Review of Off the Ice (Hat Trick #1) by Avon Gale and Piper Vaughn

by Avon Gale and Piper Vaughn 

3 stars

Tristan Holt is nothing if not pragmatic. Despite a flourishing career as a defenseman for the Atlanta Venom, Tristan knows he can’t play hockey forever. One day he’ll retire—if an injury doesn’t force him to hang up his skates first. His backup plan? Finishing his business degree. But he doesn’t count on a very inappropriate attraction to his standoffish sociology professor, Sebastian Cruz.

Sebastian is on the bottom rung of the Sociology Department at Georgia State. He has his sights set on tenure, and he can’t afford to be distracted, especially not by a sexy student with a body straight out of Sebastian’s dreams. No matter how much Tristan tempts him, that’s one line Sebastian won’t cross. At least not until summer classes end. After that, everything is fair game.

But Sebastian lives loud and proud, and Tristan is terrified of being the first out player in the NHL. Neither of them can afford to risk their hearts when they can’t imagine a happily ever after. The problem is, unlike hockey, when it comes to love, there are no rules.

We don’t know where to start with this one.  Avon Gale and Piper Vaugh, match made in heaven, and add a hockey romance, a sure fire winner.  But, we HATE to say this but it didn’t work for us, there was so much going on, but never really felt that nothing really worked for us

The good:

-           - Teacher/Student:  We really liked how Avon Gale and Piper Vaughn dealt with the teacher/student relationship.  We appreciated how Tristan waited until he was no longer Sebastian’s student before jumping into bed.

-           Tristan:  We loved Tristan.  We felt connected to him, a super-star hockey player struggling with his sexuality, struggling with coming out, and wondering how to be his authentic self.  Sebastian would not be who we choose for him, but alas it is who we got.

-         -  The kink:  This is a good and bad.  We liked the hot-between-the –sheets, hot, sexy, and plentiful, how we like our sex!

The bad:

-          -So much going on:  There is so much going on.  Teacher-student, sports romance, coming-out, age difference and on and on and on.  It was a little much and we didn’t really feel that they all worked.  Example – the age difference, other than a mention we didn’t really feel that Sebastian was significantly older; it just didn’t work for us. 

-          -The jock coming out: Off the Ice is actually like may sport romances.  Does the jock come out?  Sebastian acts like a petulant child and essentially gives Tristan an ultimatum, come out or we are done.  Yeah, we really didn’t like where that went.

-          -The kink:  We love kink. But this kink didn’t really fit.  There was a spanking scene that came out of left field, and about halfway through Tristan turns submissive to Sebastian’s dominant cranky personality.  As we said we love kink, however humiliation play isn’t one we are particularly fond of ,but there was no build towards the change in their relationship and we felt it just didn’t fit.

We don’t know why but Off the Ice fell flat for us.  We didn’t particularly like Sebastian and the humiliation play was unexpected, but it was a combination of so many things that just didn’t help Off the Ice come together for us. Off the ice is the first in a series so fingers crossed for a winner in the next book!

Review of Dark Silence (The Bound Subject #1) by Katze Snow

by Katze Snow

3 stars

Claude Galen was brought into this world to train slaves, not to want them.

When his latest victim, a twenty-one-year-old boy named Tristan Kade, begins to see Claude for who he truly is, only one thing can be done to stop Tristan from escaping: punish him.

Trapped in a padded white room with no windows or doors, all Tristan can do to stay alive in this world is to obey Professor Galen.

Submit to him.

Yield. Break.

But what happens when Tristan's body is trained to work against him? When he starts to crave the pleasure instead of fear it? When he begins to see the man behind the monster?

With it being Halloween week we delved right with this Dark Thriller ……romance – not really, from Katze Snow.  It is a dark, psychological erotic thriller and, although satisfied the dark we felt it missed the building of connection between the main characters.  We enjoyed it, we think, but left us felling a bit sad, and wishing the second book was here already.

What did we love?

-      -    If you are looking for a Dark read, pick up Dark Silence.  There is kidnapping, sexual exploitation, torture; it is twisted and sadistic in parts.  But, not to say anything is too much, we didn’t find ourselves putting  it down because it was too much (unlike some Dark reads that we have had to stop reading!).

-     -     We really enjoyed the set-up of the story, the part before Tristan was kidnapped.  There was great tension that kept us flipping the pages just to see how this would all play out.

-     -     Connection to Tristan.  To be honest we felt for Tristan, Katze Snow builds a likeable character in Tristan and we really did like him.  We felt the horrible things Claude subjected him through and wanted to wrap him up and take away all the hurts.

What took away from the story?

-        -  Editing – call us snobs but poor editing, or continuity takes away form a book, it takes us out of the story.  There are quite a few examples of bad editing, or continuity issues; he was wearing PJs and then the next page, his jeans are getting too tight – hmmmm.

