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A review by elenajohansen
Prince in Leather by Holley Trent
1.0
This is one of those reads that was so disjointed, I hardly know where to start unpicking the tangle of my thoughts about it. So let me try a point-by-point list format.
World-building: Sucks. Even if we set aside the weird grafting of pseudo-Irish fae onto a biker gang (hey, genre-mixing is fun sometimes, I applaud the creativity if not the end result) there's a slapdash quality to everything, curses and goddesses and fairy mythos piled together without anything resembling a plan. I admit my paranormal fantasy reading is limited to one big-name author and several lesser-known indies, so pardon my comparison to the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews: but this story is like the first KD book, only with even less explanation for anything. (I loved the whole series ultimately but I did feel the world-building in the first two novels could have been clearer.)
Characters: Too many and too shallow. And I mean waaaaay too many. There's the main couple, fine, but they've also got a third wheel grafted onto them, sort of. And that third wheel has two fated mates, apparently, and part of the story involves them, and also like six other characters surrounding them. And there's twelve members of the gang total, which isn't unreasonable in theory, but taking a whole chapter to randomly assign two more of them their mates from among the heroine's incredibly tiny circle of friends felt excessive and clunky. And there's a subplot about figuring out the heroine's fae lineage, which introduces several of her family members, and the first one we meet (her grandpa) is kind of entertaining and probably justified his place in the story, but everyone else shows up for ten seconds and acts like they own the place (story.) But I know nothing about these people! Why are they important?
Plot: what plot? No, seriously, what happens? There is no overarching story line beyond the romance, it's just a bunch of hooligans freeing the heroine from her curse (sort of) before the end of the first act, when I was under the impression that was a serious obstacle in her life, and then they just spend the rest of the book gallivanting around picking off minor bad guys and getting a tiny bit roughed up by Queen Bitch's guards. Which I guess was supposed to be the main plot, that the romance is putting the heroine in danger from her lover's mom? Only it never felt imminent enough to make it an actual threat, and so much else was going on that had nothing to do with it. Or nothing to do with anything, as far as I can tell.
Romance: blarg. Fated mates is not my favorite trope, but this wasn't even trying to pretend the protagonists had any chemistry, or reason to be together beyond "he says so," or even the slightest bit of sexual tension. The hero is just a gross man-child who steamrolls the heroine in nearly every way possible, including making his second-in-command a part of their sexual proceedings, not explicitly against her will, but definitely with a lot of coaxing to get her comfortable with the idea. I'm not at all against kink in general or threesomes in particular, but all of this felt like it was entirely out of left field, and not justified in any way by their personalities (what little they have) or any sort of thematic necessity.
When I got to the end matter and found out this book is the first in its duology, but not the first in the story universe, the shoddy world-building and vague feeling that I'd somehow been dropped in the middle of something unfamiliar became more understandable. But either it should be able to stand on its own anyway, or there should be some sort of indication in the front matter that this isn't the beginning of the story, and I should not start here.
World-building: Sucks. Even if we set aside the weird grafting of pseudo-Irish fae onto a biker gang (hey, genre-mixing is fun sometimes, I applaud the creativity if not the end result) there's a slapdash quality to everything, curses and goddesses and fairy mythos piled together without anything resembling a plan. I admit my paranormal fantasy reading is limited to one big-name author and several lesser-known indies, so pardon my comparison to the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews: but this story is like the first KD book, only with even less explanation for anything. (I loved the whole series ultimately but I did feel the world-building in the first two novels could have been clearer.)
Characters: Too many and too shallow. And I mean waaaaay too many. There's the main couple, fine, but they've also got a third wheel grafted onto them, sort of. And that third wheel has two fated mates, apparently, and part of the story involves them, and also like six other characters surrounding them. And there's twelve members of the gang total, which isn't unreasonable in theory, but taking a whole chapter to randomly assign two more of them their mates from among the heroine's incredibly tiny circle of friends felt excessive and clunky. And there's a subplot about figuring out the heroine's fae lineage, which introduces several of her family members, and the first one we meet (her grandpa) is kind of entertaining and probably justified his place in the story, but everyone else shows up for ten seconds and acts like they own the place (story.) But I know nothing about these people! Why are they important?
Plot: what plot? No, seriously, what happens? There is no overarching story line beyond the romance, it's just a bunch of hooligans freeing the heroine from her curse (sort of) before the end of the first act, when I was under the impression that was a serious obstacle in her life, and then they just spend the rest of the book gallivanting around picking off minor bad guys and getting a tiny bit roughed up by Queen Bitch's guards. Which I guess was supposed to be the main plot, that the romance is putting the heroine in danger from her lover's mom? Only it never felt imminent enough to make it an actual threat, and so much else was going on that had nothing to do with it. Or nothing to do with anything, as far as I can tell.
Romance: blarg. Fated mates is not my favorite trope, but this wasn't even trying to pretend the protagonists had any chemistry, or reason to be together beyond "he says so," or even the slightest bit of sexual tension. The hero is just a gross man-child who steamrolls the heroine in nearly every way possible, including making his second-in-command a part of their sexual proceedings, not explicitly against her will, but definitely with a lot of coaxing to get her comfortable with the idea. I'm not at all against kink in general or threesomes in particular, but all of this felt like it was entirely out of left field, and not justified in any way by their personalities (what little they have) or any sort of thematic necessity.
When I got to the end matter and found out this book is the first in its duology, but not the first in the story universe, the shoddy world-building and vague feeling that I'd somehow been dropped in the middle of something unfamiliar became more understandable. But either it should be able to stand on its own anyway, or there should be some sort of indication in the front matter that this isn't the beginning of the story, and I should not start here.