Christie Rich

I received a free copy of this novel in exchange for my honest review. This is an awesome beginning to a great series! Rayla escapes her over protective aunt to go away to college. She finds out more about herself than she's bargained for as she has drop dead gorgeous men vying for her affections. The story gets even deeper as she realizes she might have to fight her attraction to them in order to prevent being trapped forever. I love a good fae story, and this is certainly one of them. This story was truly unique, one you can easily get absorbed into once you get over the, “I'm attracted to everyone” thing. The book gets far more interesting during the second half which sets up a great stage for further additions to the series.… (plus d'informations)

The author Christie Rich was offering her book Genesis, book three in the Elemental Enmity series, through the Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Fanatics R2R group for an honest review. I wanted to read Genesis, but not having read book two, Dark Matter I was hesitant to review. But Christie kindly gave me Dark Matter as well, thank you.

The following unbiased review covers the story Dark Matter which is book two in the Elemental Enmity series.



Summary :

This story is told in first person through Rayla's eyes.

Dark Matter begins shortly after the first book Five ends. Luke and Zach have gone to the Island where the Order is believed to have their operations. The Order’s intention is to breed the first male Elemental. Rayla is left behind in Faeresia at the palace where she is bombarded by compulsions from countless male Fae as they attempt to influence her into choosing them as her bond mate. Overwhelmed, she spends most of her time in her room to avoid the Fae or thinking of ways to escape.

The story mostly centers on Rayla’s time at the castle and at the Island. There are short episodes where Rayla is outside the castle and what happens then.


Review:

I enjoyed this book much more than the first one and didn’t want to put it down. I think it’s because Rayla was more in control of herself and fought more against the compulsions than in the first book. Rayla is a lot less annoying than she was in Five; I remember getting whiplash from Rayla’s changing moods and attractions in that book. Now Rayla knows how to block the compulsions of lesser lords better and is discovering new powers. Rayla is still stumbling around in the dark because no one has given her much information about anything. All everyone has wanted to do is control her. The Fae, the Fae Lords, Ainessa, the Order. It’s all a power game. Often Rayla has to take a leap of faith and deal with events when she gets to them, especially when it comes to opportunities to escape the Fae. Rayla is stronger in Dark Matter, but still impulsive. Her snap decisions are not always well thought out especially when she is given what appears to be good advice. However, unlucky as she is with some of her choices, she also seems to have luck on her side at the same time helping her get out of her bad choices.

The pace of the story seems to be faster than in the first book; I sort of remember the first book dragging quite a bit. In this story I enjoyed the scenes of Rayla more at the palace, escaping or the borderlands. The slowest part of the book for me was when Rayla was on the Island.

New characters are introduced in this story as are old characters with larger roles. One of the new characters is Heath, a lower lord of the Fire element who intends to challenge Finn for the right to bond with Rayla. Heath is a major player in this story. We don’t see much of Zach or Luke because they are on the island. Tabitha the ‘seer Fae’ that showed up in the first story is back but with a larger role. In this book she isn’t as wild and crazy as she first appeared. Cassie, Rayla’s friend is living in Faeresia along with Rayla and Cassie is still in love with Finn, the Lord of Fire. We meet Roger from the first book again and we find out some interesting information about him. Cassie’s father puts in an appearance and he is nothing like what Rayla thought he was. Ainessa, Zach’s sister also shows up again. She appears to be a major villain in this series. Gibbit the troll also appears again and has a larger role. Rayla has a difficult time trying to figure out if he’s helping her or not. His actions seem questionable and conflicted.

I’m not sure how I feel about the new character Heath. He never gives Rayla an answer to her questions, unless they are incomplete or evasive. He treats her like the other Fae lords, expecting her to do as she’s told and he also uses compulsions on Rayla which infuriates her. Heath also appears to be rather conniving in his manipulations and attempts to get what he wants. He is extremely persistent in his pursuit of Rayla, but seems to want to be with her but then at times avoids her.

One of my favorite scenes of the book was with Rayla and the hellhound, Cerebus. I won’t tell you what, but I enjoyed it and I wonder if Cerebus will show up again later in one of the next books.

Now the next scene I’m going to put behind a spoiler tag because there’s something about it that I noticed didn’t quite work for me. Don’t click on the spoiler link if you don’t want to know what happens during certain events in the book.



