Customer Reviews

The Unforgiven (Watchers (Dorchester))

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

 

 

I'm not a fan of Joy Nash but, this book sounded intriguing so I, decided to read it. It's just great, I loved the characters and the storyline.

This a great read, a tiny bit slow at times, but is clearly to set the foundation for the story. I plan to read this entire series. Well Done!

When a rival clan, breeches the wards protecting Watcher/Nephalim Cade's clan, killing Cade's infant son and nearly anihilating his people, the clan's leader sends Cade on a mission to transition a woman from human to Nephalim, but in such a way as to enslave her in order to use her as a weapon against their rivals.

I really enjoyed the kick off to Nash's new Watcher series. There is sort of a romance in the Unforgiven, but there is so much more going on, as Nash brings to life a world in which the Nephalim - half human children of fallen angels - are still paying for the sins of their fathers - actually it's their descendants still paying the price. Even if the Nephalim descendants, who call themselves Watchers, haven't chosen to walk a dark path themselves, they are soulless and denied even the final judgement of heaven or hell at the end of their potentially 150 year life. Oh and as part of the curse, Watchers group into different clans by bloodline and are predisposed to hate and try to annihilate each other.

Cade's story, which is the main one in the book, is woven in with bits and pieces which introduce other members of his clan, and its main enemy. There is also a longer thread with a bit of the history of the Nephalim in which each scene is introduced by a quote from the Book of Enoch - Enoch appears to be basis for Nash's mythos. The romance part of the story, which is not as much romantic as it steamy, comes into play in the way to help a human candidate through the dangerous transition to Nephalim. A transitioning human is saved - from insanity and death that results if they are unaided - by being anchored via sex with a Watcher of the opposite gender.

As a consequence, I would label the Watchers as being steamy UF, a melding of PNR and UF that has good company in a fair number of series that are taking the old paranormal romance genre and its one couple per book model but allowing the background story arc and the supporting character to play a larger and more permanent role in the series. Since Nash sets up some promising conflicts within the supporting cast and I am really intrigued by her mythos, I will certainly be keeping an eye out for the next Watcher's installment.

As a frequent reader of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance, I can just tell when I'm jumping into a series midway through. It's something about the way the author talks about the backstory... in the way the characters are introduced... like there's all this stuff we're supposed to know already, but the author gives a quick recap/ info dump for the new readers just joining in. After reading the first chapter of this book, I would have bet you money that I missed a previous book in the series. There were storylines already in progress, relationships and backstory alluded to... But this is, indeed, the first in The Watchers series. It had me out of sorts from start.

The basic premise is this: thousands of years ago, a group of angels fell from Heaven and mated with mortal women. Their offspring were called Nephilim. They have been reviled since they first walked the Earth; they have no souls and no chance of an afterlife. Each Nephilims belongs to a clan that traces back to their ancestor angel. Each of the clans has its own special magic and they hate each other.

Many Nephilims born to mortal women do not know what they are. But should they have a near death experience, their change to their true form is triggered. The change manifests through some serious sexual hunger. And without another Nephilim to meet their needs and anchor their change, the newbie will go crazy and die.

Cade has been tasked to find Maggie and be the anchor through her transition. Maggie has no idea what she is, but when she meets Cade, she knows what she wants. Cade and Maggie come from different clans, and once he helps her through her transition, he can wield control over her... make her his slave... and use her magic for the good of his clan.

As Maggie undergoes her transition, she has flashbacks to the life of her ancestor Lilith. They teach her about her clan and where she comes from. Honestly, I found the Lilith scenes to be more interesting than the ones featuring Cade and Maggie. (Until it took a turn into Incest-ville and got super gross.) The story surrounding Cade's leader Artur and his estranged wife Cybele was really the best thing the book had going for it. The sex scenes between Maggie and Cade were hot, but I didn't really connect to an emotional relationship between the two.

Frankly, the book was too long and had too much crammed into it. It had potential, but when all was said and done, the only character I ended up caring about was Cybele. It wasn't terrible, but not great. Almost 3 stars.

Review courtesy of All Things Urban Fantasy:

[...]

THE UNFORGIVEN opens like a mid-series book; characters have complex and painful pasts, there are rivalries and vendettas, all of which were introduced through summaries or asides or context clues. I'd applaud this book for being easy to jump into, but when I circled back to find the start of the series I found... THE UNFORGIVEN.

While part of me is still in denial (looking for prequel novellas or books on another imprint), when I judge THE UNFORGIVEN as a true first in the series, the opening leaves me disappointed. None of the characters, other than Maddie, are introduced in a way that feels like a true "first time introduction". A few allusions to past heartbreaks and events don't bother me when they're clear, and I know I can go back and read about them myself, but THE UNFORGIVEN throws all racial conflicts, current romantic relationships, the nature of several dead comrades, and some bizarrely polygamous family ties into the past tense with very little explanation. I never felt lost, plot-wise, but I did feel emotionally disconnected from the characters.

Once the introduction was out of the way and I was into current events, I ran into another disconnect. Magic is the driving factor for every romantic relationship that is featured (other than references to dead baby-mamas). While this device is a classic, and works well in any number of urban fantasy novels, the characters were not well developed enough for it to work for me in THE UNFORGIVEN. Cade and Maddie don't get much interaction beyond reacting to Watcher pheromones and fighting demons. When two new characters (and here I mean "new" in the "I don't know you, I still need a reason to care about you" sense) are climbing all over each other because of "magical needs", it reads like a technical exercise without emotion or motivation.

