Customer Reviews

My Wicked Enemy

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Carolyn Jewel creates a new series with My Wicked Enemy. I have to admit the back of the book and the title made me feel like this book was just going to be alright and lost in the paranormal romance series. I was wrong. Jewel creates two characters that are unlike the typical hero and heroine.

Nikodemus is an old as dirt Fiend who swears, curses, and wants to kill Carson and Magellan. You have to understand in this series Mages/Witches/Magekind are bad news. They enslave Fiends and take away their good will. It's a war of good and evil, except everyone's in the grey a little. Carson is a witch who's been locked away from her power and now can't `pull' magic. So she's useless as anything but a battery to other Magekind and harmless to Fiends.

Carson witnesses a murder at Magellan's house and her innocent naivety comes crashing down. She runs away and straight into Nikodemus who swears she's on his to-do list today, fourth one down, "Kill Magellan's Witch.

Carson's character is filled with flaws physically and psychically. Through the entire book the reader is rooting for her survival and hoping she can come out on top. Nikodemus' character is definitely old-fashion good, but it takes the entire book before they actually get together. All around the plot is new and different then you're average vampire/werewolf romance and I'm looking forward to the next book. I hope she blows this series up big and expands on the Fiends who have already been introduced.

Put Carson and Nikodemus on your to-do list!

First of all let me say that as someone who reads a lot, I can honestly say I've never come across a book that was less what I expected then this.

Plot Summery:

In the world there are demon like creatures called fiends, and there are magekind who try to capture and harness their power. Nikodemus is an ancient fiend who is trying to kill the mage Magellan (could we find more ridiculous names if we tried?). Carson is a witch who has spent the better part of her life under Magellan's psychological control. While she and Nikodemus ought to be sworn enemies, they instead become allies and lovers.

Things I Liked:

Some parts of this were actually sort of funny, sort of sexy, sort of entertaining. There are some decent ideas here, though they are never fully developed or explained. Nikodemus is actually a pretty interesting, rough around the edges character.

The Problems:

Writing style--or rather the lack of style. There are typos, big obvious ones. There are problems where dialogue is thrown in between unrelated descriptive sentences. The diction and syntax is just really rough, so the whole thing doesn't flow at all. You really have to concentrate to keep up with what's going on.

Plot holes--serious, gaping, plot holes. I still have absolutely no clue what the purpose or origin of the mages is. What they do with their magic or how it works or why they need it. To be fair there is some explanation but it's very vague, almost like the author couldn't be bothered to throw in some background. And those aren't the only questions left unanswered.

General content***Minor Spoilers Ahead***Shock value does not always equal entertainment. You have some really crude, not in the least bit romantic sex, followed by a three-way that comes out of left field. I don't have a problem with crude language or multiple partners, when it fits the context. In this case it doesn't. It's just kind of there, like all the other poorly strung together plot points. Plus, the characters are underdeveloped, and the relationship is half-baked.

I honestly can't say I'd recommend this to anyone as a romance. Possibly as erotica, but then you have to ignore the other long winded content.

I picked this book up on a whim... The cover got to me, and I wanted to read lighter than "Breaking Dawn" and "Acheron". This proved to be worthy.

Now, I read the book, and I have to say, the characters were there. The plot was there. The fight scenes, the danger, everything that we come to look for in a PR was there... except for Clarity and Closure.

Let me explain...

We meet Nikodemus and he wants to kill Magellan and Carson. All we're told is that it's because Mages are evil and they enslaves Fiends. There's no real motive. I would have enjoyed that.

I've also read another review that touched on the love scenes in the book. On that point, I'll say that crude talk in the middle of sex is something that I would fully expect from Nikodemus. What I DIDN'T like was how Carson was put into an Anita Blake position and had sex with Iskander. I wouldn't think that she would have put up with something like that, nor would I have expected Nikodemus to just stand by and watch.

As a reader, I expect reasons for the changes of character. And I'm talking aside from "We're Fiends, that's what we do." (Yes, that is actually said in the book). And with no CLEAR explainations of what was going on with Carson and the others... with SO many questions left about Characters that are important (you'll see them in one scene, and then never hear about them in the end)... I can't give this book the glowing praise a plot like this deserves. There are just too many holes for my liking.

This book wasn't bad but in all honesty it wasn't great. I don't know if it was just me but sometimes while reading I had to stop and think, "what the hell is going on...?" Her descriptions of situations, actions, some of the sex scenes and the demons in true form were just vague and left me more perplexed than entertained. Don't get me wrong I read the whole book no problem but it was slow and just didn't have the umph I needed. I'm just somewhat on the line with this one which makes me want to write a review to say as much. There was something nondescript about this series that just didn't do it for me.

