This review is for a book I read in LAST year's challenge that I never got around to writing and posting before now.
Performed by Gabra Zackman
Harlequin Enterprises/Silhouette Nocturne #20/Audible
Category Romance
Paranormal Romance/Dark Fantasy
Paranormal Romance/Shape Shifter
Unabridged Audio Book
Rating: 2
Ana was adopted as a child and returns to Peru to find out about her origins and why she feels such a strong bond to jaguars. Once there she meets Mace Ridfort who immediately senses what she is. Only problem is, her birth father is the most evil sorcerer there is and Mace is convinced she is evil too. Ana believes she is good, like her mother was. As these two look for the answers they discover their fate is in each other and that only together can they fight off the greatest danger to all the shape shifter kind… her father's plans.
Dark Truth seemed to take an exceptionally long time to really get revved up and happening. I kept wondering when we were going to get into the action. This may be because I did not read the first book in the series and if I had, much of the story here would have appealed to me a bit more and not seemed so slow going. Then once events started to unfold they were over and done with far too quickly, and the final portion of the book read more like a prelude to book three than a conclusion of this particular story. Since I had the same problem with McKenna’s Bombshell books I read while so many others raved about them, that’s why I’ve come to the conclusion she just isn’t for me.
I never really got completely emotionally invested in Mace and Ana’s story. I felt for Ana struggling with the knowledge her father is one of the most horrendously evil beings out there and her struggle to prove she is nothing like him. I felt sorry for her dealing with the prejudice born of others’ knowledge of her blood line. The struggle of Ana and Mace to overcome her legacy and build their own on the path of light instead of dark was well developed, but for some reason it just didn’t resonate with me the way I expect my books to do.
The thing about Dark Truth that got to me the most, making me not fall in love with the story, was the evil Tupe (pronounced too-PAY in the audio book). The pronunciation sounded too much like something else to me and it just ruined the book for me. I'm sorry but I had a really hard time envisioning these bad-ass sorcery-practicing characters when every time I heard the word I was seeing a giant hair piece. The dark mood of the book is destroyed when I start giggling over the image that word portrayed in my mind.
I’m sorry to say I’ve come to the conclusion after a few books that Lindsay McKenna just doesn’t cut it for me when I am looking for a good read. Her writing style and my tastes just don’t gel very well so I think I’ll just part ways with her and not try any more of her books. That doesn’t mean her books are awful, it just means they aren’t to my tastes. She has hordes of fans out there though so obviously she’s doing something very right to keep so many people coming back for more, all the while attracting new readers. I am just not one of them.
© Kelley A. Hartsell, February 2008. All rights reserved.
