Customer Reviews

Undead and Unwelcome

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

I loved the start of this series. Undead and Unwed is a well worn, battered book that I still drag off the bookshelf and read on those days when the world seems glum. This book did nothing to recreate that happiness.

The plot-such as there is, is simple. Antonia died at the end of Unappreciated. Betsy, Sinclair and Jessica go visit the Wyndham wolves to return the body. From the minute they arrive there is a threat that a war could happen-which seems vastly out of character for Michael and Derek. Betsy, hurt that her friend is dead, is upset because the wolves seem to blame her when she feels that the Pack never accepted Antonia in place and almost drove her out of Cape Cod. Short story long, a fight breaks out and Betsy gets staked-again. Plus something weird is going on with BabyJon-something that is really never clarified. Meanwhile back home Laura is flipping her lid. The road to hades is paved with good intentions and Laura falls down that slippery slope in a big way. Marc sends desperate emails (Laura has cancelled their phone services) that say things like, "Laura is LHFM!!!!" which makes no sense to Betsy or Jessica since they don't speak Twitter Text. They go home and walk into A Big Problem.

Part of the problem with the Queen Betsy book is that it's only about 50,000 words, and reads shorter than that. It feels like an incomplete novella that has a "To Be Continued" line at the bottom of the page. I have no idea why-outside of being a predator-everyone was mentally prepared for war. In the couple of Wyndham books I've read, Michael and his wife are pretty level headed. BabyJon has super powers butthey aren't that interesting. Betsy, Jessica and Marc are all apparently idiots for not sending emails that people can read. (After sending 2 SOS emails shouldn't Marc send one in English? I'm just asking) Shouldn't Betsy or Sinclair care that their phones don't work?

If this book had been $7.50 I would have been perfectly happy with the purchase. Instead I paid $15.86 (about $1.00 than JR Ward's 540 page Lover Ahvenged) and didn't get my money's worth. If the publisher wants to keep the Queen Betsy books as hardcover books, I suggest that a short story be added from another world to flesh out the purchase. Otherwise I suspect I'll wait for paperback.

How I loved Undead and Unwed - I thought it was original and witty. Undead and Unemployed was also good, but the books have gone steadily downhill since them. I understand how the tone of the series is light on plot and generally fluffy, but with every instalment Betsy just gets more and more irritating, and the books get weaker. This one didn't buck the trend. Please, MJD, if you're going to keep this series going, for pity's sake, improve the quality.

I cant believe I wasted 20 dollars on this book. I was finished in 2 hours and it the process I wanted to scream. Betsy used to be a lovable heroine but now she is just a moron. She never pays attention to anything and her relationship with sinclair is all about sex. This was cute the first 5 books but now there needs to be some substance. MJD needs to either step it up or put an end to this series so her loyal fans will stop wasting their money.

I've struggled through this series, feeling myself losing IQ points with each installment. The author's insistence she only wants to write dialogue not only leaves gaping holes in the story - we only get to know what the characters say, not where they are and what is going on - it also makes her books very difficult to read. On top of that, the dialogue reads as if written by a whiny twelve-year old, which becomes very tiresome, very quickly.

I do not understand why Davidson just doesn't retire this one-trick pony before she's alienated all of her fans.

Stick to Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series for paranormal stories with intelligence, excitement, romance and a whole lot of heart.

I hated this book. I will explain my reasons for feeling that way, but what it comes down to in the end is that one line. If I had to add one more, it's that I'm all done spending any money, or time, on MJD's books. The series has been in trouble more than once and I stuck with it. No more, I'm done.

Those who've read the books know the score. How Betsy came to be the Queen of the Vampires, and Sinclair her husband. They know her best friends, her sister, her brother and they even know why she's at Cape Cod. So will you if you read the first few pages. After that comes problem number one. She repeats herself over and over and over and over again. Did you know Betsy is the Queen? Ooh look at that lamp, shiny! Betsy is the Queen. Oh shoes! Betsy is the Queen. Did we mention shoes? Oh let me look down on the poor Payless wearing shoes people. I'm Betsy and I'm the Queen.

