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1 of 1 members found this review helpful.My God, this is horrible!
“I travel a lot for work via car and am always looking for a decent audiobook to keep me awake. Since my local library has 1/2 of it's audiobook collection still in cassette tapes, I'm limited to the CD offerings but chose this as it seem mildly interesting, or at least, interesting enough to entertain me for a drive.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-29.
Wrong.
Let me start by saying that I have NO familiarity with this series whatsoever - and thank goodness for that! The first CD (out of 11) was pretty much some wild sexual BDSM fantasy that is no where near fantastical at all and the poor woman who they selected to read the book is just awful. Her different voices for the characters seem off but it's her voice that highlights just how poor the author's prose is - it's severely overwritten, which just adds to the agony of how bad the entire storyline is. Everytime I heard the narrator read "______' I made it a question." OF COURSE IT'S A FREAKING QUESTION - did the author really need to WRITE that down? As if, while reading the book, a question mark at the end of the sentence wouldn't have been a large enough clue. The characters dialogue is overly dramatic when it doesn't need to be, the choice of wording is so, so bad,...it's just all bad!
Of course, it was all I had and now I'm so close to the end, I will finish listening just to see how everything pans out but it will be a little painful.” -
3 of 3 members found this review helpful.
Awful
“What happened to Anita Blake? Where did this lame little person come from? Nothing interesting happened in this book and a once independent person is the sex toy for anyone. Lots and lots of pitiful dialogue. I liked the first books of this series, but this book is on the level of an over-sexed pre-teen. Bye Anita Blake. Too bad.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-23.
I tried to listen to this book on CD -as much as I could stand - the reader is as bad as the writing.
This book is truly awful.” -
2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
Pretty Women in Reverse...with Werewolves...
“Wow. And Ick.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-16.
In this book, Hamilton skips the vampire slaying entirely and focuses purely on Anita's love life. There is only one rather brief monster fighting scene at the end, and they never slay a Big Bad. Oddly, this makes the book slightly better than some of her recent books, because the author's heart hasn't really been in the evil slaying stories for a while. They also seem to be introducing a little bit of a plot arc, and the eroticism fits with my tastes a little bit more than some books.
The start struck me as a kind of gender switched "Pretty Women" story with werewolves and a pregnancy scare. I sort of liked bringing the pregnancy thing into a "sex magic" setting....it would seem to be one of the natural risks. I actually liked the musings on monogamy and Anita's thoughts on the abortion issue at the beginning. These were somewhat marred when the author felt the need to put dogmatic "my body my choice" pro choice rhetoric into the mouths of the male characters. Come on, I realize the author wanted to make it clear she wasn't pro-life, but would those lines really come out of the mouths of traumatized strippers in a moment of crisis?
That's kind of one of the problems with this book. The sexual dynamics have moved on to a place that is kind of creepy and exploitive. Apparently a couple of the stripper boyfriends were abused as children. One was a child prostitute. Actually a realistic explanation for his behavior. I understand some people who were sexually abused respond by sexualizing all relationships. However, someone like that is the last person you should put in your harem, or practice bondage sex with. For the bored middle age man bondage and subservience is a game, for the molested ex-prostitute it is something else entirely. If Nathaniel lived the life he is described as living, Anita's harem is the last place he should be. And I suspect a guy starved for love who's ex-girlfriend was forced to have an abortion by her pimp might not react calmly to another abortion. Really, if for some weird, supernatural reason you are compelled to have sex with lots of people to get psychic energy, pick some bored middle age men who'll enjoy it, and who enter into the arrangement freely. Most of Anita's lovers were abused as kids, are lycanthropes who are part of packs Anita is in some way in charge of, or are Jean-Claud's property. Based on the way lycanthropes and vampires are supposed to work in this series, one can question whether any of these people really had the option of saying no.
A callous disregard for the feelings of men is a problem in this book. If Anita just gave up the monogamy and said "Wee, free love!" I'd be more OK with it. However, she brings out weird monogamous sentiments at the most inappropriate times. How can someone with a multi-species harem really object when an occasional lover flirts with other women? She explained it by saying it made her look bad, but we just got through a scene where she was told she had hurt Jean-Claud's reputation...and the next scene she has sex with two more random guys. How come she gets a harem and Jean-Claud has to be monogamous?
Really, why shouldn't Jason's father be upset at the course his life is taking? You send a kid to college, and he...becomes a stripper. Gets a disease through sex (lycanthropy). Becomes a blood donor for a vampire (seems sort of dangerous). Becomes part of some weird necromancer's harem. Rather a dangerous lifestyle, I think. Richard is also portrayed badly, but I kind of feel for him. Imagine being psychically linked to your ex...while your ex is sleeping with your boss (Jean-Claud) and subordinate (Jason) and maybe aborting your baby...
Really, things have reached a point where I kind of think all of her boyfriends should dump her.
” -
0 of 4 members found this review helpful.
I love ALL of LKH's books.
“Skin Trade (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Book 17)
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-10.
I love all of LKH's books, but truthfully the first few books bored me. When Anita got to be a stonger woman and felt more responsible to her people ie... her leopards,the wolves, and even the Rats. Like she says they are her family, I really started enjoying the books a whole lot better. I love having a strong female character. I have read and reread all of her books I have even read most of them 15 to 20 times” -
1 of 1 members found this review helpful.
Wish I'd read some of these reviews
“It's good to know some people think this series was once good. . . I'm pretty skeptical. I "listened" to it -- I never would have kept reading. I went on vacation with some books burned to my iPod. If I purchased it, I would have enjoyed throwing it in a dumpster. I feel like it's almost cartoonishly bad. Gives me very little faith in the reading public that she's written 16 of these. . . Who is the audience? ”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-04.