Even without much depth, Cade and Maddie relationship could have been hot on it's own. However, when the "forced to feel this way" element was paired with instances of attempted rape it gave the whole book a much darker feel than I'd like. Lilith's emotionally exploited, incestuous flashbacks were heart-wrenching, and I got tense every time I saw the italics that indicated another one. It is this element that takes THE UNFORGIVEN from an acceptable if forgettable paranormal romance to something I'd rather avoid in the future. If you like tortured alpha males and relationships that are magically ordained, there is a lot to enjoy in THE UNFORGIVEN. However, I think I'll continue to get my paranormal romance with a dash of crazy (and a boatload of humor) over with The Immortals After Dark.

Sexual Content: Sex scenes, attempted rape, incest.

~* 3.5 Stars *~

They call themselves Watchers after the angels from whom they descend, but to those who hate and fear them they are called archdemons, abominable, vile beasts who feed on flesh and blood, who manipulate and corrupt the cherished humans around them. They are the bastard children of angels and humans. Abominations to heaven and cursed for it, denied heaven, denied hell. They are the Nephilim.

And it so sucks to be them.

Grouped in clans based on their angel ancestors, they are more than cursed with Oblivion, they are cursed to fight and make war with each other, to be enemies through time, a deep and instinctive hatred that is as much a part of them as their demon forms and hungers. But they can be enslaved. And with such slaves, Clan Azazel has waged a deadly war on ancient rival Clan Samyaza, leaving only a handful alive.

Now Artur Camulus, chieftain of Clan Samyaza and desperate to protect his clan, commands Cade Leucetius to go to an archeological dig in Israel, and in so doing, cross a line of honor and commit a act Samyaza had previously thought anathema. He was to find the dormant Watcher from outclan, a woman unaware of her heritage and sure of her humanity, and see her through her transition, anchor her through the sex that all of their kind need to reach maturity and enslave her and her magics for their own as he does so.

Maddie Durant had survived a malignant tumor in her brain only to become a pawn between forces she didn't believe existed prior to her trip to Israel. Now, as a vigilante faction intent on the death of all demons seems to be allying with one of those they condemn, and a clan war threatens to explode into open violence on the streets, she is both potential savior and helpless victim, and her indomitable spirit draws potential jailer Cade to her in ways he'd never expected, despite the curse that makes them enemies.

The rules are clear, his orders sacrosanct, and yet the heart of a demon may be all that stands between life...and a damnation more devastating than even heaven could imagine.

Joy Nash kicks off this dark, decadent series with a wealth of original mythos and intriguing history that offers fresh breath to a well-worn genre. There is much to appreciate in The Unforgiven, and fans of dark romance and grim fantasy should be thrilled by the groundwork laid here. The plot is thick, rich, and wonderfully diversified, the world extremely well defined, and the characters three dimensional...though not necessarily likable.

With two main antagonists as potential enemies in this debut, Clan Azazel and DAMN, an unfortunate acronym for Demon Annihilators Mutual Network (the human organization intent on wiping demons from the earth), not to mention the persnickety angels and hellfiends, Nash has set the series up with a firm foundation of really hateful bad guys with several complex motivations that her protagonists can fight with wit, wings, and wrath. It was a rather impressive display in a debut novel.

But it was not without it's problems.

To set up the world and define the players, Nash used a shifting focus in a third person point-of-view narrative, breaking up the scenes of the plot arc for Cade and Maddie with scenes focusing on Artur, on Cybele's brother Lucas, even on the chieftain of Clan Azazel, Vaclav Dusek, not to mention many, many scenes from the past, focusing on Maddie's ancestor, Lilith. It painted a uniquely complex and highly stylized picture of the world for the series, but it just didn't allow for any room or rhythm for a true romantic connection between the main characters. In fact, as a reader, I was so overwhelmed by the minutia, by the shifting perspectives, by the abrupt transitions, that I ended up feeling disgruntled on several fronts.

I loathed Artur. I found him utterly unlikable a character, jealous, petty, and small, and if he's supposed to be a good guy, he's got a long, long, freakin' long way to go. Sex - and hey, normally a huge fan - became something disturbing in the book as it was utilized as the anchor for transitioning Nephilim and a method to enslave. In fact, that alone unsettled me to such a degree that the very long (god, it seemed to take forever) transition scene for Maddie was painful in places, not erotic, not something joyous, not even something loving or at all tender. And the need for Gareth to go through transition with Cybele anchoring him actually hurt my heart with its implications.

And don't even get me started on the relationship between Azazel and Lilith. I like to think of myself as being fairly open minded, and I understand that it was several millennia ago, and demons will be demons, but that was disgusting.

I love books in which the good guys have a dark side, and aren't White Hats. I prefer it when they heartily embrace the many shades of gray. But in The Unforgiven, alleged good guys (Artur in particular) were virtually indiscernible from the bad guys in action, history, and thought. It's a dangerous line to tread, because if you can't tell the good from the bad, what's the point?

I feel the same about books with dark themes - I love them, don't get me wrong, but without hope, without a glimmer of something good or positive, the dark becomes despair, and there's no fun in reading that. Cade and Maddie should have provided that glimmer in this book, but because so little of the story dealt with any sort of relationship evolution between them, and there was no explanation of relationships for Watchers to begin with (not even the mate bond was explained, just referred to), it just didn't work out that way. The romance ended up lacking emotion, and Cade and Maddie's feelings felt like dusty footnotes by the end, rather than being actively engaged.

On a conceptual level, the book is fantastic, and it's extremely well written. The depth and imagination involved, the creativity, all of that was undeniably impressive. It's a dark book, with dark characters who have dark and disturbing - and sometimes horrifying tendencies, and do unspeakable things. I can appreciate that on a stylistic level. I think, though, that it overreached for a first book in a series, and was more ambitious than necessary. I was left feeling like too much got crammed into what is, for a series debut, simply the first chapter.

Disclosure: An ARC was provided by Dorchester Publishing via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.

~*~*~*~

Reviewed for One Good Book Deserves Another.