Elliott Kay

Whew! This book was just sitting on my KU account since 2016! Let this be a huge lesson to authors that some of us readers do take a bit of time to get to your work on KU. Just because we take nearly 2 years, it doesn't mean there is anything inherently wrong about your work. Sometimes real life responsibilities simply take a lot of free time from you.

That aside, if you are looking for a puritannical and highly philosophical story about the inherent dangers of the spiritual implications when show more an Average Joe becomes bonded by forbidden magic with a horny succubus and an even hornier bad mouthed angel, you will be highly disappointed. And if you wanted to read this book to your small kids, well, um, this book might not be rated PG 13. No point in hacking up all of the saucy good parts of the novel!

If you don't mind lots of lusty sex scenes between very willing and very hormonal participants where some of them are supernatural beings with lots of humor, then this is the read for you! Alex is just an all around nice 19 year old guy who wants to impress two cute Goth chicks at his community college Photography class. His infallible plan to gain their attention? Visit the local cemetery somewhere in Seattle after dark without asking for permission. What could possibly go wrong?

Wait, are those two women screaming in agony in the nearby chapel? Alex rushes to the rescue and realizes some sicko dressed in priest robes and two goons have mutilated and chained up two attractive (and very naked) women. Presuming the women were going to be gang raped and the likelihood of the cops being too late to save them, Alex grabs some pepper mace from his backpack and knocks the goons unconscious. Unfortunately, one of them accidentally splashes a cup with the womens' blood on his face during the rescue, and after watching the very pissed off brunette chick burn the culprits to ashes, the women confess to Alex that they aren't human! The couth blonde named Rachel is a low ranking messenger angel, whereas the rather irate brunette named Lorelei is a succubus sex demon. The priest mutilated their bodies and Alex accidentally became bonded to both of them seemingly for life during their rescue. Lorelei pretty much has nowhere to go, so Rachel proposes that he takes her to his home while she sorts things out with the angel council.

And then, this is where all of the fun starts. Now, I don't want to spoil the fun twists and turns that this story takes. Lorelei is both manipulative and attentive towards her new and very benevolent master, whereas Alex starts to shed away his innate shyness and a small sparkle of love seems to erupt between them both. Of course, explaining to your mom and friends that you are dating a 1000 year old sex demon that looks 10 years older than you might seem a bit.... complicated. While the countless sex scenes were very fun to read, I do think the first half of the book tried to overdo them a bit too much, and didn't particularly find the fling with Jocelyn to bring anything of importance to the plot. I did find the other friends to be well-rounded and the mischief Lorelei does to the people Alex cares about to be very funny (imagine seeing your mom looking 10 years younger and hotter all of the sudden while you are only trying to eat your Fruit Loops and you get a boner! Whoa!).

The final battle scene of the book was really great and it wrapped things up very well. Again, I would not like to spoil things. I do think the book could have been 20-30 pages shorter, but otherwise, it was an insanely fun read and I reccomended it to one of my friends. I'll likely have to buy it in paperback as a gift. I will indeed read the sequels sometime and award this book 4 1/2 stars. show less

Whew! This book was just sitting on my KU account since 2016! Let this be a huge lesson to authors that some of us readers do take a bit of time to get to your work on KU. Just because we take nearly 2 years, it doesn't mean there is anything inherently wrong about your work. Sometimes real life responsibilities simply take a lot of free time from you.

That aside, if you are looking for a puritannical and highly philosophical story about the inherent dangers of the spiritual implications when show more an Average Joe becomes bonded by forbidden magic with a horny succubus and an even hornier bad mouthed angel, you will be highly disappointed. And if you wanted to read this book to your small kids, well, um, this book might not be rated PG 13. No point in hacking up all of the saucy good parts of the novel!

If you don't mind lots of lusty sex scenes between very willing and very hormonal participants where some of them are supernatural beings with lots of humor, then this is the read for you! Alex is just an all around nice 19 year old guy who wants to impress two cute Goth chicks at his community college Photography class. His infallible plan to gain their attention? Visit the local cemetery somewhere in Seattle after dark without asking for permission. What could possibly go wrong?

Wait, are those two women screaming in agony in the nearby chapel? Alex rushes to the rescue and realizes some sicko dressed in priest robes and two goons have mutilated and chained up two attractive (and very naked) women. Presuming the women were going to be gang raped and the likelihood of the cops being too late to save them, Alex grabs some pepper mace from his backpack and knocks the goons unconscious. Unfortunately, one of them accidentally splashes a cup with the womens' blood on his face during the rescue, and after watching the very pissed off brunette chick burn the culprits to ashes, the women confess to Alex that they aren't human! The couth blonde named Rachel is a low ranking messenger angel, whereas the rather irate brunette named Lorelei is a succubus sex demon. The priest mutilated their bodies and Alex accidentally became bonded to both of them seemingly for life during their rescue. Lorelei pretty much has nowhere to go, so Rachel proposes that he takes her to his home while she sorts things out with the angel council.

And then, this is where all of the fun starts. Now, I don't want to spoil the fun twists and turns that this story takes. Lorelei is both manipulative and attentive towards her new and very benevolent master, whereas Alex starts to shed away his innate shyness and a small sparkle of love seems to erupt between them both. Of course, explaining to your mom and friends that you are dating a 1000 year old sex demon that looks 10 years older than you might seem a bit.... complicated. While the countless sex scenes were very fun to read, I do think the first half of the book tried to overdo them a bit too much, and didn't particularly find the fling with Jocelyn to bring anything of importance to the plot. I did find the other friends to be well-rounded and the mischief Lorelei does to the people Alex cares about to be very funny (imagine seeing your mom looking 10 years younger and hotter all of the sudden while you are only trying to eat your Fruit Loops and you get a boner! Whoa!).

The final battle scene of the book was really great and it wrapped things up very well. Again, I would not like to spoil things. I do think the book could have been 20-30 pages shorter, but otherwise, it was an insanely fun read and I reccomended it to one of my friends. I'll likely have to buy it in paperback as a gift. I will indeed read the sequels sometime and award this book 4 1/2 stars. show less

Free review copy, which is great because I wouldn’t have taken a chance on this military sf otherwise. Tanner Malone is Kip from Have Space Suit, Will Travel without the paternalism (and, sadly, without Peewee): he is intelligent, dutiful, hard-working, kind, etc. etc., and he is also too poor for college. (Part of the plot involves a future of far-flung colonies in which corporations make you pay for your own education so you start off hugely in debt.) He enlists in the Archangel space show more navy, and for half the book he trains while we get some others’ POV intertwined between his chapters, including a guy who accepts the recruiting pitch of a pirate crew. Then Tanner starts to see action, and it is bloody and leaves him devastated, but he also gets to be a hero on a large scale. This is power fantasy done right, with believable good guys who are very far from saints (except Tanner) and bad guys who aren’t bad guys in their own minds. Looks like the next book might involve more of the politics behind the space pirates and corporate oligarchs, and I’m looking forward to it. show less

Laughing because I just read a book with a fair bit of head-hopping, and here is another one!

Aaaand, DNF at 7%, for that very reason but x1000. This is awful, when the premise had such promise. Plus, the snarky angel left, and that removed the dynamic I enjoyed the most. We started off in Alex's head entirely, but ever after the reader has NO IDEA who each sentence belongs to. It's disruptive and destroys immersion and connection to a character. Terrible, lazy habit, head-hopping. If you show more write, this is a great example of why you avoid this particular beginner mistake.

I don't care if this is, perhaps, just how the author writes. I care about my own experience and thus won't read anything else by Elliot Kay. show less