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98 of 106 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Only Okay, December 18, 2005
This review is from: Forbidden Magic (Magic Series, Book 1) (Mass Market Paperback)
The plot has been neatly summarized elsewhere, so I'll just cut to my own thoughts on this book. The heroine, Silver, is very one-dimensional. She spends every minute either as an emotional, barely-functioning basketcase in some ethical crisis (she's so tempted to go to the dark side, she's usually crying or hating herself) or she is relaxedly happily bonking the hero, Hawk. The two extremes is too much to make the character believable. Hawk is cardboard hero fare - strong, handsome, kind, loving. The only thing that distinguishes him from other heroes is that he has beautiful wings and likes cookies. He is strong and loving, but he is so plain in his personality that I wouldn't be interested in meeting him in real life. The chemistry between them was not very good, and the story lacks the tension between the characters that I find in other paranormal series (like Aisling Gray, Anita Blake, Kim Harrison, Sherrilyn Kenyon, etc.). They quickly fall in love, quickly fall in bed, and when she's not a crying wreck or they're fighting demons, they're busy bonking again. Their dialogue is very wooden.
The demons are the bad guys. There's a parallel plotline with a demon named Junga who inhabits a human woman's body. There are long sex scenes where Junga is involved in (a) a threesome, (b) a foursome, and (c) a sadist-masochistic scene, with other bad demons and warlocks. Hm, didn't the author start out in on-line erotica? This may explain the graphic, repeated and pointless sex scenes between the villians. The ending is very open-ended. Perhaps the biggest disappointment was that there was absolutely nothing humorous or mischievous about the characters. It was all straightforward how-do-we-kill-the-demons and bonk-me-now. The characters were all one-dimensional, and I wasn't really interested in any of them.
I note that there are some very polished and glowing reviews on amazon.com. So polished and positive... I can only assume that those reviewers aren't acquainted with the more interesting paranormal novels out there.
On the good side, the story is imaginative, there are various animals kept as familiars, there is lots of fighting and death and the cover is nice. I think the author needs to downplay the crude and graphic sex scenes, and work on having some interesting/humorous/memorable dialogue in her stories.
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130 of 146 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Did I Read The Same Book?, December 13, 2005
This review is from: Forbidden Magic (Magic Series, Book 1) (Mass Market Paperback)
I finished "Forbidden Magic" and the book didn't live up to the glowing comments of the other authors on the front page of the book, not by a long shot, and those comments were the reason why I bought the book. No way is this book comparable to the ones by Kelley Armstrong or Kim Harrison in regards to engaging the reader in the characters and the story's universe.
The author threw in some Celtic mythology buzzwords, but I didn't get any sense that it was more than surface research. The world building was superficial and rather formulaic, the dialog was rather silly at times (a dying spouse says haltingly, "You've always been the witch of my dreams"), the primary characters are stereotypes, the secondary characters are underdeveloped, and the author seems to follow the maxim, "when in doubt, throw in a sex scene". I lost track of the number of them by the end. It didn't seem to matter what was happening or what was about to happen, every time the hero and heroine got within three feet of each other he hardened and her juices started flowing. I just started to roll my eyes by the second third of the book.
The book ended in an obvious lead-in to a sequel, but I won't be buying it because the author failed to make me really care if the heroine is ever going to find her sister, or if the demons are going to take over San Francisco.
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58 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
SO glad that I didn't buy this, May 9, 2006
This review is from: Forbidden Magic (Magic Series, Book 1) (Mass Market Paperback)
Amazon kept recommending this based on other books I've bought (Kelley Armstrong, Kim Harrison, and Patricia Briggs, to name a few), but after reading a number of crummy Amazon recommendations, I checked it out from the library to try. Thank god that I didn't buy it. I love this genre, but unfortunately this book is a classic example of poorly done supernatural fiction. I am loathe to write bad reviews, as each book is a very personal part of an author, and presumably a labor of love, and therefore I usually simply don't review books that I don't like. But it seems that SO many mediocre books are coming out lately, plastered with jacket blurbs from good authors, that reviews are sometimes the only way to avoid another $7 mistake.
What the previous reviewers have pointed out is true--the story starts out with an interesting premise, and the characters have potential, but then the train stops abruptly before it ever gets out of the station. The characters become (or remain) two-dimensional at best, there are gaping plot holes, inexplicable behaviors, and a pretty unsatisfactory ending which obviously sets us up for a sequel. It's basically impossible to suspend your disbelief throughout the book--you keep getting jerked back to reality thinking, "WTH? Why did he/she/they do THAT? That makes no sense" or "Why are they able to do that? Oh, I see, Yet Another Convenient Magical Power".
The sex scenes are for the most part pointless, doing nothing to further the plot and very little to titillate the reader. While I'm not a fan of Barbara Cartland-esque euphemisms for genitalia, I don't want to read repetitive scenes that sound like they were lifted from letters to Hustler, either, especially between the hero and heroine. Even LKH at her porniest writes more interesting sex, although she's gone over the top as well. The sex should drive the plot, not attempt to fill the crater-sized holes in it. When you find yourself flipping through pages to get to the end of a sex scene, you know that the book has some serious problems.
If one is looking for really well-written supernatural fiction, I highly recommend the authors that I mentioned above, and also Marjorie Liu (Tiger's Eye, Shadow Touch), Robin McKinley (Sunshine) and Rachel Caine (her Weather Warden series). Other good but not Buy In Hardcover authors--the second stringers-- are J.R. Ward (Lover Eternal and Dark Lover), C.E. Murphy (Urban Shaman), and C.T. Adams and Cathy Clamp (their second book, Moon's Web, is far better than the first one, but it's a series so read both).
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