I'm sorry to say but I didn't think this book was that great. It is an interesting story line but there were the little things that bothered me.

Firstly and the one that annoyed me the most was that every time they had to get in a getaway car, the seat belts had to be mentioned. I don't think we, the readers, have to read it when it is commonsense and it is a fantasy novel. You don't see actors reminding everyone to put their seat belts on in a high speed chase in the movies.

Secondly the love scenes. While you're reading and come across the love scenes it starts of nice and romantic then the language becomes crude and you loose all the sense that it's meant to be romantic turns into a quick rough shag.

Thirdly by the middle of the book it turns into an Anita Blake novel. Now don't get me wrong I don't mind the series of Anita Blake but we all know in the latest Anita Blake it has taken a complete U turn. But in this particular book it just throws you into the multiple lovers without any preparation and understand as too why. The heroine does not seem to be the type to go for a threesome.

And fourthly the heroine constantly had migraines and was mostly always unfocused in vision which just made it frustrating to read.

Overall it was a waste of money and time.

You know, I think if I said, "Carolyn Jewel attended the Laurell K. Hamilton school of urban fantasy writing" and called it a day, most readers would probably get all the information they need from my review. Maybe I should add, "Not the early Anita Blake books, late-period Laurell K. Hamilton, and yes, that does mean what you think it means."

This is actually not at all what I expected from the first chapter of MY WICKED ENEMY, which I read as a sample. The writing is noticeably more polished in the beginning of the book, and has a kind of bleak simplicity that really drew me in. The heroine, Carson, is in a pretty miserable situation and I sympathized with her immediately. But after the exposition, where we get the lowdown on who the main characters are and why the mages and demons hate each other so much, the book really shifts gears.

Demons are all attracted to mages - mage blood is like demon catnip - so every demon who meets Carson wants to sleep with her. Some of them try to force her, some of them try to seduce her, but they all try. The plot makes sense and all, and it's fairly interesting, but it seems like the real purpose of the plot is to manufacture sex scenes. The book features a lot of graphic sex, and a lot of it is rough or kinky. Not saying that's good or bad, just fair warning.

As the book wore on I had a harder and harder time picturing the supernatural elements of the plot. There's a lot of stuff about magic - pulling magic, touching someone else's magic, channeling magic through someone else - and I got totally lost. I'm not sure what people can do with magic in this world, or what its limitations are. Without a really clear guide to how magic works, a lot of key scenes in the book made hardly any sense to me. I mean, I understood who won and who lost or whatever, but not the mechanics of how it happened.

It's also a big deal that the hero, Nikodemus, has both a human and a demon form, and at key moments shifts into his demon form. But we don't really find out what that demon form looks like...so I understood it was exciting and forbidden, but remained fuzzy on the details. If the author is going to go there, shouldn't she really, really go there?

I really enjoyed 'My Wicked Enemy', right up to the point fairly near the end when our heroine added a second man to her bed. This seemed an almost entirely gratuitous and pointless scene for the overall plot and didn't fit in well with the idea of one-man-one-woman that the rest of the book suggested and overall with the sexual content of this kind of book. After that scene I rather lost faith in the book and I imagine this might be a criticism from other readers.

Apart from this scene the overall storytelling was very good in this book. Carson Philips, a young woman, is on the run after discovering her guardian has murdered someone. She is accosted by an unknown but rather handsome man who tells her that it's his job to kill her because she's a witch. She doesn't know the first thing about this and eventually Nikodemus, a four thousand year old fiend, realises she's telling the truth. Carson has escaped from the evil mage Magellan and has taken an important artefact with her which Magellan needs for a dodgy ritual to gain the power of a fiend for himself. Nikodemus has to get Carson up to speed very quickly with the strange world in which she now finds herself.

Carson and Nikodemus continually have to dodge people trying to kill them, mostly fiends who are bound to their mage-masters despite being desperate to be free. As Carson's fluctuating powers begin to increase she finds that she has an unusual ability to rescue these people from their mage-bindings. But can Carson and Nikodemus keep themselves safe from all those trying to kill them, and can Carson survive all the events that happen to her?