At one point Rayla is captured by Ainessa and the Order. They wish to impregnate Rayla hoping she will give birth to a male Elemental. They first try to artificially inseminate Rayla. Now this part is important, Rayla is not married to the sperm donor, Roger, the man that Ainessa and the Order have picked out to be Rayla’s husband. But when Rayla doesn’t get pregnant, they will have Roger impregnate her the good old-fashioned way. But get this, they have to be married first!

Sorry, but I couldn’t help but laugh. Ainessa and the Order want Rayla pregnant, but it makes no sense at all that Rayla has to be married before her and Roger have sex. We all know that isn’t necessary in order to get pregnant, and the Order had no qualms about the artificial insemination, having knocked Rayla out to inseminate her. We already know that morally they aren’t nice people so they technically raped Rayla on the table to inseminate her against her will, so having Rayla marry Roger is way too farfetched. They just want Rayla pregnant. Forcing Rayla to get married is one more struggling step they have to deal with. It doesn’t make logical sense in the plot to have Rayla and Roger get married. The only reason that Rayla has to get married is because this is one of the author’s messages. A woman must remain a virgin until she marries and she is not to have sex unless she is married. This was a message in Five and also in this book. Cassie, Rayla’s friend, is also a virgin on her wedding day. I think if the author wants her message to work well with the plot, then the marriage issue should have had an explanation behind it to fit into the story better. As it is, it sticks out like a sore thumb because there’s really no reason for Rayla and Roger to get married except that it’s the author’s message and she wanted to get it into the book. The marriage scene just hangs there floating around with no reasonable explanation for why it happened or why it’s necessary. This particular wedding scene could have been completely removed and Roger could have just taken Rayla away to the cottage. The author’s message was much better conveyed and fit in well during the scene when Rayla and Cassie are talking after Cassie’s marriage. On the Island it just makes the Order appear silly to perform a wedding.





There are some formatting problems dealing with the fonts. The paragraphs would switch from serif to sans-serif and back again. This also caused the fonts sizes to change because of the difference in font type.

In the end I liked Dark Matter more than Five. This book was more exciting and Rayla was less annoying. The Island scenes in this story weren’t as interesting for me, but that’s probably just my taste. Formatting problems were pretty much limited to the serif and sans-serif changes which I would think could be easily fixed. In the end I give Dark Matter, 4 stars.


… (plus d'informations)

I was given this book to read by the author through the Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Fanatics R2R group for an honest review, thank you.



Genesis takes up immediately where the last book left off. We are swept right back into the ceremony that will link Rayla to five Fae Lords. In this book, we are given a better look at the personalities of the Fae Lords who are vying for Rayla’s affections and the Realms they govern. We are also introduced to some new characters that I found very intriguing.

Positives:

Rayla Meets the Angel - Very cool. He said he wasn’t an angel. I wonder if he’s a Nephilim? The next curious thought is: I wonder if he’s the one who is Rayla’s father. She is supposedly part Fae, but I’m wondering if Rayla is more than that?

Rayla’s Interaction with the Borderland Creatures – I love that Rayla goes against what the Fae believe in. At the beginning she’s fearful of the creatures, she works past that and helps them. Maybe it’s all by accident but she does.

Rayla’s Positive Personality Traits – There were some positive personality traits I liked about Rayla when she chose to use them. First she stood up for people who couldn’t stand up for themselves because of their circumstances. She chose to see past the rumors and ‘legends’ that surrounded a person or creature. The other trait is that she defended her family. Sometimes she could be forced to be courageous only because she couldn’t get out of a situation, she had to face it.

Naming the Borderland Creatures – This was a great idea by the author. I love the concept that by giving names to the creatures, they no longer are terrifying, but can once again become who they were truly meant to be.

Mysteries – The author is doing a good job of weaving in more mysteries and slowly revealing the answers to those mysteries throughout the books.

Lords and Their Realms – I liked learning more about the Lords and their Realms. Finally we get some answers about their personalities and how they live. Although a couple of their personalities are questionable since we find out some important information about their behavior later on. I just wonder how long the ‘influence’ on these two lords has really been going on.


Negatives:

Rayla’s personality is annoying. I’d thought she’d grown a bit in the last book, but she seems to have regressed to her whiny self again in this book. She complains about almost everything if she doesn’t get her way. I really dislike female protagonists that are drama llamas. When Rayla makes a decision, she’ll back track and say later that it was a stupid idea. She has no faith in her own decisions nor accepts the consequences of those decisions. She doesn’t think about her actions and what will happen when she does. Her main emotions are whiny and angry, with confused, antagonistic, confrontational and impulsive thrown in. Confrontational and impulsive are not always good attributes and I’m having a hard time accepting that they are being passed off in this book as being acceptable. I was having a difficult time continuing to read this book because of Rayla’s personality. She was really getting on my nerves.

