Grade: C-

I like reviewing anthologies. They’re quick, too short to get boring, and I don’t have to wade through pesky exposition to get to the meat of the story (sometimes). Besides, if the story sucks, you can just move on to the next one. It’s almost like… a box of chocolates. If you’re lucky, the one you pick up would have a cherry in the center; if you’re not so lucky, it’s maggots. This particular anthology is so-so. Only Kenyon’s piece was remotely readable, but only in a “ah, old friend, we meet again” kind of way. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. The one by L.A. Banks stirred my interest, but there was so much triflin’ shit going on at once, that I didn’t fully enjoy it. The other two were utter crap, the last of which I couldn’t even finish. Man, when Kenyon’s predictable fare is the best contribution in an anthology, the other writers should just… I don’t know, throw themselves off a bridge and hope to get eaten by a shark. Heh. I just cracked myself up.

The first of the bunch is a Were-Hunter story by Sherrilyn Kenyon starring Dante the Katagarian (an animal that can turn into a human) and Pandora the Arcadian (a human that can turn into an animal). For the uninitiated, this story would probably be too wacky and weird to make sense. For one thing (and stay with me here), Pandora is from the FUTURE and she is kidnapped by a group of Katagarians from the past and brought to their time to be a broodmare because Katagarian females make lousy wives. This is a common practice among their kind. Pandora escapes from them, but is unable to return to her own time because she doesn’t know how to do it. Her sister tells her that the only person who can help her is Acheron (don’t you know he can fix everything?) so Pandora goes to a nerd convention that Acheron frequents every year, in hopes that she can talk to him and beg for sanctuary. Instead she finds Dante who is at the con with his horny brothers. Unfortunately for Pandora, she is “in heat” and hard pressed to control herself from fucking any were-panther in the vicinity. Whoo-hoo, were-panther orgy! Wrong. Since this is a romance and not an Anita Blake book, only Pandora and Dante get to have sex and the rest of the suckers have to wait for their own storylines. They run into some trouble with the Katagarians who initially kidnapped Pandora, but like I said, Acheron can fix everything. Dante has the prerequisite issues and baggage of a paranormal romance hero and Pandora is adequately lost, clingy, and wide-eyed. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The next one by Amanda Ashley was so bad that… I can’t even come up with a hyperbole here to describe how bad it is. In fact, it’s so bad that I can’t believe people still write shit like this. It’s just bad. Period. Our heroine… damn, I can’t even remember her name. Shaniqua? Shakira? Ah, hell, I’m too lazy to look it up. Anyway, Shakira is your typical red-haired maiden with big boobs and big, blue eyes, who enjoys gasping, whimpering, quivering, and shivering, much like one of Paris Hilton’s Chihuahuas. Reyes, the dark, brooding warrior hero, who kidnaps her because her dad killed his dad, is your typical he-man who can only do two things: brood and sport an enormous erection for Shakira. At her, he intends to kill Shakira for revenge, but the simpering, brain-dead idiot somehow melts his resolve (by letting him stick his tongue down her throat) and he decides to marry her, instead. She runs away, he chases her, he turns into a werewolf and gets injured in a fight with another werewolf (Ashley doesn’t ever reveal who it is), she stitches his wounds… you know the drill. This is a run of the mill story with a bimbo heroine and a boring hero. You’d think Ashley would have done something with the werewolf thing, but it just appears like something she inserted into the story so that it would be considered “paranormal”. It’s an after thought, nothing more. This just isn’t one of those stories where the heroine loves the beast. Pity.

The third story by L.A. Banks is the most interesting one, but there’s so much mythology to plod through that it should have been a full-length novel. This is actually a prequel to her vampire-huntress series and I was fascinated enough by the story to hunt down the rest of the series. The hero, Jake “The Nose” Ryder, is a biker who just wants to explore the open road Easy Rider style, but meets up with Tara, a half black, half Cherokee chickie on her way to her grandma’s house to find a cure for what is ailing her. I’m not going to say anymore because I don’t want to spoil it for you, but Jake and Tara are really good together, especially after Jake decides to help Tara get to her grandma’s house. Jake is a bad boy type who falls hard for Tara and Tara, who sometimes can get a little nutzoid for my taste, is a good match for him. There is a hot, hot scene where Jake washes Tara’s hair in the tub and this story is worth reading for that scene alone. It’s too bad that the set-up bogged down the development of Jake and Tara’s relationship, but once you get past all the exposition, it’s actually a pretty good read. It also ends quite unusually for a romance… I didn’t expect it at all.

The last one by Lori Handeland… I don’t know, I didn’t even finish it. I was two pages into it when words like “skinwalker” was tossed at my poor head and I couldn’t go through with it. And that was before the author started going on about Navajo-this and Navajo-that. I began experiencing traumatic flashbacks of Cassie Edwards’ novels. Plus the hero was a weirdo that popped out of nowhere… I’m puzzled that I was able to get through a horrid Amanda Ashley story, but not this, and Handeland’s writing is a thousand times better than Ashley’s. Weird, huh? But yeah, I didn’t bother reading the rest of it.

Even though most of this anthology made me wince like I was chewing on tinfoil, I’m still glad that I read it because I wouldn’t have discovered L.A. Banks otherwise. I’ve been looking for a good series to follow and Vampire Huntress looks awesome. The Sherrilyn Kenyon piece was surprisingly pleasant even though it’s a rethread of almost everything I’ve ever read by her and Amanda Ashley… should just stop writing. Forever. As for Lori Handeland, I’ll give her another shot. It’s not her fault that I was too annoyed to finish the rest of this book. Any Handeland fans out there? What do you recommend?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: C, Romance: Paranormal, Romance: Anthology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.