NB: This is a guest rant. Many years in the making I believe. It’s aged in a notebook like fine wine. Decant it with care and savor!
The backstory on this is that, like, 4 or 5 years ago, I accidentally late-night-bought a free ebook that threw me into such a rage that at like 3AM I decided to write down all my feelings about it. I think I meant to submit it to SBTB. But I think at the time just writing it all down made me feel better about everything.
Cut to now, several houses and cities later, and I find this old notebook containing many things including this old rant. I’ve cleaned up the writing a little bit, but I was too amused with past me’s anger to not send this to anyone, especially its intended audience. So here is my 5 year old review of Feral Sins by Suzanne Wright.
This is a cautionary tale of buying an Amazon Kindle book without reading the description or any reviews. In my defense, it was accidental. Had I read the reviews, I know I would not have read this book. But, alas, while shopping on my Kindle, my finger slipped and I bought a book. A book I deeply regret and ended up DNFing around the 70% mark.
This book didn’t start out so bad. Because of my accidental purchase, I forgave the grammatical errors and awkward sentence structure. The plot reminded me of a Shelly Laurenston book (which I adore), with slightly less interesting characters, aside from our heroine, Taryn. Taryn is a latent werewolf – as in, she can’t shift. However, she’s a powerful healer and a self-described sarcastic bitch. I don’t mind this in a heroine, preferring it to TSTL heroines or the weepy virgin stereotype.
Her father doesn’t care about her, and plans for her to be mated against her will to a horrible alpha who wants to make her his slave. At the beginning of the novel, she is kidnapped by our hero Trey (in hindsight, the kidnapping is a warning sign) who proposes the plan of them pretending to be mated so she won’t end up with the Jerkface Alpha and so Trey will gain an alliance with her father. Their plan succeeds, she moves in with his Pack, and the problems begin.
Before I get to the scene that made me DNF this book, let me list the pros and cons of the first 70%:
Pros:
1) The shifters. This world has an interesting take on the wolves. The wolf is almost a different person inside, with separate emotions. They have “true mates,” but can imprint on someone else if something should go wrong. They live in packs in houses together, have alliances, and a council. I liked this world-building.
2) Taryn. I liked her. She was funny, sarcastic, and pragmatic. However, at times I did have trouble understanding why she stayed with Trey.
3) The original plot. It was interesting and different, I liked that they were pretending to be mates and the true love bond didn’t snap in instantly.
Cons:
1) The rest of the plot! Dear lord, this book loves to introduce conflict and then get rid of it in insulting-to-the-reader ways.
Examples: The original Jerkface Alpha plot is tied up about 2 days after Taryn moves in with Trey, way too easily. I thought he would be more of a villain, but nope! It all works out neatly!
Also, at one point Trey assigns one of his men to be Taryn’s bodyguard. BG falls in love with her, offers to leave when he does so, freaks her out, and then stops talking to her when she starts seriously boinking Trey. Later, Trey is all “You can’t talk to my woman. She’s Sad. This makes me Sad.” And BG is all, “Sorry for being in love with you. I’m over that. You and Trey r so cute! xoxo!” to Taryn and she’s all “Yay!” This was wrapped up way too easily, IMO.
Finally, a major conflict is whether or not Trey and Taryn are soulmates. This is…you guessed it…tied up rather neatly 5 seconds after being introduced. This is when I realized that the main plot for the last 50% of the book would be “will Trey accept her love” and “who is betraying Trey??” Argh to the first, meh to the second.
2) Trey. So…he’s supposed to be “psycho,” but to me he acted less psycho than all the other wolves. He’s also emotionally repressed. He’s insanely obsessed with Taryn, but he doesn’t love her because he can’t know love. This is literally my least favorite trope at this point.
3) The side characters. They were all flat with one character type apiece. We have prudish grandma, bitchy slut blonde, guy who only speaks in pick-up lines (literally why), BG with crush on Taryn, geek, and girl who cooks. All of them (of course!) love Taryn except (of course!) the bitchy blonde.
5) The sex. Look, I love sex in a romance novel. I love erotica. But this sex often seemed a little rapey, which can be up to interpretation. This was of the “You want me, but won’t admit it, but you are wet and so you are MINE!” and I didn’t feel like there was enough clear consent. A vagina producing moisture does not equal consent. I think that their “alphaness” was supposed to make this a non-issue, but it was a problem for me.
Which brings me to the WTF, DNF-causing, ruiner-of-a-mediocre-book scene:
For Trey’s birthday, Taryn agrees to submit to any fantasy he has for one hour. So he chooses group sex. It’s not that I have a problem with group sex per se, but rather how it’s presented in this book. It’s arranged without Taryn’s foreknowledge, entirely by Trey. All 6 guys in the pack come in and do…whatever they want to her (apparently they have all been harboring fantasies about her). Earlier in the book, Taryn won’t even perform oral sex on Trey and now she’s deepthroating six guys. What??
And before Trey was all Overpossessive Alpha Male and wouldn’t let anymore touch her, and almost killed BG for wanting her. He also admitted earlier that he’s shared women before but Taryn’s different. What??
But mostly, it wasn’t so much that it was out of character for Trey so much as in the beginning it really seemed as though Taryn does not want this, but then she gets turned on, and that’s when I gave up. Look, I’m all for promising your SO access to their kink on their birthday, but I think saying “whatever you want baby” does have some limitations. Like, my BF knows I am terrified of mascots, so if I told him “whatever you want” and then he came in in a mascot costume, I would definitely be within my rights to back out. Or if he brought in his 6 closest bros. Who live in our house. So I gave up on this book at this point.