What I also dislike about Rayla is how she does things like answer the door in her sheer nightgown and not possibly know that a Fae would find it tempting. After all her time with the Fae, Rayla can’t be that blind to her effect on them. I find situations like this that the author created for Rayla in order to create some sexual tension to be an obvious manipulation and it’s annoying. It’s the ‘I’m so naïve, I don’t know what to do or who to pick!” about Rayla’s contrived behavior, that was only one of many continued annoyances.

Rayla’s feelings of lust for the Fae Lords came across well, but I really didn’t get a true feeling of her love for Ethan. When Ethan shows her his soul, she pretty much just says “I felt his soul, every part of him.” That’s it. That is a pivotal moment and it’s something that Rayla has been wanting for so long, and the author didn’t give us a really intense powerful moment. I felt cheated by the lack of depth in the scene. Love is very important in this whole series, only it’s not very well conveyed. Lust and desire are well conveyed, but not Love, which I find odd since Love, Virginity and Marriage are such big messages throughout these books.

The next paragraph is a bit of a spoiler so don’t read if you don’t want to know what happens.

In the previous book Rayla marries Roger. In Genesis, she then marries Heath. I want to know when Rayla either annulled her marriage to Roger or divorced him before marrying Heath. Her marriage to Heath would not have been valid if she was still married to Robert. Then later Rayla is bonded/married to Zach while still married to both Roger and Heath. It’s even more confusing to me when the author’s message is to remain a virgin until marriage or bonded, but then seems to skip over a very important factor of not being married/bonded to more than one person at a time in the books. If bonding is considered different from marriage, then that could be used as an excuse for the Faes being married and bonded. But to be married at the same time as getting married again? This must have been a plot hole unless it’s explained away in the next book. But Rayla doesn’t seem to be highly concerned that she’s married to two men at the same time and then bonded to another. She pretty much shrugs it off that she doesn’t like it rather than raise a stink about it like she does so many other things throughout the series. The only thing she does say is that “Roger did not count.” But just because she thinks it doesn’t, doesn’t make her marriage to Roger any less legal. She can’t just brush it away just because it suits her and the author. None of this scenario the author wrote makes sense. I don’t look favorably upon a story when an author conveniently brushes aside an event because it doesn’t suit them later on in the story. The situation should be dealt with in a realistic manner if a scenario is written in at all.

The author’s creation and revealing of new mysteries is, I believe, her strong point in Genesis. The next best scenarios were the ones where we learn more about the Fae Lords and their Realms. Unfortunately, I found Rayla to be overwhelmingly annoying in this book. So much so, that I had to put the book aside repeatedly because she was doing my head in. Rayla doesn’t seem to have really grown except in her abilities to wield her powers and even then she doesn’t use them all that often. Most of the time she is helpless to use them or they have no effect on who she is trying to use them on. So this story is still pretty much about an ordinary girl who has no real handle on her powers and has five guys lusting after her and her untapped powers. It’s the third book and I would have really liked to have read something more decisive happen with Rayla’s maturity and her powers, but that didn’t happen.

I’m pretty disappointed with the non-development of Rayla but I like the other events that happened in the story. Because of the weakness of Rayla, the story fell to two stars, but because of the rest of the situations, I give the story 3.5 stars. I don’t think I can give this book four stars, since the main character was too darn annoying and there was no real character development for Rayla that wasn’t already mentioned in the previous two books. So I end up rounding this down to 3 stars because GR doesn’t give half stars.


… (plus d'informations)

I received this book from the author through ARR, thank you.



Where to start? I guess I have to start with saying I have very mixed feelings about this book. I wanted to like this book a lot because of the concept behind it. The flaw in the story was the poor execution of the characters which I will go into more a bit later. This book is told in first person through Rayla, a college freshman’s eyes.

Cover: Edit: This review was for the old cover. The current cover is the girl in the purple dress and is much better looking. I think more could have been done with the cover. The idea of the symbol for the Elements is good, but the image is a bit dull. In my mind, elements are powerful, take fire for instance. Where are the bright, roaring colors of fire? Even wind, could be the sky, where are the bright colors of the sky? And then there is the green and browns of the earth. The cover needs to have richer and brighter colors.

