Enjoyable, steamy, and super problematic. ( )

Prelim Review: This is really more of a 4.5, but I loved it enough to bump up to a 5 for these purposes. I would honestly probably give this a TEN except while Rhys does spend much of the book trying to coax Mina into liking him the vast majority of the 'romance' portion is crammed into the latter third of the novel. Which interrupted my very enjoyable reading of the world surrounding them. I hesitate to say this but...I may been okay if no romance had come up! Or if it had been secondary to learning about the Horde and the aftermath of their being ousted by Rhys. ( )

This had a surprisingly engaging steampunk backdrop with a much more complex plot than I expected.
The steampunk worldbuilding is very wishy-washy and vague and technically it's more like electropunk if you want to be pedantic but it managed to capture the steampunk atmosphere and feeling very well nonetheless which is what steampunk is really about imo.
The plot starts out simple enough but gets increasingly convoluted and at the same time the angsty romance takes over more and more of the plot and the final resolution is half-assed at best and renders most of all that convoluted plot irrelevant. In the end, all that plot complexity was mostly a plot device to drive the romance and is ultimately not at all relevant to the story.
The romance itself is very much in your face clichéed without any attempt at subtlety.
The sex goes from pretty hot to (apparently not) very painful. Surprise dry ramming and all that... (Was this really written by a woman?)

One thing that kept confusing and annoying me is that the author uses 2 or sometimes even 3 names for characters and never sticks with one of them either, constantly switching between them. I think it was supposed to help characterization because certain people called others by certain names but it just made things much more confusing than it needed to be.

Oh, and the ending is so incredibly cheesy I felt like my ears would start to bleed any second.

I enjoyed it more than I expected but the romance took over too much of the book especially in the last part while neglecting too many dangling plot threads all over the place. ( )

3.5 stars. Strangely, I found the romantic relationship hard to believe, while the zombies and steampunk elements seemed perfectly fleshed out--would like to have had more of that. The world Brook created was engaging; I found the characters less so. May or may not continue on with the series. ( )

better on the re-read. There is something about this author that causes me serious cognitive dissonance. wtf is up with that? no idea. ( )