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Sunday, January 8, 2023

Shades of Wicked #SIAM Book One of 3!

 



Happy #SIAM review day!  Today I'm sharing my thoughts on Shades of Wicked  by Jeaniene Frost --along with other participants in Anne's Read Along
Here is the schedule of the review posts where you can read everyone's review of this book. There is always a wide range of opinions! 

Jan 8:    Shades of Wicked              –  Review from Carole @ Carol’s Random Life in Books

Jan 22:    Wicked Bite                        –  Review from Robin @ Books of My Heart

Feb 5:       Wicked All Night             –   Review from Anne @ Books of My Heart


**************Spoilers**********************

Shades of Wicked is the first book in Jeaniene Frost's Night Rebel series and it's a spin-off from her very popular Night Huntress series.  If you have read the Night Huntress you'll appreciate some of the cameos and side characters in the book and you'll have more general knowledge of events prior to this book, but it's a stand-alone. 

The beginning of the book has lots of Veritas, our MC, talking to herself, We are in her head and along for the ride. For me, it was too much exposition. Give me the action. I enjoyed the action portions of this book--and the demon dog Silver. Ian is in the Night Huntress books and I am sure many readers pick up this book to read his story. His personality is based on a persona of a vampire is loyal to friends and likes sex and violence, which is pretty typical for a vampire. 

Veritas is a half-vampire half-demigod that is usually in a glamour around others to hide her actual appearance--so she looks unassuming but of course very attractive and slim. Veritas works as a law guardian but for this book, she is basically on leave to try and kill a Demon she's been trying to kill for thousands of years. 

Ian and Veritas start as enemies, and then there is a fake marriage and then they are lovers. All good stuff, all stuff I enjoy.  Here is the thing though.  Veritas is a demi-god, she's been around for 4,000 years. She should be more interesting and both she and Ian should have worked through their issues by now--guilt over people they lost, how to communicate effectively, etc. They have the maturity of humans in their early 20s. It's like the old man on the porch in It's a Wonderful Life said: (and I'm paraphrasing) "Ah, eternal youth is wasted on the wrong people."

3.0 Stars  It's alright. 

5 comments:

Northwoman said...

Aww you didn't love it. Sure they maybe should have worked through things. I don't know how many years of the 4,000 Veritas spent being raped, tortured and then murdered and how much time to regenerate. It's hard to say how long it would take to understand the rest of the world after that barely existing. Ian went through some of that also. And he's much younger. But the vampire rules may have governed some of his earlier years. I don't know how much trust anyone would have after that kind of treatment. So on personal relationships, with trust, yeah they are newbies.

Hopefully we will learn more in the next book. Also, we are learning much more about demons and other supernaturals in this world like witches and demi-gods now. So I like the world-building as well as starting to learn much more about these characters.


Anne - Books of My Heart

Berls said...

I adored this book, though I can see your points. I just already really liked both Ian and Veritas - I feel like Ian has a persona, but it's just that, a persona. And he's actually much deeper and I'm enjoying getting to know him better. And Veritas I've been curious about because we've seen her clearly willing to bend the rules in previous books. For me it was 5 stars. I opened up a chat in COYER today to begin discussion, I'd love if you could hop in - I think it would be really interesting to get everyone talking about various thoughts :)

WendyW said...

This sounds good. I'm sorry you didn't love it

Hena Tayeb said...

Sorry to hear it was just alright.

Renee said...

New follower here from #COYER. I'm sorry you didn't like this book. I haven't read it, but I am a fan of the Jeaniene Frost books I have read.