Storyline: I like the story line for the book. The idea of the Fae, the Order and the Elementals are a great idea. The idea that the Fae could be compared to fallen Angels is also interesting. I do have a problem with the amount of religious overtones that start to appear the further the story goes a long, however. The pace of the book was fine; I didn’t find it too slow or too rushed.

Now the characters:

Rayla is the virginal female who is ‘special’ to the point of having five gorgeous Fae Lords competing to bond with her. This is the cliché storyline of young adult romance novels. The female lead ends up falling for two gorgeous men, in this case Fae, and can’t make her mind up. But let me give a guess. She’ll choose Zach (who she couldn’t guess was Ammon once Luke told her the name) because Zach’s the most powerful and mysterious. Rayla may even turn out to be Fae like the troll said, which means she will likely be immortal too and then Zach and Rayla can live happily ever after.

I didn’t mind Rayla so much in the beginning, but my dislike for her started to grow as soon as she met Zach, the mysterious ‘man’ she couldn’t resist even though she knew nothing about him. She didn’t trust him, but she would throw herself into his arms any time she could. Rayla also seemed pretty clueless. She couldn’t guess that Zach was a Fae Lord and it was pretty obvious right away. When there are clueless lead female characters like this, I get very exasperated with them and it takes away my pleasure in reading the story.

One thing that annoyed me was the way Rayla acted toward Zach. It pretty much went like this, “How could you?!” Rayla is angry. Zach makes a joke. Rayla likes him again and can’t stay away. Zach lies to her. She’s angry. He tells her he didn’t technically lie, rather omitted. She forgives him. This happened over and over and over again in the story. Rayla’s moods toward Zach changed per sentence depending on what Zach said. It appeared that no matter what Zach said, she’d be a little mad then, “No big deal.” I was getting whiplash with how often Rayla changed her mood. Rayla is weak and easily swayed by whomever she is with. The little resistance she gives in pushing away from choosing a partner doesn’t convince me that she is strong, only that she doesn’t want anyone making up her mind for her in the matter. Predictably Rayla falls quickly “in love” with Luke near the end of the book because he’s so open and honest, and there is the second romantic male love interest. I wanted to roll my eyes.

As to the other characters, everyone falls “in love” with each other too quickly. I would say it’s more ‘lust’ on the female’s part since the Fae lords are manipulating their feelings, and more ‘power lust’ on the part of the Fae Lords because they wanted to enhance their own power. For the Fae, the female humans are nothing more than tools. And the females once bonded, look what happened to Jessica, were pathetic. I think the message to teenage girls that a woman is not complete and satisfied without joining with a male is a poor one to give in a female YA romance story. What I disliked, and many other reviewers have already posted, is the way so many of the characters fell ‘in love’ with each other so fast. It was very unrealistic.

Cassie: I’m going to cut Cassie a break. I think she was treating Rayla poorly because she was very terrified of having to be institutionalized again. Her times being institutionalized were probably painful and traumatic for a child, so Cassie was going to deny everything to Rayla. I liked that she finally admitted that she could see the Fae and troll because it seemed to make Cassie’s character stronger. She wasn’t afraid any longer of being called crazy. I did have a problem with her wanting desperately to have a boyfriend though. Once again the author gave the message that women need to have a boyfriend, that there can’t be a strong single female character in the story. I was surprised that Cassie didn’t seem to be very upset when she told the story to Rayla about her dad being the head of the Order. I would have thought she would have been devastated but I didn’t get that feeling at all.

The Fae Lords: I really dislike the lack of information that Zach and the other Lords give Rayla, no one informs her unless they decide it’s necessary, even though she is the most important Element. Another poor message to young women, that they shouldn’t worry their pretty little heads over the serious stuff, the men will take care of it. Just like Rayla’s aunt, the idea is to keep Rayla clueless. How could Rayla’s aunt really think that leaving someone with no information is protecting them? The more information someone has, the more prepared they are to confront obstacles.

Favorite Characters: Styx and Sister Mary Margaret. Styx was cool and funny. Styx was a great character to add to the story. It would be interesting to find out about his herd that is being kept captive, and by what, and how Rayla fits into everything. Sister Mary Margaret was self-assured and knew that the more information that Rayla had, the better off she would be. I wonder what happened to her.

The romance aspect is typical YA female romance. There is nothing unique about it even though it’s between Fae and an Elemental. The history of the Fae, the Order and the Elementals are what make this story unique. I just wish that the characters were fleshed out fuller and better executed, especially Rayla. The book was easy to read and it kept my attention but because of the characters, I can only give this book three stars.


… (plus d'informations)