Full Moon Rising, Keri Arthur

[beccaelizabeth]

Was looking for urban fantasy. By my standards, did not find it. Main character in this, according to cover blurb, is 'half vampire, half werewolf, all trouble'. As is her sex life. The werewolf half makes her need sex, or she goes mad and tries to eat people. She goes around having a lot of sex and saying she shouldn't be judged for it, but it's on the basis that she's not human and shouldn't be judged by human standards, which is a weird spin. The vampire half thus far just makes her super special sparkly strong. Sex happens every few pages and the whole plot is about sex. And if you have any triggers about sex you probably don't want to read this. The main plot is about her abusive boyfriend who has been drugging and raping her regularly for a year and she's only just noticed. She thought she just couldn't handle champagne. So there's bits with describing him drugging her unconscious and her waking up enjoying it. Then once she realises he's being evil there's even more rape, without drugs, and her enjoying it. And the drugs were so he could force her to get pregnant. Evil and creepy. Only now they're going to give her superpowers. Which is not a side effect fertility drugs tend to have. There's also a lot of violence mixed with the sex, and sometimes just plain old violence with blood and slicing people to pieces. I was particularly unimpressed with the bit where she cuts people's legs off and then says it's worse than just killing them. Er, no, dead is worst. It's also weird and annoying because there's only one other female character in the entire book - even counting bit parts, as far as I could tell - and they get killed. Off screen. Sort of in passing. It's like fridging, but also like they couldn't be bothered with that bit. So really there's just this one woman in the center of the story, having a lot of sex, with half the other characters being her boyfriends. There's also her brother, her brother's boyfriend, and her boss. I'd be yaay about presence of queer character, except it's contributing to absence of women, and they were somewhat unsatisfying as characters. Extreme lack of women. Plus all the characters are weirdly samey because the book is so busy with the sex scenes nobody gets a personality. ... her brother has no sex scenes, he just lacks personality on his own. So it's all sort of empty by the end. And I'm not left wondering what happens next to these people even a tiny little bit.

I've been reading fanfic and have identified the yearning/having cycle that I'm looking for. This book has entirely too much having to ever build up a good yearning. Even though she talks about looking for her soul mate, she mostly seems to be looking for more sex. And getting it. A lot.

Also sometimes getting in fights, and... er, mostly not winning come to think. There was quite a lot of being chained up. And then having to be rescued or escape. That accounted for most of the action in the book really. Repeated capture and escape.

So I guess there's a market for that.

Book is going back to the library. I am not getting the next one out. Bored.