Elaine White's Life in Books

** I WAS GIVEN THIS BOOK, BY THE AUTHOR, IN RETURN FOR AN HONEST REVIEW **

Author – Jillian Neal
Star rating – ★★★☆☆
Plot – Missing. I don’t get the point of the book, unless it’s all about the sex.
Characters – females are one dimensional and males are a little more broad spectrum.
Movie Potential – ★★★☆☆ (unless the sex is removed, then it goes up one star)
Ease of reading – okay. Simple words used, but too much flowery description that is distracting.
Cover – ✔
Suitable Title – No.
Would I read it again – No.

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Book Analysis:

This book did nothing for me, to be honest. There was so much that I didn’t like that had I not been reviewing this for a blog tour, I would never have finished it.

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Pros:

When I began reading this story I was excited, hopeful and I really enjoyed the first 10%. I chose to review the whole series because I read Wendy Owens’ Guardian Series last year and it blew me away. It was an excellent series and this ‘Gifted Real’ series sounded similar. I had high expectations when I started and unfortunately, the book didn’t live up to them.

The story had a great start with an epilogue that introduced us to the main characters: Logan, his sister Emily, and Rainer. Rainer is Logan’s best friend, but he’s also Emily’s boyfriend. We get told this really early on. The first chapter then goes to years later when the kids are twenty.

The first few chapters are great. I thought it was really clever of the author to give us a history of this unfamiliar world and an explanation of how it worked through an exam that Rainer had to take. However, it was very difficult to follow because so many terms were being thrown at us, as a reader, and we were expected to understand what they meant with no explanation, sometimes, so this was a very half and half situation. Sometimes things were really well explained and some things you were left to work out on your own, which wasn’t so clever.

I’ll admit, that from the very first page I didn’t take to Emily. It began as me being undecided about her character and then progressively moved towards real hate. I’ll explain why later. As for Logan and Raider; I love them. They’re awesome and normal – for the first few chapters! I also really like Adeline, who is Logan’s girlfriend. She’s perhaps the most real character in the book.

I really like Logan and Adeline as characters and in their relationship. I like the overall story – or attempt at one – and the funny/awkward parts. I do giggle and cringe quite a lot when Logan and Rainer are together. They are what pulls this story up to a 3 star for me. But I’m still missing plot!

I like the way the book ended. At the end of the first book in series I always read ‘End of Book 1′, but this say ‘Just the Beginning’. Though I’m disappointed that it took 50% of the book for it to even start, this is a good way to move into the next one.

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Cons:

The premise of the characters all being ‘Gifted’ with magical abilities and separate from the ‘non-Gifted’ world was, I’ll admit, original. Until it went NOWHERE! Literally, we get introduced to this amazing world and then it all turns out to be a back story for Rainer and Emily’s romance. Let me tell you in advance that I gagged a few times because of that.

There’s a really awkward ‘talk’ between Rainer and Logan as they discuss sex and their girlfriends, early on in the book. At first I thought this was really funny, brilliantly done cring-worthy stuff. I literally giggled out loud, but then I realised that this realistic scene of two guys discussing this subject was going to be the real main story throughout. Yawn! And that brings me back to the characters supposedly being twenty…no! These kids barely act sixteen. I think this book was originally a YA about teens and then the author thought – Hell no, let’s add a gross, obscene amount of descriptive sex!. And…she did!
And this is where all my problems start.

Rainer has an uncle Stan and when he visits him early on, he has this really weird Spanish ‘friend’ who seems more like a loanshark. However, this moment gave me a really bad feeling – like these two would cause real trouble for Rainer later. Um…nope. The next 20% of the book was about him getting his freak on. Literally.

I expected this book, from the covers to the descriptions on Goodreads and Amazon to be a YA series for teens. Well, that opinion was thrown out the window when the obscenely desperate Rainer and Emily began rubbing and grinding all over each other every second they could get. I’m not kidding either. It was like the entire story was thrown out the window in favour of seriously explicit sex scenes. Well, if you want to write an erotica go ahead, but at least bill it as an erotica. And, even worse, the sex scenes were NOT good!