I then went to look at the Amazon reviews and found that the negative reviews all agreed with my perspective that what could have been a 3.5-4 star book became a 1 star or DNF at that point. In my opinion, the first 20% is a SBTB B/B+, the middle 50% is a C, and the book as a whole is a DNF. I assume Trey and Taryn get a HEA, but I couldn’t care less at this point.
*Note from present-day me: I can honestly say that 5 years later, I definitely remember this book, but only because of the last scene. I honestly think this review was being kind as I vaguely remember having serious issues with the repetitiveness and poor editing. But I don’t remember much of the plot. Much like HABOs, I guess we only remember the most bonkers parts of books! I would be interested to know if anyone in the Bitchery has read this book and if so, what they thought of it! Perhaps it isn’t as bad as past me thought it was…
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*lol* The author has actually removed that scene from current copies of the book.
So I, of course, had to go look at the book at Amazon probably because I suffer from how-bad-can-it-be? syndrome and if-it’s-that-bad-I-have-to-read-it disease, and interestedly enough the author changed the book, probably because of complaints similar to the rant. (Like Eve already mentioned.) It’s got me wondering how often authors are making the major changes because of massive review complaints. I’ve seen revisions before, but I don’t think I’ve seen this before. Anyway, despite my perverse urge to read it, I’ll pass.
Whenever there are love triangles between an insanely obsessive alphahole hero, the heroine and another (usually more sane) guy, I always root for the heroine to drop the possessive hero and go for the other dude. I would LOVE to read a book where this happens.
Anyway. Nice rant! These things would also drive me crazy.
From the Goodreads page, it looks like the book was originally self-published, then Montlake picked it up. Since they most likely did a fresh edit on it, perhaps getting rid of that scene was one of their suggestions or requirements before acquiring it.
I just read this book a little over a month ago. Actually I read this book and then quickly devoured the rest of the series and Wright’s Mercury Pack series. Was this one of my favorite books ever? No. Was Trey an Alphahole? Yes. Did I have reservations with the plot while reading the book and upon further reflection? ABSOLUTELY.
The group sex thing would have pushed me over the edge too. I certainly may have given it a DNF. Group sex would have been way out of character for Trey, and Taryn for that matter.
Fans of shifters and paranormal romances might like the Montlake version of this book though. I didn’t find the sentence structure to be weird or off putting; it seemed pretty well put together. I really enjoyed this book actually.
Wow. That is… a new level of crazy. Great rant, though!
Yeah, I just read this last week and was actually a bit peeved that there WASN’T any partner-sharing or voyeurism because there’s significant groundwork laid for them in the story but then the actual stuff was edited out. Annoying.
In the new version, his kinky b-day gift is just butt sexx. 🙂
Hah, my favourite part of the book was that group sex scene (still return to that sometimes), but that’s just my kink ;D
@NT is correct. The book was originally self-published, but Montlake required that the group sex scene be cut when they acquired it.
Haha, like Jo, I didn’t mind that scene. TBH, Suzanne Wright is on my auto-buy list.
Original ranter here! It’s so interesting that they released a new version of the book with that scene edited! And I think I ended up reading another book by her (with vampires?) that I liked more?
I have nothing wrong with group sex in general, I think it was just the contrast between his possessiveness and then suddenly wanting everyone to bang her that made me DNF.
But I can definitely tell she has a lot of fans and maybe I will give her another try, especially looking at these comments!
Ooh. The vamp series is pretty good. And the first book in her demon series is also fun. Feral Sins was definitely her roughest, most out-there book!
Great rant! Three years or so later, I still remember the scene and regret reading the book.
Adore your rant. Thank you.
Thing is, I think it came too late. I vaguely remembering read a book with a Taryn and a Trey and shapeshifters but it definitely did not have any group sex as that is a huge turn-off for me. Not to mention it doesn’t make any sense… Trey is all supper-possessive and then suddenly he has her gang raped?
@C L Bevill – the only similar example I can think of is Whitney, My Love by Judith McNaught. (I’m not sure exactly why the author revised it for the second edition but she did take out a spanking / crop scene and alter a sex scene to make it less rapey.)
I have the book without that scene, but am totally with you on the grammatical errors, lazy writing, and shallow world/characters. It really felt to me like she hadn’t thought about what the world really looked like, how everything worked, who people actually were; she has no sense of who everyone is; it was like she picked a stereotype and threw it in. Having read Nalini Singh, who builds world and characters so well, this was like eating cardboard. Also, I moonlight as a copy editor and I was mentally changing the writing the whole time I was reading. She shouldn’t have been let anywhere near a book contract.
Whaaaaaaat the… I can’t believe she put that scene into this book. OMG! so disappointing. It doesn’t even make sense.
I haven’t read this book but I have read several others in the series and I agree that her grammar is problematic. My main gripe is that each book has the exact same sex scenes. Like, word for word phrasing and actions. Is this author unaware that different people have different kinds of sex? After 6 books I feel like I know what kind of sex the author has and it appears to be all she knows. Definitely lacks imagination and I was pretty bored of it by the 3rd book.
You just took the words out of my head. The cons are exactly how I feel about the book. The character’s personalities were not adding up at all. How can you be possessive, then decide to share her 6 other guys, letting them put their things in her? Like No, it just doesn’t add up. The whole plot of the book felt so amateurish, especially for the ratings it had. The conflicts were grossly exaggerated. How does a group of 15 people (including a granny)be considered a “STRONG” pack. Like how???? They easily could have be overthrown at any time. It just makes no sense to how powerful they were being portrayed. Urghhh, the entire book did not just add up. I feel like the beginning had prospects but ehn was lost along the way.