Thursday, February 23, 2017

The end of the affair with Anita Blake...a new post for a new blog

The Creative Services Trading Group has a new blog discussing topics of interest to writers and readers. I had the honor of providing the first post—about how my love of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series has faded over the course of 25 books. There’s an “elephant in the living room” of that series that no one else seems to have noticed. When a series you love goes wrong...

Friday, February 17, 2017

Bachelor Dragon Blues Cover & a Runaway Dragonette Review.

More dragons on reality TV. This time it's Bachelor Dragon, Jevrath, a Dragon Planet war hero being pressured to put his social life on planet-wide television and his inconvenient attraction to Beth, a serious-minded human who works for a fertility clinic.

This cover made me smile, Bachelor Dragon Blues.

Also this week brought a wonderful review from Crystal's Many Reviewers

What a cute and fun story! The king of Dragon Planet is in love with reality TV from Earth and decided that his daughter would participate in the first Journey to Love show. Verity, on the other hand, doesn’t want to have anything to do with mating because that would mean she’d be stuck in a nest taking care of eggs for the rest of her life. That isn’t in her plans but she tried to runaway once before with disastrous results. She has no choice but to go along with her father’s and uncle’s plans, watching for a way to escape.

Ryan is a human on Earth and loves everything dragon related. He and his best friend have created an everything dragon library, collecting everything they can dragon related. They stumble upon the footage of the Journey to Love TV show and Ryan is immediately smitten with Verity, the “actress”. Soon he finds out that there is more to the universe than he thought when Verity lands in his basement. Verity’s uncle finds her quickly but Ryan goes back with them, incorporated in the competition to win Verity’s hand.

The poor dragonettes!! The more I read this story the deeper I understood Verity’s fear and how terribly the female dragons were treated. In the end, the only full dragon I liked was Stravos. I would definitely read a story about him. In the beginning, I had hopes there were good dragons in the story. There was this one poor dragon at the beginning, Runeroth who made me laugh out loud and feel terribly sorry for him. He wasn’t so standup as the story went on. Then there was the crazy out of control Thidrad who I disliked from the beginning but at the end there was a glimpse of something that made me believe that everything I thought I knew about him was wrong.

The show and the producer, Tracy, I had this love/hate thing going on with both. I could understand where Tracy was coming from as a producer and the threats coming from the crown she had to contend with, but I had a hard time understanding how she could be a party to what Verity’s father wanted to do. There was this one detail about the nose ring that was vile and with all the examples of the mistreatment of the dragonettes I half expected something would be done to help them in the end. Perhaps that detail will be a part of the overall plot arc for this series.

All in all, this was a cute read. The fantasy take on a reality TV show was surprisingly fun to read. Though there were slightly darker elements with the treatment of the female dragons, the story didn’t become burdened by them, somehow staying on the lighter side, having some downright humorous moments. The cover really doesn’t so this story justice. It’s also a series that I would be interested in seeing were it goes. I have a couple of dragons in mind that I would love to see get HEAs.