Grade: F

Bam,

I am officially saying goodbye to Kensington’s Aphrodisia line. I have switched my subscription to Brava, already received my first books and DAMN, I’m so happy. But I couldn’t leave Aphrodisia without giving you a taste of what I read. Of course, you may want to light my hair on fire and put it out with a hammer after offering this up for your palette.

My last book from Aphrodisia was Give Me More by P.J. Mellor. Note that I didn’t choose this book… Aphrodisia had a super-fucktastic mix up and I didn’t select the last four books that were sent to me. Of the four books, the first was an anthology which was resold without being cracked due to one author being on my AVOID AT ALL COSTS list, the second was okay but I hated the previous book in the series and the third was such a waste of paper that I though of putting it through the shredder. Which brings me to the fourth:

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Grade: F

It took me two weeks to finish reading this book. Two weeks. For me, that’s an eternity because I timed myself once and I can read four hundred pages in two hours. Granted, the book was Narcissus in Chains by Laurell K. Hamilton, but that’s still pretty good, right? My point is, I’m a fast reader and it took me two weeks to finish this book because I would find myself staring at the same page for minutes at a time, reading the same paragraph over and over again, and not recognizing it as the same paragraph because they were all so dry and boring. I’d set it down, force myself to pick it back up a few days later because I have never left a book unread, then toss it over my shoulder after about 10 pages, only to pick it back up again. It was a vicious cycle. None of the stories pulled me in except for Bujold’s short story and only because it was about a giant warrior alien woman falling in love with a wee little human-sized man, but I was only mildly amused at best. Most of the time, I had no idea what was going on because a couple of the stories are a part of a series with an already established canon or mythos, so all the “in jokes” were pretty much lost on me. While reading this book, I felt like the idiot who attended a Halloween party all decked out and shit, but no one else was wearing a costume.
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