Book Review: Blood Ties: The Turning by Jennifer Armantrout

in a nutshell: 4 out of 10. if so much.

it's first-person narrative and i *hate* first-person narratives. it's so easy to get wrong - i usually end up feeling like i'm trapped inside of the narrator's skull and banging on the brain-bone trying to get out. i have no picture of the main characters except the heroine is predictably blonde and stunning; the hero is predictably handsome and broody as a battery hen; and the villain is apparently an animated Mr Potato Head since he keeps taking his victim's eyes and using them to replace the one he lost.

the heroine, Carrie Ames, is supposed to be a doctor but except for referring to feeling angst-driven about achieving her MD, you don't get the sense that she actually IS one. there are none of the little details you get in a J D Robb book that tells you the author *knows* what it means to be a doctor (or at least has done some actual research). she's got or she had parents that were not into imagination and were pretty anal about keeping things "real". or something. i dunno. don't care.

as a character, damn, that chick *whines*! everybody hates her, everybody's against her. she goes to confront her fear in a morgue and ends up bat-snack. she has a painless transition that was apparently painful or something. it's all very general and wierd - i felt like i was being rushed along to the Good Parts, like the author was saying "okay, this happened and that happened and then there's this other bit, but get this - check this out!" and whammo - major battle with lots of gore or yet another sex scene. she's supposed to be cool, dedicated, and driven - but she comes off as a self-absorbed whinger. the one situation in emerg that's described in the book, she ends up out in the hallway blowing chunks - and she's supposed to have been a doctor for a full eight months by then!?

the sex is unnecessarily detailed and, in more than one instance, completely gratuitous. i mean, if i wanted sex THAT graphic, i could always have it delivered to my house in a plain brown wrapper. why, by all that's holy, do i need to have an excruciatingly detailed, millimeter-by-millimeter, of the hero's boy bits!? i don't! she could've left it at "my new sire came with a serious upgrade" - that was funny! that was good! that told me all i needed to know! and then she wrecked it with dimensions and so on. i think the author cribbed her sex scenes out of the slimier issues of hustler or was taking notes from some 70s porn on late-night cable or something.

the violence is graphic, too, but no worse than any of my Mack Bolan or Anne Rice books. nothing new there.

not at all thrilled about the use of juveniles. it's not done in a way that makes it clear the author is flouting taboos or is making a statement about how horrible such practices are. there's no personal engagement with the victims so they become just... yeah - "cattle". not even people - just backdrop.

the characters are also from stock - biker vampire bad guys, evil witch (of course she's sultry and red-headed) bad guy, plucky street rat sidekick, yadda.

oh, and of course the good guys who may or may not be good now - they're the council that wants to voluntarily eradicate their own species and of course they look totally normal. one even wears a twinset and pearls. that makes as much sense as those lunatics who think people who have children are destroying the planet and we should voluntarily extinguish ourselves as a species by never having children (whatever happened to "mod-er-ation", people!?).

okay, the bit about the hearts, that was a cool twist.

bottom line: i took the first two books in the series out of the library. i finished the first book and - this is VERY rare for me - was totally not interested in reading the second. i skimmed over the back cover and thought "oh. more of the same" and decided to watch my PVR recording of The Dog Whisperer instead.