Dark Prince by Christine Feehan (audio version)
WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS BOOK AND WHY DO PEOPLE LIKE IT?
I mean, hello. It’s been a while. In the time since I last posted, I’ve been busy, but still reading. Middlesex was fantastic, as you could have predicted. I finally got into A Week to be Wicked, and I’m sorry about those mean things I said before - it is turning out to be a completely wonderful book and I adore it.
I also started a new job with an hour-each-way driving commute. So. I strolled down to my local library (I literally live close enough to stroll down there, isn’t that great) and demanded the longest, trashiest-looking audiobook they had. Behold, DARK PRINCE, the author’s cut, in 16 (!!!) CD’s.
On the way home today, I was listening to CD 11. And girl, I am fucking DONE. Done done done done done with this whole ridiculous book and this series and this author and I am just going to up and quit. SBTB has a pretty good takedown of why these books can get repetitive and annoying, but I have one question: WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP CALLING THEM ADDICTIVE AND READ 18954879 BOOKS BEFORE QUITTING? You don’t have to do this to yourselves! There’s good paranormal romance series out there! Read those instead!
Here’s the plot. I will describe it briefly, you can just pretend I spent 1200 pages telling you about it because this shit is LONG:
Raven Whitney is a psychic girl who helps detectives find serial killers (in an unofficial capacity - this part is not really explained well. Do they know she’s psychic? Why do they know to come to her in the first place? It’s just as well this plot device is abandoned halfway through, because you never get any juicy procedural information). She just finished tracking a particularly nasty killer and is in the Carpathian mountains to recuperate.
…
Yes, her relaxing dream vacation is apparently in the Carpathian mountains. Forget Bali or Tahiti or St. Lucia, Raven Whitney wants complete and total isolation, which means that she’ll fork over her hard-earned money (Do they even pay her to catch serial killers? This is of course never mentioned.) and head straight into the middle of vampire country. Except she has no interest in vampire myths. I really can’t commend her enough on her vacation choice here.
Anyways, she meets Mikhail, who is a big sexy Dark Prince and he sees her and knows she is his “lifemate” and he begins to feel emotions and see in color again. I’m not kidding, that actually happens.
Mikhail and Raven hook it up, despite Raven having 100 existential crises, Mikhail using his magical vampire* juju to send her to sleep 100 times, and Mikhail using his magical vampire dick to sex her up a lot more times. You guys, I actually got BORED with the constant sex. I don’t even know myself anymore.
*technically, Mikhail is not actually a vampire, but if it looks like a vampire and drinks blood like a vampire and is overprotective and broody and exchanges blood during sex like a vampire in a paranormal romance novel, it’s a vampire.
Raven is a total Bellaand even though she nominally opposes Mikhail and stands up for herself, she is weak and boring. She also has long legs despite being impossible small, and of course she has “full breasts” and a tiny waist. Those things are described a lot. Her family, her interests besides vacationing in the Carpathians and sexing vampires, her preferences, and her history are not described at all. At all. Her past is dismissed with “She had no real family back in the States” so … she might as well just hang out with a vampire prince?
It could just be that the audiobook made the repetitiveness of the book more evident, or perhaps I didn’t really like the reader (I didn’t), but today something in me snapped and I decided that if I heard “But Raven … you are my lifemate” one more time I was going to run my car off the road.
Read it if Twilight wasn’t sexy enough, or if Jeaniene Frost’s Night Huntress series wasn’t boring enough.
Are we talking about terrible romance? Because this book is terrible. It’s part of a series on 7 sisters with magical fairy powers or some shit. Our heroine, Elle, gets kidnapped by a slimy Greek billionaire, (those damn Greeks!) who holds her captive on his castle island and does seriously fucked-up things to her. Like, rape is not the worst thing he does, OK? That’s how fucked-up this situation is.
THANKFULLY, her soulmate, Jackson, (with whom she’s had a falling out prior to whole kidnapping scene,) is a former Special Ops type, so he gets the boys back together for One Final Mission and they bust her out of the castle. YAY!
Except, not yay, because all Elle wants to do is go to her magic home with her magic sisters and heal her damaged psyche and probably just stay in bed for a good long while, but Jackson is like, “fuck that! I know what’s best for you!” and takes her to his place instead, completely ignoring the wishes of this victim of unspeakable crimes. Her family totally goes along with this, because HE SAYS HE KNOWS BEST, YOU GUYS!
So, like, a DAY later, they decide the best way to deal with her PTSD is with sex. YES! SEX WILL SOLVE EVERYTHING! Except it doesn’t! It’s a really bad idea- the first time! Then it’s all literal bearskin rugs and candles and shit.
I don’t know, a bunch of other shit happens involving a priest who is molesting young teens and the bad Greek keeps attacking Elle mentally, but they somehow get their dog to mentally attack him, only it causes real, physical damage and there’s some talking dolphins or some shit and the end is so ridiculous I can’t even.
This book is so bad I can’t bring myself to give it to Goodwill because I don’t want to inflict it on an unsuspecting reader.
The contemporary Special Ops hero! I’m convinced it’s what an author does when they want to give a hero special powers but don’t want to make him a vampire.