We get a small injection of relief with a challenge everyone talks about, but the author never explains. We’re just expected to know, all through the first 20% of the book that ‘the Angels’ are a team of some sort, without being told which sport it is. Then we get to ‘Coulomb’s Web’ the last game Emily has to play before graduation. Apparently she hates it with a passion and is no good at it, but, surprise surprise, *spoiler alert* their team wins with no problem. Urgh! That is something I said a lot while reading this book. It’s unbelievable and single-minded. The game description, when it finally came was very complicated and I barely understood most of it. It would have been nice to have a comparison to a game or idea that we readers would already understand.

I’m also not a fan of the repetitive words – ‘issued’ being used to describe movement? And people ‘panted’, ‘stunned’ or ‘hushed’ their words? Really? REALLY? There is a heck of a lot of panting going on throughout the first 30% of this book it’s unreal. And, FWI, people don’t inhale food! If that’s a thing with these ‘Gifted’ characters then that should have been pointed out by now. Normal human beings EAT food.

Let me just admit that by 20% of this book, the whole ‘sex’ issue was really getting old. If they were rubbing, grinding or talking about the sex then Emily’s thrusting her breasts into Rainer’s face. And I’m not exaggerating; that line is used many, many times. The book began well, with a good story and potential to be great. Then it became all about Rainer and Emily doing the nasty. And trust me, it’s nasty. I feel like the whole lot of them are horny pre-teens with nothing better to think about. I see glimmers of real character in Rainer and Logan, but not in any of the females. I feel like I’m missing the real point of the story.

To be blunt, I would have cut almost all of this trash out of the book and I could still get the basic storyline, without all the rampant, unnecessary, single-minded focus on sex. I’m really also not happy that all the females are weak, slutty and sob all the time. All the men are typical bad boys and all the women do nothing but flirt, sleep around and cry. It’s a gross injustice to the female sex. I feel sorry for any teen or pre-teen who reads this expecting a great YA story only to get full explicit sex shoved down their throat for 30% of the book and being told that it’s okay.

Let’s get back to the sex, shall we? Since we can’t escape it let’s evaluate it. Now, I’ve read a lot of novels with erotic/explicit and barely any sex. I write them too, but this one really takes the cake. It reads like an old 90s Mills and Boons with the description:
“Though he’d certainly done this much before, he began to consider his next moves.”

This is about fingers going places I’m not allowed to talk about in a review. BUT, we’ve never been told this before. We get a flash back LATER that this has happened before, but no mention until now. The whole sex part of the story is gross, to be honest.

“Her energy flowed into him as he opened and ripened her rhythmically.”
Seriously, I almost gagged just typing that out. Think what I felt reading it. Then there’s this constant, incessant frustrating MILLION times that Rainer asks Emily if she’s sure and everyone goes on and on and on about how much this will hurt her. GROSS and annoying! We get that he’s nervous and this is supposed to be a ‘big deal’ to the Gifted, but how many times do we have to hear it?

Then there’s trash like this –
“he broke through her until he could fill her with all of him.” That sounds painful and gross. But, Emily’s all delighted and absolutely fine with it. Ew.

“He placed his hand on her mound over the approximate place where he’d just broken through her.” Please excuse me while I’m sick. I mean, this is unbelievable and disgusting to read. You have no idea the amount of times I gagged, squinted and tried not to keep reading this stuff. It gets worse, but I can’t go into it now. I’m feeling sick as it is.
But let me saw one more thing about the sex – the first time all he goes is get inside her and blasts off (to keep it polite for the review). That’s not sex! Yet she claimed it was magical and blah, blah, blah.

How am I supposed to believe they kids are twenty when they do stuff like this after sex –
““I really want to take care of you, Em, always.” She swooned.
Tears formed on her lashes as she nodded. “Thank you.” She fell back on her pillow. She hugged the one he’d slept on to her chest and inhaled deeply.” Who swoons in this day and age? And don’t get me started on this one –
“She could feel his every emotion because his release was inside of her.” GROSS! Urgh!

