Elaine White's Life in Books

The Author

 

 

Elaine White is the author of multi-genre MM romance, celebrating 'love is love' and offering diversity in both genre and character within her stories.

Growing up in a small town and fighting cancer in her early teens taught her that life is short and dreams should be pursued. She lives vicariously through her independent, and often hellion characters, exploring all possibilities within the romantic universe.

The Winner of two Watty Awards – Collector's Dream (An Unpredictable Life) and Hidden Gem (Faithfully) – and an Honourable Mention in 2016's Rainbow Awards (A Royal Craving) Elaine is a self-professed geek, reading addict, and a romantic at heart.

 

The Reviewer

 

I’m an author and reader, who just can’t get away from books. I discovered the MM genre a few years ago and became addicted.

Top #50 UK reviewer on Goodreads
#1 reviewer on Divine Magazine

SPOILER ALERT!

Lessons Learned (The Gifted Realm)

Lessons Learned (The Gifted Realm) - Jillian Neal **I WAS GIVEN THIS BOOK, BY THE AUTHOR, IN RETURN FOR AN HONEST REVIEW**

Book – Lesson Learned (The Gifted Realm Book 2)
Author – Jillian Neal
Star rating – ★★★★☆
Plot – better than book 1, but still thin
Characters – even more slutty and brutish than book 1
Movie Potential – ★★★★☆
Ease of reading – easy to read, if you can get past the word usage
Cover – X doesn’t adequately represent the story
Suitable Title – ✔
Would I read it again – No.

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Book Analysis:

This book frustrated me even more than the first. It has even more potential, but it is sadly ruined with the same mistakes, plot issues and misunderstandings.

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Pros:

I like the Cascavel and Vindico storyline advancement. It’s the most interesting thing I’ve read in this series so far. Unfortunately, there’s not enough of it for me.

Logan and Adeline’s relationship is what saves this book. It’s what ups my 3 stars to 4 and what convinces me to keep reading. They are the only real thing in this story and it’s sad that there are only a few chapters where they get to shine.

I’ll admit that I am actually enjoying this series. There are A LOT of things that let it down, but the more I read the more I try to see beyond the terrible sex scenes, the selfish and single-minded behaviour of the characters and look for the real plot. When those moments crop up I’m like a giddy fangirl, giggling and gasping in surprise at what unfolds. But the bad parts do mar my enjoyment quite a bit and I just want to scalp the whole lot of it until it’s the well arranged YA novel I see beneath the surface.

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Cons:

I think it’s really cheesy for an adult novel, which this is supposed to be, for the MC to be ‘Lawson’ and the bad guy to be called ‘Wretchkinsides’. I mean, could you make it any more clearer who the good and bad guys are? Fine for a YA novel, but cheesy and lazy for an adult.

I have no idea what ‘sausage biscuits’ are, but I’m guessing they’re American. They don’t sound appetizing at all. Did I mention before that I hate accents? There are also issues in this book, where quotation marks are missing. There’s the same mistake when ‘up’ and ‘down’ are used incorrectly, when ‘on’ and ‘in’ are in the wrong places. E.g. “down his chest and traced her fingers over his nipples.” Eh, I’m sorry, but you can’t do down a chest to reach nipples, you go up. And “hands move up her inner thighs until he caught her left ankle”: No matter how you spin it you can’t go up a thigh to reach an ankle. It’s physically impossible.

I also don’t understand why the whole Regis and his wife chapter is needed. It doesn’t tell us anything that we haven’t already been told; it’s just an excuse to get some ‘sexy’ moments in. The problem is that it’s not sexy at all.

The sex is still total overkill; there’s no need for even half of it. And this : “They’d hoped that moving into their own place would allow them to engage in the physical side of their relationship a little more often.” Really? They were at it like rabbits in Book 1. I don’t think they could do it any more often if they tried. Book 2 is still full of gross out, unwanted, unnecessary and irrelevant sex scenes that make me gag and roll my eyes.

Emily is still super slutty; in fact, she’s worse than before. She’s also weepy, irritating and frustrating. I don’t like her at all, just like I always knew I wouldn’t. Now, before you say anything; no, I didn’t decide to dislike her for any reason and then keep to that. No, I just saw things in her really early on that I detest in a female MC. She’s weak, hormonal ALL the time and she’s unlikeable, to me.

There’s also not enough of Logan and Adeline in the first half of the book. It’s like they’ve been forgotten entirely, except for Logan to offer that ‘light relief’ whenever things get too ‘heavy’.

I don’t understand how someone in the limelight for the last however many years can’t approach the press and choose to do an exclusive interview with them. If they gave them a no-holds-barred truthful interview then they would be less interested in them. All this sneaking around, never answering questions and always acting suspiciously is what keeps the media interested.

Rainer is supposed to be this big bad guy whose only interest is keeping Em safe, but all he does is get caught up in her slutty ways and forget how to function like a human being. And redeeming qualities he has as a character disappear whenever he thinks/talks or is around Emily. Suddenly he turns into this raging sex machine, and his only thought is to screw Emily until he can’t breathe anymore and grant her every wish. It’s sickening. Then she goes all Bridezilla on him.

I really don’t understand this book at all. These guys are twenty now and they’re breaking out in a cold sweat about going to a strip club FOR WORK!!! They need to grow a pair and Em needs to grow the F up about it all. They’re supposed to be adults, so they need to grow up and start acting like it. It’s a job; he saved a young girl and all they keep going on about is how much Em is going to freak out. They’re getting married!!!! What possible reason does she have to think that some stripper is going to catch his attention?

