One Good Book Deserves Another

Genre: SciFi Romance, Time Travel
Series: N/A
Rating: 2 Stars
Formats: Kindle


Since Annie Simpson's husband died a year ago, she's been living a lonely, boring life. At first it helped her heal, but now her days seem empty and lacking purpose. One night, however, Annie enters her kitchen and is stunned and scared to see a large, gorgeous, naked man standing there. Before she can flee or call the police, James convinces her he's not going to hurt her. When Annie finds out he has come back to the past to flee the group intent on killing him, Annie thinks he's insane...at first. Then she starts to believe. Horrified by the grim picture of the future that James has painted, one of slavery and butchery, she offers to help. She's drawn to James in a way she's never felt before, not even with her husband, and when James is near her, she can't help but feel alive. When the full scope of the truth comes out, however, the question of life becomes a hotly contested topic, and Annie's previous blind faith may result in the death of everything she holds dear.

Never Love a Stranger is a difficult book for me to review. I didn't like it, but I can appreciate what the author accomplished and what she was trying to accomplish. I think the concept of the book was good. It was an interesting plot and Fisher's vision for the future was pretty comprehensive and impressive. There were a lot of layers and deceptions, ill intents and heroic actions that blended together in an odd, yet compelling way. I can understand how some readers would find some of the revelations in this book to be disturbing, even though I'm not one of them. Yes, there were things in this book that were difficult to accept and not something you'd find in a traditional romance novel, but I found those aspects to add a sense of gritty realism to the motivations of the characters.

That realism was appreciated, especially as I found it so lacking in other aspects. I had significant issues with character action and dialogue from the very first page. I felt neither were very believable through the whole of the book, and I can't imagine anyone with a modicum of self preservation acting as Annie did when she first saw James. The dialogue between the characters was often heavy-handed, trite, or cliched, and very little of it felt organic to the characters or the situations they found themselves in. The characters themselves, especially James, were inconsistent throughout and James' personality and vernacular fluctuated between believable for his backstory and situation to bordering on absurd. Any time a character who has supposedly traveled back in time from over three hundred years into our future, and has been shown to be perplexed by the identity and function of something as pedestrian as a bath towel may lose a lot of cred as future-guy when he starts uttering such modern colloquialisms as "Go to hell."

I appreciated the author's intent, but this book is also beleaguered by a large schism that splits the book into two parts and turns a slightly common but basically harmless time traveler romance into a quagmire of scifi frustration and implausibility. I acknowledge that my preferences in reading lie elsewhere, so I don't want to appear hypercritical of issues that wouldn't please me if they'd been penned by Asimov himself, but I can't help but feel that the material and plot were larger than Fisher's ability to translate the ideas to the page. I hope that doesn't sound like harsh criticism, because I love that Fisher tried. I just don't think that there are many authors who can do it effectively and believably to begin with - time travel is literally littered with paradox and confusion, and defining an entire futuristic landscape in the span of half a book is a mighty task.

Had Fisher's ambition for this story stopped at overcoming the...er...intrinsic differences...between Annie and James, I think I would have been okay with it, but all told, it was too big a concept and handled with too little sophistication to be enjoyable for me.

Genre: Paranormal Romance
Series: Guardians of Eternity, Book 6
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Formats: Mass Market Paperback, Kindle


I admit, I believe the Guardians of Eternity series hasn't quite reached the level of exceptional paranormal romance (yet). I think it's a very solid and satisfying paranormal romance series - with a slight issue here and there. There doesn't seem to be a lot that differentiates and individualizes the lead romantic pairing in each book in either character development or the formula of the evolving romance, and I believe that is what separates the solid and satisfying from the exceptional. I've long been a huge fan of paranormal romance novels and series, though, so I have a pretty high tolerance for that lack of differentiation and individualization. It's a common malady in the paranormal romance series sub-genre. That being said, there are some series, like Christine Feehan's Carpathians, that I stopped reading a long time ago because the formula got to be too much, the characters too interchangeable, the women too often somehow lesser than their mates. I'm taking a break (and have been since Acheron) from Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark Hunter series for similar reasons.

