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
To Cast a Stone
Book – To Cast a Stone (The Goddess Redemption #1)Author – Kelli Lockheart
Star rating - ★★★☆☆
Plot – short, rushed, not well explained
Characters – one dimensional
Movie Potential - ★★★☆☆
Ease of reading – easy to read, hard to follow
Cover - ✔
Suitable Title – X – didn't seem relevant to the story except in the most roundabout way
Would I read it again – No.
** I WAS GIVEN THIS BOOK BY THE AUTHOR, IN RETURN FOR AN HONEST REVIEW **
This story, although being a 'short story', was too short for my liking. I felt like a lot of story was being told in the most simplest, shortest way possible, when really a lot more detail was needed. It was too fast paced for me, jumping from one thing to the next in the space of a sentence or paragraph. It was extremely hard to follow, especially for the first half of the story.
What Artemis does, regarding the hunt, is an intriguing and unique concept, but it feels like it's passed over much too easily and is never really explained properly.
The review copy I have was extremely hard to read. The font was so faint that it was illegible in many of my applications. The Kindle app was the worst, because random lines were in bold and the others were almost invisible. When I did find a way to read it, the writing was so small it made my eyes hurt and the font was so faint that I had to squint often to make out what a word was supposed to be. This made the reading experience entirely frustrating and painful. The fact that the story wasn't capturing my attention either, made it all the worse.
The first half of the story didn't really made sense to me. It says at one point, that Artemis has her immortality stripped from her. Then the next, her 'human' body has been trapped in stone for centuries and she has absolutely no problem walking, talking and functioning mere moments after being released. Then, after no explanation, it's briefly commented on that she's going to live human life after human life. The entire thing is not even explained as being 'magic', in fact, it's not explained at all. It's simply there. I think at this point, the reader finds it difficult to understand whether she had immortality or not.
The story vastly improved once Artemis became Alexis, though it was still too fast paced and confusing. Nothing was explained to a standard that made it easy to follow. The story only picked up one Galen and Alexis met. Even then, however, this short story read as nothing more than Artemis and Orion/Alexis and Galen having to find each other so they could have a lot of sex. The plot was thin, even for a short story of this length (77 pages in the format I had).
