Customer Reviews

Borrowed Flesh

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Vanessa is a witch with eternal life. Her battle scars, however, necessitate regular virgin sacrifices to keep her skin fresh and healthy. If she doesn't do this she starts to breakdown, literally. All is well, considering, until her quiet life as a tarot card reader/psychic counselor is disrupted by a rash of missing husbands. A friend of her latest sacrifice starts sniffing around as well. All this sounds like good thriller material, but it is wasted in a haze of poorly sketched characters and fuzzy narrative. I had a hard telling telling the wives apart - they all seemed alike, perhaps it was intentional on some artistic level, for Ashley (the sacrifice's on-the-prowl-and-searching-for-clues best friend) is fully developed. The story unfolds with dream logic, but this hampers any emotional connection with the events and don't get me started on the pages wasted focusing on one wife's dabbling with a New Age group and mulling over whether or not to drink her own urine (a meaningless subplot that goes nowhere). Events proceeding those in the novel are mentioned, making me think that this is a sequel or continuing 'series'. If it is, I have little interest in reading any others. A real disappointment.

The recipe for retaining a youthful appearance includes a steaming bath of virgin blood, bone, hair, and flesh with a dash of herbs, spices, and an animal sacrifice. The cost is nominal, your soul.

The premise of Borrowed Flesh is interesting and the plot is intricate. However, Giron fails to follow the various plots to a satisfying conclusion. Her prose is rich and multi-layered, but her characters' motivations are weak and sketchy, leaving too many questions unanswered. The climactic scene is rushed and leaves the reader unsatisfied. The idea that there is insufficient energy in the universe to support more than one immortal is ludicrous.

Borrowed Flesh takes an interesting and promising premise and turns it into a hurried mélange of impressions more like a fever dream, than a full-bodied horror classic. The bones are intact, but Giron needs to borrow more than flesh to make this story immortal.

My first gripe is that the back cover blurb does NOT accurately describe what the books really about. The murdering of young girls, as said on the blurb, is actually not the focal point of the story. This in itself isn't a sin, though, and I usually never hold this against a book. The authors don't write them anyway, marketing does.

The plot is different in some ways, and I applaud the writer for this, but it just didn't hold any pizzazz. It was a bit formulaic, unexciting, and when the two 'baddies' came face to face, it was a weak battle without much spirit behind it.

The book read like a light read, instead of anything deep, and I had trouble taking much of it seriously. The character of Vanessa was stale and cardboardish, Ashleys' didn't make sense - inconsistencies were made on the personalities of the characters involved just to suit the plot and keep it moving in a convenient direction. A good thing the author DID do with Vanessa was give her multiple personalities, making an interesting internal conflict to read about.

The writing style is direct and to the point, although I felt some of the emphasis was overdone. For example, when Vanessa is always haunted by being alone, the point can be gotten and felt without it repeated every chapter. I give brownie points to the author for granting her characters with emotion, but it just didn’t seem leveled out to me.

While this book holds many flaws, it did keep me reading. I didn't want to quit out of boredom, so it didn't fail on all levels. Not a book I would recommend to most.

I'm not finished reading BORROWED FLESH,but at this point, I'm
wondering if I should bother...what bothers me the most is the the title. It is misleading. She's not going to give any flesh back to these people, is she? This book should be called USED FLESH or STOLEN FLESH, not BORROWED FLESH.