Now that might be a somewhat bad example, since often in life people repeat titles over and over again, but what I'm saying is that past facts, like curing Jessica's cancer which never made a damn bit of sense and was a cop out in the series, get brought up over and over again, in the span of a few pages. Same for her sister's origins. It's mentioned again and again inside of a handful of pages. As well as repeated over and over throughout the book. It's padding to drive up the total word and page count. If most of the padding were cut, the book would probably be 50 pages.

But the padding, Dear Lord the padding. I don't know about you, but I don't care for over description of rooms, people, objects and so on. Why not just say, "A brilliant shade of deep red" Oh no...we must beat the point to death of how this red carpet is better than all other red carpets out there. And ooh and have you seen this desk? We'll take a paragraph to describe the desk! And this persons hair, well I'll compare their hair to mine and then tell you all about my hair, and then tell you more about their hair and how humidity probably affects it! The point is it gets annoying, and over description is either tedious, or padding, or both. In this book, both.

To a degree Marc says what we've probably all thought at one time or another, that Betsy is a PIA and needs a reality check. But her stupidity, and demand to be the center of attention at all times, is wearing very thin. As is her inability to not say stupid things. Several of the things she says when talking about Antonia with her pack made me want to slap her. Insensitivity like that isn't funny. It's just stupid and mean. In the past, I've had moments when I thought that just maybe, Betsy was growing as a character. Now I don't think she ever will. When you're primary character is that self centered, and everyone around her is one dimensional, never expressing thoughts, feelings or emotions, you're going to be in trouble in the long haul. Even Tina and Sinclair come and go only when they need to annoy or babysit Betsy. They're now boring and uninteresting. Everyone is just so flat. Betsy comments that she doesn't care what they do, and since it's from her point of view, the readers don't get to follow up.

Plus the woman is to stupid to live. Or be undead. She keeps making the same mistakes. She doesn't think things through. She leaves everything up to Sinclair and then when she doesn't like how he does things, she has a hissy fit. The whiny brat routine has worn thin too. Well if you've read the series, you get it. With the last two books, which I read back to back, I'm starting to think Paris Hilton comes off as a lot more intelligent.

I used to enjoy these books for what they were, fluff. I love fluff. And I don't mind the idea of a darker storyline. What I do mind is excessive filler, lack of real character growth, which is inexcusable when you're this many books into a series, stupidity in thought and action, extreme unbelievability that goes into the "Jump the Shark" mode, as with BabyJon (and for the love of God why can't she type his name as Jon? BabyJon, cause we might have forgotten he was a baby!) And a main character that has gone from being annoying to being unlikable.

Plus the shoes thing? Getting really old. Not just in this series, but all of them. Being a shoe lover just isn't unique or quirky, or cute anymore. Not that it ever really was.

I have loved most of the Betsy books up until this one. This reads more like a short story and not a novel. I feel like the author banged something out just to meet a deadline. She put no thought into the story at all. I was really hoping that we would get to see Betsy grow up and embrace her responsibilites instead of continuing to be a spoiled brat. I will not read anymore of MJDs books.

This series is fizzling out. Each additional novel seems skimpier on plot, characterization, imagination, and fun. In this installment, Betsy, Queen of the Vampires, visits the werewolves to explain why one of them died in her presence. The editing and proofreading continue to be bad--rights instead of rites, knew instead of new, etc. I find this especially unforgivable in books this expensive.

What happened to this series? I was a big fan -- telling all my friends about it. It was fun, fresh and interesting but now it's old, tired and unforgivable. IMHO, the books have gone down one step in quality each since the fantastic "Undead and Unwed" and I no longer hold out any hope they'll improve. The author repeats herself so much I found myself screaming "we fans knew that before and you've told us that three times in this book already!" while reading this story. The characters are acting like parodies of themselves or like other people all together. Jessica's name in the previous books was Watkins but here that's changed to Wilson (I fear writer error and/or a complete lack of an editor) and the back of my copy tells me that the main character's name is Betsy Taylor and that this story is all about "Becky" and her new troubles. SERIOUSLY? Did no one edit this?

