Author: Jessica Andersen
Series: Royal House of Shadows, #3
Genres: Fantasy, Paranormal Romance
Publisher: Harlequin
Date Published: October 18th, 2011
Edition: eBook
Source: eARC via Netgalley
Once upon a time…the Blood Sorcerer vanquished the kingdom of Elden.
To save their children, the queen scattered them to safety and the king filled them with vengeance.
Only a magical timepiece connects the four royal heirs…and time is running out…
For practical Reda Weston, nothing could explain how reading a sexy version of “Little Red Riding Hood” catapulted her into another realm—face-to-fang with the legendary wolf-creature who seduced women. A wolf who transformed into a dark, virile man…
Dayn cursed the Sorcerer that turned him wolfyn and damned him to a lonely fate. As a beast, he mated with women to gain strength.
Strength he needed to rescue his royal parents. But as a man, he craved Reda’s heated, sizzling touch. With little time left, Dayn had to either embrace his wolf to save his kingdom…or fight it to save his woman.
My Review:
In this third installment in the Royal House of Shadows, Jessica Andersen tells the story of Dayn and Reda. This is the first thing I’ve ever read by Jessica Andersen, actually I’d never heard of her before this series. So as far as that goes I wasn’t sure what to expect going in. Unfortunately, this book is the weakest in the series so far (in my opinion), so I don’t think I’ll be reading anything else from this author anytime soon.
This started off pretty good though. Lord of Rage kind of had this underlying Goldilox and the Three Bears thing going for it, and in this one we get a lot of influences from Red Riding Hood. I liked this and I think it’s a really cool aspect of the series. I can’t imagine what fairytale the first book, Lord of the Vampires, would’ve represented, or maybe they didn’t start doing the fairytale influences until the second book. I’ve heard some people say it was Alice In Wonderland, but I didn’t really see that at all. But anyways, I liked that aspect of the book a lot and so for me this started out pretty good.
However, from there it seemed to go downhill. I wasn’t a fan in general of the writing style. It just sort of seemed all over the place and blurry. In addition, while I didn’t dislike Reda and Dayn, Reda was sometimes annoying and I overall just didn’t really feel much at all towards either of them.
There were also a few problems with the dynamics of the world again. This seemed to happen in Lord of the Vampires as well. But in this case my problems were:
For one, how in the world is Dayn a wolfyn? That makes no sense unless he was adopted, which I don’t remember reading anything about in this book. Perhaps I missed that part? I just didn’t get that at all and it seemed like one of those things that was thrown in there just because they needed him to be a werewolf at the time, but there was no foreshadowing or any kind of reasoning behind it.
Secondly, who is Moragh? Is that the person that took over Elden or just some random villain? This was confusing to me. Maybe I should’ve remembered from the previous books. But I was thrown off because it was a female and I could’ve sworn that the person who took over Elden was a male. That being said, this just seemed like an extremely random conflict.
Finally, I think it’s a little too convenient and it makes no sense that Reda is vampire royalty. This seemed like another one of those things that really wasn’t thought out very well. If she’s vampire royalty, why has she lived in the human world with no memory of this at all for her whole life?
In addition to those spoiler-esk tiffs, I also found it very annoying that Dayn said “Gods and the Abyss” or “Gods” like every other sentence. First of all what is the Abyss? I’m sure we’ll find out the next book but it made no sense in this one. Second of all, he just said this way too much. It was like his only reaction to anything that was remotely shocking.
To leave off on a bit of a good note, I still really like this world and I’ve heard absolutely fabulous things about Nalini Singh’s contribution, Lord of the Abyss. So I’m still very much looking forward to that book and seeing how all of this wraps up. This one just wasn’t for me. So far it’s been kind of a mixed bag with this series, kind of like a lot of anthologies.
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