Serena Akeroyd

This series has an altogether amateurish feel to it.
Everything is very much made up on the spot and developed on the fly.
This is particularly true for the world-building/magic system.
The main problem with this is that the author changes the rules just as freely if necessary.
Beyond that, I don't really have big issues with the first book, partly because it really is just setup.
There isn't any actual plot yet. I've seen others complain about this in their reviews. But, maybe because I had already been warned, it didn't bother me at all.

The series really started to sink with the second book.
This series very much requires to be read in sequence but the author still does the whole newcomer thing and explains everything again in very crude and artless info-dumps.
Immediately after, we continue with a lot of incredibly frustrating dialogue.
A few of the protagonists talk about the whole mate thing and explain it to the MC. But they do it in this incredibly roundabout and awkward way. That leads to a back and forth in which they repeatedly throw insults at her for every painfully bad explanation she doesn't understand. It really comes across like the whole point of the conversation is to humiliate her, even though that obviously wasn't the author's intention.

Something else very frustrating that starts to appear in the second book.
The revelations, while predictable to a versed reader, take ages for the protagonists to uncover. And sometimes, when they finally manage it, the author time-skips over the actual scene and continues with an unrelated POV and a whole bunch of dry exposition followed by plain filler.
Why the hell do you interrupt a high tension situation and go on an arduous tangent from a different POV?
Throughout a typical story, there are high tension sections interweaved with relaxing interludes. The latter is the place for info-dumpy world-building and stuff like that. If your exposition/info-dumping is so boring and dry that you fear people might actually drop the book without holding the plot progression hostage, you should consider improving on it or delivering it in smaller chunks instead.
I could never appreciate it when stories so obviously drag out revelations. In Manga/Comic/TV series this is called filler, and none of the reasons why it is done in those applies to a book series like this. It's annoying and doesn't even serve a purpose.

I actually read through the second book and even started the third before abandoning the series, mainly because I already had them lined up in a playlist and hadn't yet found another interesting book that was available to me.

Verdict, I do NOT recommend even to RH fans.… (mehr)

DNF at 50-ish%.

Quick and dirty review.

I very rarely enjoy large age gaps, especially when the heroine is so ridiculously naive. I find age differences in real life to be ripe for abuse and control. The author tries to explain it away by saying that 58 is basically mid-thirties for werewolves, but applying this same rule to the heroine makes her like 12. Not into it.

The heroine switches back and forth from badass to whimpering child at the drop of a hat. It's like the author just picks a personality dependent on the particular scene, instead of building an actual character.

Side characters keep trying to introduce excuses for bad behavior in the main characters, saying things like 'you need to understand where they're coming from' and so on. Let me just say, a girl's parents locking her away in a wing for her entire life, not allowing her any freedom, being horrifically verbally abusive, and humiliating her in front of their entire race's government isn't being misunderstood. It's being ridiculously cruel to the point of deserving to have their children taken away by social services. There is no redeeming those characters.

Long story short, the romance and smut is nowhere near good enough to excuse literally everything else.
… (mehr)

DNF....I can count on one hand the number of books I've not finished. K U makes it easier, thankfully! So, here we have a ridiculously fit Pakhan of the Russian mafia who can't speak. They all use sign language and everybody they meet seems to know it too. (Rolling my eyes) I actually made it to chapter 8 when I just couldn't finish. Cassie starts with the "I'm fat" body image crap along with telling us she weighs "200 lbs on a good day". Really? The book was moving along just fine with the minimal description of her being a beautiful blonde. Truly, that was all I needed to know. The "overweight" "low self esteem" crap ruins a book! It seems to be all the rage these days. Why would anybody want to read these descriptions of a heroine? Moving on to a different author......… (mehr)

I am a bit sad to report that my excitement for this book weaned. I loved the prior one. The chemistry between Hunter and Aurora was hot. Then you add in the cliffhanger that hyped up my excitement to read this book. For some reason I found the first third or so of this book to move really slow. It felt like the book was really long and could have been shorter and not really lost anything to the storyline.

Aurora and Hunter were both different people. Which is not a bad thing as they both had went through a lot and grown. Yet, I felt like I was just reading about Aurora and Hunter but as people talking with no real connection.

However, I stuck with this book as I did enjoy the prior one so much. Luckily, it did get better and by that I do mean steamier. The intimate relationship between Hunter and Rory was hot. Overall, I still liked this book and conclusion to this duet.… (mehr)