Also, the author's new technique of starting most chapters five sentences in from where she should and therefore making the reader have to read ahead and then go back so they can understand who was talking and the context of what was being said is incredibly annoying. And as much as I love Marc Spangler -- why did we have to have whole chapters where he calls himself "dude" as he supposedly writes in his journal? While I didn't have to guess who was writing those chapters, it still felt forced and irritating to me. I'm so sorry I wasted my time reading this and I am only thankful I didn't spend my money on it having seen in the last couple of books the slide this series was entering. I'm disappointed in the author, the editor and these beloved characters that are no longer themselves or interesting in any way.

Just one of the many lines that, I suppose, were intended to be funny but failed miserably... I would like to say that this book was a let down, because it sucked, but after the last one there was nothing much to screw up left.

--SPOILERS--

So Betsy, Sinclair and Jessica head to Cape Cod to deliver Antonia's body to the "grieving" pack. Of course, Betsy's sole concern is Betsy. Once or twice along the way she mentions how painful it was to think about what happened in Undead and Unworthy, but after that goes on and on about some juvenile, completely unrelated subject with, you probably guessed it, her in the center of it all. At the end of chapter two she shoves away the thought of her friend only to rant about Jessica sending her employees memos without Betsy's knowledge, gasp! In chapter nine when they are discussing the funeral, Betsy, of course, does not give a cr@p and does not even pay attention. There is a moment there when she is happy that she is finally going to learn about werewolf burial rituals, again why would she be sad about Antonia? The woman only sacrificed her life to save Betsy's, after all. All in all I was extremely disappointed with the way Antonia's death was handled both in Undead and Unworthy, and in Undead and unwelcome.

The story arc that started with the Ant in the previous book was mentioned once in passing in this installment. With or without it the last two books would have been exactly the same, so why even created it?

Laura is once AGAIN a single maraschino cherry short of a fruitcake, spreading chaos around the place via her group of devoted devil worshipers(lame). Tina, one of my favorite characters from the first books, seeing as I don't particularly like anyone in the last ones, could have been completely absent for all the role she played in this story. Marc is portraited like a complete imbecile.

Especially irritating was the way they explained why all vampires, be they Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or Atheist were hurt by crosses and such, because IT DID NOT MAKE ANY SENSE! Why even attempt it if you have no way of explaining it? Bah.

But what is really disappointing about this series as of late is that there is no character growth or development. For the last few books all we see are the same damn things told in a slightly different fashion. But Undead and Unwelcome was the worst of the bunch because half of it was retelling, sometimes over and over again, what we have already been told in the previous books. It was BORING. the book was BORING, everything about it was BORING, BORING, BORING. I am only giving it two stars because I liked Lara, the future pack leader ( I mean, who wouldn't like a six-year-old who sizes up the vampire queen if she needs to fight her one day?), and Sara, Derick's wife.

And like the previous book, I did not buy Undead and Unwelcome, but borrowed it from a friend. I am no longer even interested in waiting for a paperback after seeing that the paperback for Undead and Unworthy was a large print and just as expensive as the hardback, which will most probably be the case with this installment as well. That is just poor marketing strategy.

And finally, what is up with these covers??? Whoever created them needs to be shot. Bring back the funny cartoonish style!

I have loved and kept all of the Queen Betsy series and was really looking forward to this one. I am SOOO disappointed. It was boring up until page 230 and it was a short book of only 282 pages. It was also double spaged and the pages were exceptionally narrow. Sad. I think that she was just trying to get a book out on time for her publicist. It was just a narrative of what already happened in all the other books. The only thing different is you saw a little more of her "devil spawn" sister going crazy and coming out. It took me about 2 hours to read this entire book so I would wait and buy it used or check it out at the library!