All right, you have seen my rating so if you like this book just don't even bother reading further. If you don't know anything about this, maybe I can save you some time. Please remember that time is something that, without massive advances in science, you can never get back.
What the "cuss" was this author thinking? I really tried to get into this book. I really did because I love horror but this was just terrible all around. It had a horrible plot that I didn't even understand in the first place. The book kind of lost me when one of the main characters kept trying and failing to drink her own pee because of some ritual thing. The writing was nothing special and the entire story was not relateable to anyone. I don't even think that an author writing this would enjoy or relate to it. The only thing that I can say for Giron is that maybe she was trying to be unique and different. It is definitely unique since I have never read another book like it, but being different isn't always a good thing. Most people might find you rather unique and different if you took a dump in Santa Clause's lap in some odd protest of Christianity but they probably wouldn't like your actions. Now, I respect all books and I am not saying that this book is crap (or dump for the sensitive types) but I thought it was a bad effort and one of the worst things I've ever read right up there with Stranger by Simon Clark and Black Butterflies by John Shirley. I still want to try House of Pain because I own that one too, but judging by the reviews it got, it will be more time wasted that I will never get back. Don't make the same mistake I made and will probably make again. Unless you want to experience everything horror, and I mean everything, avoid this one.

The back cover blurb of Borrowed Flesh is misleading and had me pretty disappointed. Basically, it says the book is about a witch who kills virgins and bathes in their blood in order to gain eternal youth. This only happens twice (providing the only gore and horror) and is not the focal point of the novel. Here's what the back cover blurb should say:

Vanessa is a witch with eternal life who makes a living reading tarot cards. When several of the town's women residents come to her for help with their straying husbands, she has a feeling there is something else keeping the men away. When she tries to solve the mystery she realizes she's not the only witch in town.

Borrowed Flesh should have been marketed as a paranormal romance because the novel focuses Vanessa's budding relationship with David. The parts where she bathes in virgin blood could have been easily cut out because it's not essential to the plot and are the only parts that could be considered horror.

The characters aren't very deep and I didn't find myself caring about what happens to them. Vanessa is portrayed as a "good" witch, yet she kills innocent virgins to obtain something as frivolous as looking young, which made me dislike her. She's the heroine of the novel and Giron tries to make her seem caring, but I couldn't get over the fact that she murders young women and bathes in their blood just to look pretty. Also, some characters are mentioned over and over without explaining them. Sophie constantly appears in Vanessa's dreams but there's no explanation of who she is or why she is significant to Vanessa's life. And Vanessa's ex Demian is described a bit, but there's no clarification of why he and Vanessa broke up or what their relationship was like, Giron just says how Vanessa will always love him over and over.

Although I didn't care for the characters, the novel held my interest until the end because of Giron's direct writing style and my curiosity of why the husbands went missing. Which brings me to the part of the novel which I hated the most: the anticlimactic ending. I got to the end just to find a measly five pages dedicated to the fight between our heroine, Vanessa, and the "bad" witch. And the reason behind her holding the men hostage was so ridiculous that it made me upset I wasted my time on the rest of the book just to reach this crazy conclusion.

I like Giron's writing style and will read more of her work, but I would recommend skipping this one.

I bought this and then read the online reviews, which weren't very kind...and I almost didn't read it. Then I grabbed it to read on a train from Dover to New York and found that it was a satisfying, straightforward horror with very nice language and believable charactes. I'll read more of her stuff, 'cause I see some real talent here.

There's a prequel to this book?? I don't know how the author made it past the first one through her publisher. This is my first review simply because this is one of the worst, if not THE worst, book I have ever read. I thought this a poor book in many aspects, though I did read it to the end. The whole plot was laughable with it's little subplots & "inner turmoil" of Vanessa, the fight at the end was too easy and very anti-climatic, the book in general was poorly written, and knowledge on the subject matter was poor. Witches are cliched in here for the 1700s, as it's one of those "witches are evil and make spells out of virgins blood" books. Please save yourself the time and money and read a well-written and worthwhile book instead.

I dont know why this is getting unfavorable reviews from people I thought it was a great read and was able to finish it in a couple days. I liked the fact that neither of the main characters was good in the beginning but things sort of turned around in the end which was kind of a bad thing for the heroine of the book although she was able to take it all in stride. I liked it and would recommend it.

I really did not see the point of a murdering animal abuser (Vannesa) calling another animal abuser (Molly) evil. It was plain to see that she was no better. Also, why would Ashley trust Vannesa after Molly already confirmed her suspicions of Vannesa killing her friend?