jacob

My Take in Brief: A promising premise, but the central relationship was not compelling. I won’t be continuing with this series.

Series?: Yes, this is Book 1 of the Nightwalkers. The last one, Book 5, was published in September 2008.

Word on the Web:

Jane, Dear Author,  C (with Frankophiles chiming in to defend the book, and getting a very effective smackdown from Sybil)

Mrs. Giggles, 42 :

And as for romance, it seems to me like Jacob and Isabella aren’t falling in love as much as they are being forced to submit to something equivalent to an anal probe in a UFO.

Amazon.com, 4 stars after 102 reviews

Heroine and Hero: Isabella is a bookish virginal librarian, who is very strong and forthright. Jacob is a Demon, and acts as a kind of Demon cop (the “Enforcer”)  among his kind, preventing fellow Demons from succumbing to moon madness, the urge to copulate with humans, which never turns out well for the humans. He’s elegant, upright, moral, principled, and his desire for Isabella poses a large threat to his standing and worldview.

Plot: Honestly, I don’t know if there is one. At first, I thought it was going to be Jacob’s forbidden desire for Isabella. But that conflict gets resolved pretty quickly. There’s a lot of worldbuilding and introduction of characters. I guess the plot involves Isabella’s coming to terms with her new abilities and what they mean for her and for Jacob’s world.

The Racy Romance Review:

Here are some positives:  I liked the idea of Demons as another race alongside lycanthropes, humans, druids, and others. I liked it that the hero and heroine were good people who behaved (mostly) in a civilized and kind manner towards one another, with nary a silly misunderstanding in sight (being able to read each other’s minds helps prevent those things). I liked it that the Demons were a band of brothers, with some sisters, who are adults, and not frat house jerks.

But the relationship between Jacob and Isabella mystified me. It turns out they are drawn together by their DNA, a kind of scientific twist on that old paranormal standby: the Destined Mate.  It’s nice that Jacob occasionally wonders whether their attraction is genuine, but nothing much comes of this. The main problem I had was that within a day of meeting, Jacob and Isabella start to act like the old couple from a previous installment of a series … you know, the ones that show up in the Black Dagger Brotherhood, or a Bridgerton book, just to remind the reader they are still in love? And they’re totally boring? There was pretty much no arc to the relationship — it went from zero to sixty in a five pages or less, and stayed there.

The same is true for Isabella. She goes from being a human with a quiet life and no belief in the paranormal to a kick ass heroine in just a few days. Not only that, but a few hours in the old dusty demon library has her finding the key to solve ancient intractable problems in their civilization.  Talk about what you can do with an MLS!  While I liked the Isabella she became –  “Be a partner, not just a protector” she tells Jacob — I found the character not well realized or believable. Jacob, too, was pretty one note.

The many many references to the heroine as “little”, from her body and height, to her hands, to her “sly sexy little mouth”, to Jacob’s pet name for her ( “little flower”) made me long to give the author a thesaurus, damning to hell Stephen King’s claim that the word a writer finds using a thesaurus is always the wrong one. I didn’t care if it was wrong, I just wanted another word besides “little”. Diminutive? Tiny? Small? Vertically challenged? ANYTHING.

The animalistic jealous possessive behavior Jacob displays when another male comes near Isabella, and her reluctance to look at or hug other males in deference to it, reminded me of the BDB, and was equally creepy for me to read, reminiscent as it is of symptoms of abusive behavior that male partners demonstrate right before they pull a Chris Brown on their Rhiannas.

It occurred to me as I was reading Jacob that for all of the grief the Harry Potter series gets from established religions (perhaps because it is geared, at least nominally, to children), so many paranormals wreak havoc with major religious traditions without seeming to catch the attention of the religious right. I don’t care about that, honestly, but what got my Jackles raised a teensy bit (those are Jewish hackles, BTW.) (And yes, I made that word up.) was this passage:

“So your name is not Jacob?”

“Of course it is. You may actually find this a little ironic, but after we are given our power names, parents choose a call name, like Jacob and Noah and Elijah, and they usually select the name from –”

“The Bible!”

“Yes.” Jacob grinned. “You see, Demons have a great respect for the Christian religions.”

But none, apparently, for Judaism, or they would recognize that these folks are all in the Torah, i.e. the Hebrew Bible, aka the Old Testament to the Christian folk. Sigh.

I thought the worldbuilding, at least the big picture, was consistent and interesting, but there was little in the way of detailed description. I found it hard to figure out what people looked like, what the rooms looked like. It all sort of blended like in a category romance. I must also admit that the writing was not my cup of tea — very purple in the sex scenes, especially. There were a lot of verbs that didn’t go with their nouns. Like this: her “sweet breath skidding delightfully over their tastebuds”, or her stomach “rose and danced”. And odd locutions, like “her torrid mind”,  “the brooms of her eyelashes”, her back arching in an “inconceivable spasm”. There was one phrase I could not figure out at all and I still wonder if it’s a typo: “she pushed him to his limits, her capacity for back-building before her release astounding”. Does anyone know what “back-building” means here? I am so glad I am not a romance author, because I am sure that writing the sex scenes in a non-cliched, yet non-jarring way is one of the hardest things in the world to do.

Kresely Cole is the last paranormal romance author standing in the Triple R derby. Let’s hope Demon King doesn’t disappoint!

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