“and when it came right down to it he’d taken her for granted” Ah, no! No he hasn’t. He’s been the exact opposite; always putting her first, even when it was illogical or stupid to do it. He’s always done what SHE wanted and what made HER happy. I don’t give a flying F that he kept secrets; every couple keeps secrets from each other at one point and let’s face it…if it’s that much of a problem then TALK about it.
Em can’t go on saying that she doesn’t want or care about his money, then turn round and be furious that he didn’t tell her about a lawsuit. It’s not of her frickin’ business if she doesn’t want anything to do with his money. Em needs to get some self-esteem. If any pretty girl that walks past Rainer is going to get her knickers in a twist then she needs to wake up and smell the coffee. The poor guy has done everything for her, for the last twenty years. He’s disobeyed her father, he’s obeyed every order and risked his friendship with his best friend for her.

They’ve been together forever and Rainer has never looked or strayed; why get uptight about a WORK JOB that he had no choice in? Doesn’t 20 years of loyalty and fidelity mean anything to Em? It seems like she cares more about the money going to someone else than him being at a strip club.

“I am so sorry for how awful this must have been for you” Really? How was this awful for Emily? She’s the one making Rainer’s life a misery and acting unprofessionally in front of Fiona, who is her boss. She’s making Rainer’s work life a misery and putting her own life in danger. How stupid can you be?

“I don’t care how young she is; she’s being a bitch.” Logan spat.” Well, I don’t agree with ‘spat’ as a descriptive speech term, but YES! He’s the only one who agrees with me. The whole time I read Emily I just think ‘this girl is either straitjacket crazy or pregnant’.

Rainer spends a heck of a lot of time going on about how sex isn’t the only thing he wants from Emily; how it’s love and a home and a future. He loves her so much that he would do anything for her, but he can’t look at her in the bath, without controlling his sexed-up hormones for five minutes? Their argument lasted one day before he was groping her up and they were rutting like animals. And why, oh why, does Rainer need to take his shirt off to talk to Emily while she’s in the bath?
Really, the amount of sex they have is unbelievable and ridiculous. It’s also really pathetic that it’s their solution for everything.

And how ignorant and selfish do these kids have to be to not notice that Mrs Haydenshire is either pregnant or seriously sick? If I can see it then they should too.

Why use ‘lamasted’ when chastised would do better? And how would you know this: “He blinked and tried to determine why he’d awoken two hours before he had to get up.” How did he know it’s two hours early? Oh, and let me just show you this: “I don’t guess I realized I was so awful to live with.” Does this make sense to anyone else? It’s very difficult to read. And so was this: “I’d walk away and let you have that because all in the world that I want is for you to be happy.” It almost reads, in places, that English isn’t the author’s first language. In which case, this would explain a heck of a lot.

Garrett is a total man-whore and all the girls are even sluttier in this book than book 1. The whole ‘guzzler’ thing at the bar just proves this. I also don’t understand why Rainer feels so responsible for all the bad crap that’s happened – the bar, the restaurant etc. It wasn’t his fault; Em goaded him every time and all he did was act like a brainless, horny teenager and give in.

I also don’t think saying that he wants to be a more ‘consummate lover’ is what the author meant. I’m thinking it should have been ‘considerate’. That happens a lot in this series; the wrong words are used. Not just words that unnecessarily long/complicated, but words that mean entirely different things to what the author thinks they mean. There’s also a real issue with quotation marks being missing or in the wrong places, so that you don’t know what’s speech and what’s observation/description half the time. There are also incomplete sentences where a full stop is used instead of a comma. A lot of the time it feels like a sentence has been cut in half and now makes very little sense until you’ve read on.

I also find it very hard to believe that Emily’s tattoo would all fit into the one tattoo, small enough to be discrete and yet large enough to have all of that detail, while only taking up her hip bone. It seems unbelievable to me that each detail is legible.

There are also lots of places where there is no definition between one scene and the next, one location and the next and memories of the past and actions of the present. There’s still no obvious, clear shift from past to present when someone drift off into memories. There are moments when the lack of speech marks makes it so hard to find out what people are saying and what people are thinking. There’s also a scene where they’re in the car, driving one minute and the next they’re on the sofa, with no explanation or indication of their having moved at all.

Rainer and Emily are so childish and focused on sex that they can’t see straight. It’s grossly disgusting and lowers the intelligence of the characters. What little redeeming qualities they have as characters are completely ruined by their single-minded obsession with sex. It feels like 90% of this book is Rainer shoving his fingers up Em and that’s not a book to me. That’s porn; not a story with plot.

I find the ‘magical’ aspect of this story to be a really lazy way for the author to have the characters connect and know each others thoughts. It’s used as a lazy way for the author to ensure against pregnancy and make keys, locks, and security systems obsolete. I don’t see any other reason for it. The magic and the society doesn’t seem to have a real focus in this story.

The main ‘plot’ of Cascaval and the Vindico is a much more intriguing story than the roundabout of when Rainer and Em are or are not having sex with each other. But it’s given a complete back seat to their sexual antics. It lowers this story from what could be an awesome 4-5 stars to a bare 3. That’s for potential. If I was to rate this book on what was actually in it, not what it could be, it would be a 2 star at most.

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Overall:

This book made me even angrier than book 1. There are more pages dedicated to sex in this series than action or plot and it drives me up the wall. The overall story is excellent and I ‘nearly’ cried and laughed a lot while reading, but the incessant and unnecessary sex, whining and tantrums.

It takes half of the book, again, to get away from the sex and into the plot. Again, the first half is full of horny, desperate kids pretending to be adults. Then the real story begins about 45% – 50% of the way into the book.

Ultimately this book needs the stuffing edited out of it. It needs spelling/grammar checks and a major plot overhaul to remove the sex and turn this into a kick-ass YA series that would sell like hot cakes.