I'm still reading Alexandra Ivy's Guardians of Eternity series. Why? Because it's still giving me exactly what I like in my paranormal romance novels. An uber-alpha male and a strong, independent female that lock heads, fangs, fists and wits, humor, and charm to create an explosive chemistry that works for me quite nicely. There's also the characters from previous novels that get tossed into the mix, and I love seeing the continuing development there.

In Beyond the Darkness, in particular, Ivy has gone one step further, and seems to have added another dimension to the series arc, hinting at something coming that may draw together all the characters we've met so far and pit them against one decidedly evil threat to all demonkind. It was a tantalizing and tricky thing to do, because it provided the series a cohesion and depth previously unattained. Not to mention, this particular book is the first of the series to provide a male pureblood werewolf as top dog (so to speak) instead of another of the leeches (as Salvatore would call them), so we got to get a much better - though still too brief for me - view of the difference between the vampire culture and the declining werewolf culture. The differences were handled nicely, even if I wish I'd seen a few more of them to make them really stand out. When combined with my appreciation for the series and the characters to date, it raised my enjoyment of this book and the series even higher.

Not to mention that Alexandra Ivy has managed to take a character I have disliked since he was introduced, Salvatore Giuliani, and made me not only like him (a little), but understand him better and appreciate his responsibilities and the demands of saving a race from extinction. That stunned me, because I said in my review of Darkness Unleashed I was not looking forward to a book about Giuliani. Up until this point I've found him arrogant, manipulative, and at turns boorish and sadistic in how he treated his curs and females. There was a lot of ground to cover to get me to like him, and while he still isn't my favorite character, I admit, I did warm to him. I had no such trouble with Harley. I found her just as competent, intelligent, and strong as all of Ivy's female leads (except maybe Abby). I enjoyed very much her calling Giuliani to task again and again for his arrogance and I appreciated her willful resistance to bowing to the alpha's power. I thought the plot supporting her backstory was well defined and explained everything about her character. In fact, I think this is the first book in the series in which I completely bought into exactly why the male and female lead are exactly the way they are and was very impressed by how deftly the author blended the pair without diminishing either individual.

Salvatore has been searching for the four genetically altered pureblood cubs for thirty years, and has finally stumbled across the third (after the first fell in love and mated to the vampire Anasso, Styx, and the second proved to be barren...though she also fell under the spell of the leech Jagr, and Salvatore had no chance there). Imagine his surprise when he realizes that the third of the female cubs, the delicate in appearance but anything but delicate in reality Harley, is not only within his grasp, but is also his true mate - a bond he thought lost to the mysteries of the past for his species, as it had been a hundred years or more since the last pureblood true mating. Harley has been living cloistered from the werewolves, kept hidden by Caine, the upstart cur who's been using Harley's blood to try to find his personal holy grail - turning curs into purebloods and being the messiah of the species. She's been lied to her entire life - about the death of her sisters at the claws of the Were King himself, in particular, so meeting up with him on a moonlit night sends terror through her heart and violence through her soul. Neither know, nor soon realize, that each are a pawn in a far deadlier game, and ancient evil and a long dead nemesis rise against them both. If they fall, they lose more than their lives, they lose the entirety of the battered and beleaguered were species.

Excellent novel, and a fun, fast read. It didn't have quite the same amount of humor that some of the others in the series do, and I truly missed the sardonic acceptance that each of the vampires showed when they realized their mates weren't going to make life easy on them. Salvatore was less humorous, more intense that way - but in his defense, he had some truly charming and adorable moments towards the end that I won't go into further to prevent spoilers. They were endearing, though. Beyond the Darkness is also the first in the series that has set me on the edge of my seat for the next - and it's exactly because of the added dimension I mentioned as well as the plot thread with Caine. Dastardly Ivy keeps making her books better and better. I very much enjoyed it.