-       -   Tropes – there are a lot of tropes going on here.  Virgin, closeted, struggling with his sexuality, and add that to the human experiments subplot, daddy issues it was a bit much.

-       -   Character Development – we feel in this Dark genre that there needs to be a serious connection between the kidnapper and the one being tortured.  And we struggled to find that.  We didn’t feel that Claude made any choices to lure Tristan over to being submissive, rather just kept pushing and pushing at Tristan’s boundaries.  WE just didn’t feel the connection between these 2 men, and subsequently we truly didn’t feel the push/pull struggle of Tristan wanting and hating Claude at the same time. Claude had no charm and we didn’t feel lulled by his attempts to woo Tristan into doing what he wanted.

-       -   The End – yes, we know that this is a series, but ugh, the end just snuck up on us and we were left feeling wha???????

Dark Silence is the first in The Bound Subject series.  It is and interesting read, dark, yes, but doesn’t push too many bounds.  The one reason that we read Dark Romance is the idea of Redemption that however bad things are there is hope.  But, with it being a continuing book series we didn’t get the satisfaction of a wrap of other the story and it has kind left us feeling a bit wounded.   

Review of Clickbait by Garett Groves

by Garett Groves

3 Stars

A frustrated journalist. An abrasive internet sensation. Desire even enemies can’t deny.
 
Jeff Taylor is a cable news juggernaut with an ax to grind—particularly with the media industry that made him. After a tough interview with Kile Avery, online troll extraordinaire, Jeff melts down on air and tells the world just what he thinks of the media machine.
 
He’s swiftly fired and blacklisted by every major media organization… except one. NewSpin—the same fluff media company that Jeff most blames for the current state of journalism—wants to hire him to do a piece on Avery.
 
“Avery’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I’d sooner live under a bridge than work with him.”

Kile Avery is a viral blogger who thinks love and traditional media are dead. He’s built an online empire quickly by posting scathing video takedowns. So when Kile’s approached by NewSpin for a documentary series on his meteoric rise to fame, he can’t say no… even if Jeff Taylor is the reporter assigned to the project.
 
“When we started this, I wanted to destroy Taylor. Now I just want to sleep with him.”
 
The two have nothing in common save for their mutual hatred, but they quickly discover they share real chemistry on and off camera—chemistry neither of them wants to admit to, privately or publicly.
 
Can they set aside their differences and come together to make a ratings hit? Or is their story destined to become yet another clickbait headline?

We had so many high hopes for Clickbait, but man, we struggled to finish this story.  We usually really enjoy everything by Garett Groves, but Clickbait just didn’t come together for us.

So let us start with what we liked!  Kyle and Jeff are enemies, they essentially hate each other, and what the pother stand for and believes in.  There is a sexual tension that is palpable; they truly are enemies-to-lovers.  There are some serious sparks between Kyle and Jeff and it one of the few reasons that we kept us from not finishing this book.  Along with them being enemies, there is also a huge age difference between them, and that whole opposites attract is super sexy.

Even with all these good tropes, there is so much that made us scratch our head.  Honestly, the story doesn’t make sense.  Jeff is fired from his million dollar job, and has to take the first available position – really?  Kyle runs an anti-love blog, we think, didn’t really understand the blog idea.  And really the point of the project that they were working on together; following Kyle’s rise to fame, but they only went to his office once? There was confusion about what day it was, and on and on.  As you can see we were confused for most the story.  Clickbait is about 375 pages, not the longest book we have read, but it just felt like it dragged, and got caught up around other characters, mis-communication and co-workers plotting.  It was too much.

We so wanted to love this book; May-December, enemies-to-friends, opposites attract, how could we not?  But there was so much going on in this book that it left us feeling confused and unfortunately not invested in the actual romance.

Review of Backfire by David-Mathew Barnes

by David-Matthew Barnes

3 stars

Tired of keeping their love a secret in their small Southern hometown, Evan and Cameron plan to runaway together, unaware that someone is determined to stop them - no matter what it takes.

So so so so so so SO good!  This is our first KM Neuhold book and we can’t quite figure out why! Rescue Me takes the horror of being at the wrong place and the wrong time and shows the reader what it takes to move past a traumatic evet and hopefully fall in love.

29 pages.  That is all this little novella takes to tell the story of Even and Cameron, and living in a bigoted small town.  This is an interesting story, and although we enjoyed the concept, had a few issues, even in 29 pages. 

The POV changes back and forth, over and over, and we were confused who was who.  With such a short story it might have been better to keep to one narrator.  The other is the flashbacks, so many flashbacks. How they met, the first time they kisses, studying together.  I get what David-Mathew Barnes is trying to accomplish with the flashbacks, but it didn’t really work and added to our confusion. 

But it is 29 pages, the best 29 pages we have read?  Maybe not but still has enough story to keep you reading from the first words.