L. R. Braden
Author of A Drop of Magic
Series
Works by L. R. Braden
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Gender
- female
- Places of residence
- Colorado, USA
- Short biography
- L.R. Braden is the bestselling author of the Magicsmith urban fantasy series, the standalone novel Demon Riding Shotgun, and several works of short fiction. Her writing has won the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Sci-fi/Fantasy, the First Horizon Award for debut authors, and the Imadjinn Award for Best Urban Fantasy (twice). She was also honored to be a finalist for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers 2021 Writer of the Year award. She and her family live in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, where she spends her time writing, playing, enjoying the outdoors, and weaving metal into intricate chain mail jewelry that she sells in her Etsy shop, WimsiDesign.
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Reviews
An improvement over the first book I feel.
The enhanced grimness and stakes of the series help, and I like how her relationships and storylines don't always wrap up neatly. It's nice to see how she grows and become stronger to meet the challenges she faces.
That said, keeping the note is stand-out stupid.
Looking forward to how the world building develops, it has a good foundation right now.
I hope the piece she made when she was feeling the sorrow of Aiden's death comes back into play at some point.… (more)
The enhanced grimness and stakes of the series help, and I like how her relationships and storylines don't always wrap up neatly. It's nice to see how she grows and become stronger to meet the challenges she faces.
That said, keeping the note is stand-out stupid.
Looking forward to how the world building develops, it has a good foundation right now.
I hope the piece she made when she was feeling the sorrow of Aiden's death comes back into play at some point.… (more)
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 8
- Members
- 43
- Popularity
- #352,016
- Rating
- 3.2
- Reviews
- 2
- ISBNs
- 14
First, it starts off with pretty bad pacing issues where it just doesn't manage to move at all and when it finally gets past endlessly circular inner dialogue and picks up the pace, and the plot moved to faerie, things fall apart very quickly.
This is a very minor spoiler at roughly 40% of the book.
As you know, these faeries can supposedly not outright lie and they use this as a defense even though they are master manipulators and can basically say whatever they want and then deny ever having said it because they could've meant it some other absurd way that is obviously bs.
So, I get that this reasoning can be used to trap mortals. This is the way of faeries after all.
But they also use it against each other and it gets accepted as valid by other faeries even though everyone obviously knows that they can basically just lie if they are a little careful in how they word things.
Enter our MC. The King forces her to mingle on a big event at court without adequate protection or schooling full of Faerie purists. He knows that they want to kill all halfers which includes the MC.
Someone claims the MC insulted her and demands a duel to the death and everyone has to believe the faerie because she can not lie but the MC has no recourse because she can lie so there is no way for her to defend herself. All this is apparently above board in faerie.
It seems like this is supposed to be some clever attack on the MC.
What this means, in reality, is that the wise and centuries-old king is an utter moron.
He knew all that. And yet he sent his granddaughter to die under his own watch. Of course, it doesn't actually play out this way but that is in no part due to the King intervening. He is just frowning and a little upset about it.
And the MC even realizes this but then excuses it to herself by claiming she is just trying to shift the blame from herself. How moronic and self-flagellating can a person even be before she starts amputating her own body parts to feed the poor with? You probably need to hide all sharp objects in her vicinity to make sure she doesn't suddenly throw herself onto any of them as a martyr.
The king is retarded and the MC is equally retarded. I guess it makes sense, they share the same DNA after all. I guess when God made it rain brains, they all had umbrellas open.
Basically, the author utterly failed to pull of faerie trickery in a believable fashion but made it a major plot point nonetheless.
What essentially happens is that the author uses this supposed faerie trickery as a plot device when she needs it but it doesn't exist if it would be inconvenient for the plot.
This kind of cheap and lazy plot device infuriates me and is unacceptable in any literature above an average fan-fiction imo.
But while this alone infuriated me enough to write a whole paragraph about it it's by far not the last or the worst flaw in this book. But the rest is much easier to put into words.
The MC is TSTL to a mind-boggling degree.… (more)