Overall this was a good read with a love story which was generally believable, particularly the parts where Nikodemus realises he is going against cultural rules and breaking taboos with his relationship to Carson. Of course the above-mentioned three-in-a-bed scene rather killed the romance side of the book for me (clearly I'm a traditionalist) but apart from this the story worked well overall. Carson was a rather weak and inept character at times, at others she seemed strong if rather impetuous. Nikodemus was a little hard to get to know, despite hearing most of the story from his viewpoint, but some of the side characters were interesting and added spice to the story. I just wish the author had left out THAT scene.

Originally published for Curled Up With A Good Book © Helen Hancox 2008

In the world of Wicked Enemy, demons really do exist and so do mages and they are mortal enemies. Demons, the `Kin', once earned their evil reputation with their ability to possess humans, but now it is the mages that are true evil, lengthening their lives by using black magic fueled by deaths and enslaving demons to do their bidding and robbing the 'fiends' of the vital psychic connection between `Kin' - bringing these `Mageheld' demons the anguish of psychic starvation caused by the inability to feel their fellow fiends. Though the book has only scratched the surface, the world building of Mages, the Mageheld, the Kin society, the power structure of the warlords with their sworn fiends, and the psychic connection between the demons was truly interesting.

Killing runaway Witch Carson is number four on demon warlord Nikodemus' to-do list. But Nikodemus quickly discovers that Carson is not the powerful witch/mage of her reputation. When he first meets Carson she is a clueless, helpless, magicly crippled victim of their common enemy. But even though Nikodemus decides not to kill Carson, she is still hunted by her former mage boss' mageheld demon henchmen who are sent to kill Carson and regain an important Talisman that's she's stolen. As Nikodemus joins forces with the damaged witch to nullify the threat of the powerful magical object, there is something about Carson that will make Nikodemus want to break every taboo -- until suddenly, sleeping with the enemy sounds like a very good idea indeed.

While the world and the characters in My Wicked Eneny were great, there was just something off with the love scenes. Nikodemus' mindmelding partial `possesion' of Carson had potential for uping their joining into a soul-deep connection, however Nikodemus' thoughts - and we don't get Carson's - were centered pretty much on the demon kink of `doing it' while shifted into demon form and the fantasy of his alien body joining with `a' human and not with Carson in particular. Add a startingly unlover-ly word amid the peppering of curses in his `love talk' - which up to that point did up the intensity and edginess of the scene - and result just wasn't very romantic. Another scene later on was a weird sexual healing between Carson, Nikodemus and a pyschicly reconnected demon which avoided being a full ménage, just pairs with a third mental participant, but again no romance.

Out of the bedroom, and the attic, the story was great. Nikodemus is immediately compelling, as he struggles with instincts that draw him to this forbidden witch and lead him to protect Carson instead of killing her to remove the danger she presents to his demon race. The struggle for the Talisman and its reprecussions, the confrontations between mages and demons, and Carson's contribution as she acquires formidable power and learns to wield it, supply plenty of action to go along with some powerful and dangerous secondary characters: Durian, Xia and Iskander. Jewel already has the Xia's book in the works, My Forbidden Desire, but I expect that we'll be seeing stories from several of the other demons - maybe even Fen and Harsh - in the future.

I really like this series but the author tends to let her writing get away from her. She almost makes it a GREAT book but instead its a good book. Really good. But dang...I'm not sure the author has a clear idea of all the details of her world of magic so sometimes (read pretty much all the time) when the magic starts to happen the writing becomes kind of rambling. Same with the sex scenes. I'm frequently not sure what exactly is going on during those times and I find it frustrating. I mean, I dont need every gory detail of tab A going into slot B but on the other hand I shouldnt be getting lost during the scenes, either.

And I would LOVE to have a really clear description of what a fiend looks like transformed. Instead its like a low budget movie where they cannot afford a "real" monster therefor you never actually SEE the main event of the movie. The author tells us bits and pieces about a fiend when they transform but never gives us a truly clear picture.

That doesnt ruin the story for me, just makes me wish someone had helped her make herself CLEARER.

I still really enjoyed the books of this series and would have to say they are worth the read. Nothing life altering but certainly a good few hours curled up on the couch on a cold afternoon.

After reading a few other reviews I'm glad I wasn't the only one sitting there thinking 'WTF is going on here'. Man oh man this series has potential. It's a different approach that I haven't read in paranormal's. But the writing has so many holes I yearn for a set of golf clubs and a stretch of green lawn. I was drawn to the cover and bought this as well as what I believe to be the 2nd book after so I'm going to read it since I bought it....I just hope the next one doesn't make me feel like I was missing pages or something.