Jennifer Cody

Very annoying. There is an _excellent_ story here - the different cultures, different species, Law finding his family (not his blood kin, he's had lots of those), the adventure, the solutions... But every time the story began to form, as the characters became more than a bundle of quirks and started developing into individuals and building relationships, the book wandered off into dick jokes or long, explicit sex scenes. There was relationship building in the sex scenes but not much. And show more really, an entire species, one of the protagonists' species, defined mostly by being good at sex? And fighting, and drinking, but mostly sex. Sorry, this isn't "crack fantasy" to me, this is boring. The author seems to find sex a lot funnier than I do, the adult equivalent of kids' toilet humor. The most annoying thing is that the story was good enough I'd probably read more, anyway. I'd love to see a "clean" version of this (drawn curtain), but I'm not sure it could be written. show less

Ok. I wanted to like this because the idea of a series based on Tarot cards... with such great cover art... really appealed to me.

Sadly, I thought this was pretty bad. First of all, the language completely threw me off. Worlds like "Badonkadonk" seemed completely out of place when dealing with magical creatures...and people who I assumed were in their late 20s and 30s.

And poor Dec. Every time he enters a scene there's a sentence about his ass using a wide variety of annoying adjectives. I show more mean, frankly, I'm not even sure what kind of a character he is because there's very little remarked upon but his body shape. At once point his boss hints that he may have hired Dec because of his body shape.

As for the other character Thoren, he's so busy throwing cards on the floor to make Dec bend over in front of him... that I'm not sure what kind of character he is either.

Then the sentence that literally made me toss the book in the recycling bin: "Thoren smirks, running his hand down his body from his chesticles to his cum gutters." Not only is this demeaning language, it doesn't even fit! I work at a library and a couple of my colleagues read the offending sentence after retrieving the book from the recycling bin - and they agreed. It's just a series of immature and demeaning language choices. (And they replaced the book in the recycling bin. We can't even put this on our free cart.)

Now, I'm no prude. Hell, I used to teach sex trade workers how to put condoms on using only their mouths. But "chesticles" and "cum gutters"? Come the hell on. Not all throw away language belongs in books. You can look at my reads to see that I'm not shrinking violet when it comes to sexual content. I didn't even get to any actual sex in the book - I couldn't get past the language.

Anyway. That's my review. I bailed at page 112

It's a real shame because I thought this was going to be a good read. Sadly, I don't think I'll be reading any further in this series of books which is probably unfair to the upcoming authors but there you have it.

Usually, I try to come up with a group of people I could recommend a book to even if it's not something the appeals to me... but ... nah. show less

The first few chapters were annoying, way too much sex. There was a sort of story happening, but mostly it was sex scenes vaguely stitched together. Then after a while the story amped up and the sex reduced to a much more tolerable level - and it turned into a very rich story. There are quite a few gross-out scenes, of sex and blood and throwing up. The whole Edovard thing is weird, though the meta at the end of that was deeply amusing. The repetition of how much each of them is willing to show more do to save the others - the vengeance they're willing to wreak - gets a bit much. It was good, but not as good as the first one...I will be reading the next ones, though. show less

Test - can Jennifer Cody read a book that's not drowned in sex scenes? Barbarian Orc was a very good story obscured by way too much sex; let's try this one. Ok, this one works (for me); there are sex scenes, and many dick jokes/mentions, but the focus is on building the relationship. Relationships, rather - between the protagonists, certainly, but also the many weird family members that accrue. Bellamy was nice, in that aspect, so they weren't all from Fox's side. Fascinating world - and show more neat trick to avoid infodumping. show less