing for my liking, as the distinct Alpha force, while Val was quick to judge and shoot off his mouth. As a trouple, they didn't work for me. There was too much acceptance of weird, ridiculous situations.

I found some of the plot a little hard to follow. There was a lot of intricacy in the things the author introduced here – the site itself, the maze and often the puzzles they had to work out. They weren't always written in a way that was easy to follow. These were the times when I skimmed or had to re-read entire pages, just to try to get it to make sense. Which it often didn't.

There are also a lot of run-on sentences, that take nearly a paragraph or a half paragraph. That's too long to keep track of what's going on and they often read quite confused. In amongst that are a few grammar/sentence issues (e.g. sight instead of site).

Everything was fine, plot wise, until the 50% mark and then it all got very strange, quite childish and kind of ridiculous. The whole maze part was the problem and it really dampened my enjoyment of this book. The Hall of Earthly Desires was less like a hall of temptation, with gold/men/woman/treasure images that I'd imagined and a lot of deadly arrows with one glimpse of gold that felt like an after thought.

I was also a little angry with the admission of the “door riddle” challenge they faced. It read like a rip off from Labyrinth, which had an almost identical scene, solution and everything. Jinn's punishments for the mercenaries who were chasing them also seemed ridiculous and childish.

There was so much to take it, at all times, that it got a little exhausting to read it and follow the story at the same time. Not to mention that the “romance” aspect was more lust than love.

I think I must have skimmed at least the last 10%, because it was ALL sex. And I mean that, I'm not exaggerating. There were so many pages of sex that it made my head spin to skip past them all. I skimmed each page for dialogue or anything resembling plot, but it was just way too much sex and in a way that I don't like to read it. A lot of flowery speech and begging in slightly ridiculous ways.

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OVERALL

A lot of flowery prose, a lot of strange events that bordered on the ridiculous and over all, too many words. If this book had been half the size, without the maze scenes and some small adventure/danger in its place, I'd have ranked this much higher. As it is, compared to book 1, it lacks romance and depth.

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FAVOURITE QUOTE

“When Philip moved out of his arms, Valdemar saw the love-filled castles in the sky of his dreams come crumbling down and turn to dust.”