I really don’t understand Rainer and Emily’s relationship. I don’t believe it either. There’s a constant invisible, unexplained power she has over him and we’re told in the Prologue that she told him he was to be her boyfriend when they were kids. Now, that seemed cute and all back when they were six or seven, but it feels like it’s still that way. Emily tells Rainer what she wants and he gives it to her. It’s not realisitc.

To be perfectly honest with you all, if I wasn’t committed to reviewing this series it would have been a DNF the moment all the bumping and grinding started. That wasn’t what I signed up for and the NEXT TWENTY PERCENT of horny teenagers doing nasty things in disgusting ways wasn’t what I signed up for either. The sex isn’t hot, necessary or relevant to the story. There’s even a magical safe guard against pregnancy, so it’s not as if it’s a major story arc so that Emily turns out pregnant later. They’ve just told us it’s impossible, so WHY? For the love of God, why?

Though the basic idea if good and I like the male characters, I can’t take any more of this ‘sex is the ENTIRE point of the story’ plotline. And that’s how it reads. If they’re not thinking about it they’re doing it. WHERE’S THE STORY?

The blurb mentions this – “Heady desire consumes them both, but this raw sexual need could blind them to the dangers that surround them. As they allow their voracious passions to consume them, evil seems to lurk around every darkened corner.” But it never, for once, mentions explicit sex warnings or that the ENTIRE book is about sex. If it did say this, I would never have decided to read it, to be honest. I like my sex to come WITH a plot line, not instead of.

But, to be fair I committed to reading and reviewing this series and I’m darned well going to do it. I’m going to suffer every minute of it so that you don’t have to.

Lots of flowery description that isn’t necessary and distracts from the reading. I’m starting to see the plot coming through the story, but that’s at the 50% mark. It should never take this long to see the plot and even then it’s thin.

I have a REAL issue with these words being used so repetitively in the story: ‘issued’ is not a way to describe walking and NO-ONE ‘inhales’ their food. It sounds gross, painful and really disturbs my reading when it is mentioned so often. There are many alternative words to describe someone eating quickly. People also do not ‘husked’, ‘sassed’ or ‘hemmed’ their words. These are barely words as it is, never mind the correct term for someone talking. What is wrong with ‘said’?
I did a lot of eye-rolling and gagging during this book; it feels like it was written by a teenager with no knowledge of sex or adults. And I’m including the sex scenes in here. They’re not hot, not attractive, not sexy and neither are the characters.

And let me just ask you: does this sound sexy? “She hissed his name; it seared through him as a low guttural groan and escaped his lungs.” It sounds like Parseltongue and it sounds painful. That is not sexy, bedroom talk. And let me just mention this one: “To pull the erotic energy from its main storehouse would be exquisite.” I’m not even going to tell you what this was about because it made me gag so hard that I nearly choked myself.

And here – “The sunrise was reflecting off of the water.” Was it? Because this is Rainer’s POV and in the next sentence he opens his eyes, so how does he know? And saying ‘heartbeats’ in reference to one person, makes them sound like they have two hearts. Emily has one, so ‘heartbeat’ or ‘beats of her heart’ would have made more sense.
The writing style is very juvenile and reads as a first draft that no-one has edited. There is a lot of flowery and useless, unnecessary description. Simple things are being described with alternatives and using a heck of a lot of metaphors. The sex is cringe-worthy and makes me gag; it doesn’t sound sexy, enjoyable or exciting. In fact, it’s pretty gross and makes me really uncomfortable. And believe me, I read a lot of erotica, so it’s not the explicit part that bothers me, it’s the way it’s written. If the author can’t describe the body parts and practices of sex properly, in her explicit scenes, then maybe they shouldn’t be writing sex scenes just yet?

It would be nice if the memory scenes/flashbacks were in italics or something to separate them from the present time. It’s very hard to tell where one ends and another begins.

What actually disappoints me the most is that this would make an awesome YA novel if you just removed the sex and hinted at what happened behind closed doors instead. The conversations, the characters personalities and twist of danger versus humour and love is excellent – for a YA novel. But the explicit sex (which is horrible anyway) would have to be removed. Then, in my opinion, this would be a 5 star YA novel. The story, once you weed it out between the sheets, is actually really good. But it shouldn’t take 50% of the novel to get there. I could easily have chopped out about six chapters from this to make it an incredible, unputdownable, YA novel.

