Featured books

Featured Websites

.: Reader Views Kids

Provides book reviews, by kids, for kids

.: Inside Scoop Live

Provides live author interviews for podcast

.: Authors Access

Provides interviews with experts in the publishing industry

.: Midwest Book Review

Provides post-publication reviews

.: Reader Views

Provides book reviews and author publicity

.: LR Communication Design

Provides professional website design and development

.: Blogging Authors

Provides a place where writers and readers meet

.: Review The Book

Provides 5 books reviews on 10 different sites

.: Best Sellers World

Provides book reviews and author features

.: Feathered Quill Book Reviews

Provides book reviews and author features

reviews

My Forbidden Desire

Carolyn Jewel
Hachette Book Group (2009)
ISBN 9780446178242
Reviewed by Sally Gorsuch for Rebecca's Reads (6/09)


If you enjoy stories about witches, demons, fiends and the frailness of humans, you might like this one.  The basic premise is that the main character, Alexandrine Marit, is a human with very faint witch-like powers she can't control.  The powers are more like slight premonitions that she is not completely sure what she is supposed to do with or exactly how she is supposed to interpret these random feelings.  Add to that, a talisman she wears around her neck.  Enter Xia, a friend, who has been ordered to protect her even though he hates all humans.
 
This whole storyline could have been much more interesting if the author hadn't spent half of every page saying how much the main character, Alexandrine, had the hots for the good looking fiend Xia.  The author got that particular point across, but apparently she felt it had to be repeated over and over and over - to the point of putting the book down because it was getting to be very annoying.  If you take out all the repetitive “she wants him and he wants her,” this could have been condensed down into a very good short story.

Once you can get past that major continuous distraction, I felt like the author's writing was actually well done.  Her descriptions and the action sequences were to picture as you read along.  The basic idea is very interesting; how would you handle it if you had a small premonition power that you couldn't quite handle, no one to explain it to you, and you were a little scared of it.  Then suddenly a good looking fiend shows up, who hates you without even knowing you simply because you are a human, to protect you from a whole other world that you were not even aware really existed, except as scary stories told to children.  Throw in finding out your own father is a magical bad guy and, of course, you and your protector finally get together (that was obviously going to happen) and you have an ending with no surprises.

.: Blog