The use of ‘spastically’ and ‘spaz’ are really not okay with me. It doesn’t fit the character and it’s really offensive. I also hate the flippant way the author and character use the word. There are also a lot of instances where ‘and’ should really be ‘an’ and I’m not a fan of accents being written into books. I don’t mind slang words, but when words are spelled to look like an accent it makes it really difficult to read, especially when you’re not familiar with the accent.

I’m also confused as to whether the Angels are a sports group or a job sector. One minute they sound like a Quidditch team and the next thy sound like Aurors. (I’m sorry for the Harry Potter analogy, but that’s the only comparison I have.)

What happened to Rainer never having looked at or noticed other girls since he met Emily when they were little kids? It seems that every time I turn around he’d ogling some girl with a great ‘rack’. He did it twice within this book; first with Chloe and secondly with Fionna.
And I have no clue, whatsoever, what this means ‘He perked coffee, seated himself at the table, and waited determinedly.’ How does one ‘perk’ coffee exactly? What does it even mean? I also don’t think the author understands what the word ‘diatribe’ means or what negative connotations it has. She uses it multiple times to describe when someone goes into lecture mode. I suspect the word she’s looking for it ‘tangent’ or ‘monologue’, ‘lecture’ or even ‘speech’. Diatribe is not the right word to use in any of the places she has used it. There are also a few ?’s at the end of perfectly normal sentences, that suggest it’s either a typo or the author isn’t sure themselves about what they’re writing. It feels sloppy.

And don’t get me started on the multiple times that ‘IN’ has been used instead of ‘ON’. Like this ‘Everyone say in the living room floor’. Now, you can either sit in the living room or on the living room floor, but you can’t sit in a floor.

I also have a feeling that Fergus’ Gifted girlfriend will either be his saviour or really big trouble. I also don’t like Fionna looks and acts around Rainer; it feels to me that she’s flirting a heck of a lot, right in front of Emily. I also have a feeling that Emily will get pregnant from their bout of sex in the shower at her parents house, since no-one mentioned either of them doing a cast.

And, not for nothing, it says “Thank you for reading ‘Rock Bottom’” at the end. Except that I didn’t; this is book 1 and ‘Rock Bottom’ is book 4, so that’s a mistake that needs fixed, unless I’m reading an Arc, which wasn’t made clear at the time.

I also noticed that there’s a discrepancy between the book covers. I didn’t get a cover with my copy of Book 1, but book 2 says ‘Book Two’, while the third says ‘Book 3′. This is minor, but it’s important when broadcasting your series and it’s a matter of continuity, which is a problem in this book so far, as well.

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Overall:

As you can see this book had more Cons than Pros. I think this book would be a 4-5 star favourite if it was written for a YA audience and the author had someone editing who knew about grammar. No offense to the author or the editor/publisher, but the whole thing read like a teenager attempting an adult novel. It just didn’t work.

The characters are one-dimensional, with flashes of uniqueness that don’t last long enough, and very stereotypical. The girls are sluts, the boys as bad-asses and the parents are overbearing, toothache sweet and overprotective. The only two things in this whole novel that I found believable or likeable were: 1. Logan and Rainer’s friendship because they had a real bromance going on that was fun and real; and 2. Logan and Adeline’s relationship because although they had sex, it was all about making her feel loved and sharing something special. It didn’t turn into this gross out sex-fest and he isn’t after it every second of the day like Rainer and Emily are.

The decent plot/story was let down grossly by the explicit sex, bad grammar and mistakes. I would have preferred this book had it undergone some intense editing; I mean, grammar, spelling and deleting a few chapters wroth of useless sex scenes. There’s really no need for them, because they don’t push the story along at all. I feel like they’re only there to provide some heat and make the characters seem more adult, but it’s a fail for me. The characters are juvenile, pathetic and barely read older than fifteen. The sex isn’t good, enticing or sexy and the little romantic parts there were could easily have provided enough romance to keep a YA market happy.