This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by Dominika. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Paranormal Romance category.

Here is Dominika's review:

I was really hoping to like this book. I wanted to write a review that was filled with lots of squee and happy rainbow unicorn gifs because that would have been fun to write. In retrospect, I was being overly optimistic since I am not typically a paranormal romance reader and rarely feel such adoration for the subgenre. This book did not leave me with warm and fuzzy feelings after the HEA. I found the entire journey to the HEA underwhelming. This lackluster reading experience is partly due to my extreme pickiness as a reader. There are specific tropes and character dynamics that I find satisfying in my romance novels, and this book featured none of those. In fact, it was full of a lot of my personal turn-offs.

Our heroine is Annie, a young woman with the special ability to hear other people’s auras. I think she has some kind of super hearing in general since it’s mentioned at some point that she can hear the ocean’s tides from far away. She is visiting her Grandma Tia in the South Alabama town of Bayou LaSiryna. Annie is desperate to be rid of her extrasensory ability, and she hopes her grandmother’s hoodoo powers might help her with that. I sympathize with Annie’s frustration. It’s annoying enough to get a random song stuck in your head; I can’t imagine how I’d deal with the din of every single person’s unique musical aura along with the magnified sound of every cricket and gust of wind. The hero is Tombi, a local Choctaw Indian and a supernaturally gifted hunter of evil spirits. He enlists Annie’s help to fight the local shadow spirits of the bayou in exchange for helping her learn how to control her magically magnified hearing. It’s an ok enough premise and I went into the book ready to suspend a certain amount of disbelief. The execution of this premise, however, did not work for me.

I knew I was in trouble on page one of chapter one after reading this sentence: “The forest beckoned with its thick canopy of trees draped in long tendrils of Spanish moss that fluttered in the sea breeze with a silver shimmer like a living veil of secrecy.” When I eventually get to the sex scenes, genitals are referred to as “his manhood,” stirring “loins,” and her “womanly core.” Perhaps these phrases make you want to pick up this book. Maybe that is a writing style that works for you as a reader. If you enjoy phrases like “weeping whistles of warring hope and despair,” this might be the paranormal romance for you. This writing style fell flat with me. I tend to prefer brisk action and sharp, witty dialogue. I’m not as big a fan of borderline florid descriptions of nature.

I won’t bother going into too much detail about the plot surrounding the supernatural big bad because I found that predictable and tame. The key to defeating the main villain (a shape shifting, misery loving snake beast named Nalusa) involves some kind of magical flute and Annie’s newfound hoodoo powers and the power of love or something and I just couldn’t bring myself to care because what the hell was I thinking when I picked a paranormal romance to review. When reading about the shadow hunters chasing down wicked wisps in the bayou, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the descriptions of people creeping through the woods at night with slingshots. I imagined the hunters throwing rocks at swamp gas and communicating with hand signals in the dark and felt more amused than enchanted by some of the supernatural elements.

Another thing that did not work for me was the reliance on inner monologue as exposition (more telling than showing). I got through the book with a combination of reading and listening to a chunk of it on audio book. The inner monologue felt particularly awkward when listening to the supernatural action scenes. When our main couple first runs into Nalusa, I was listening to Tombi’s inner monologue about Annie’s trustworthiness/Nalusa’s rise to power after Hurricane Katrina and thinking “just attack the stupid snake beast already.”

I never really enjoyed this book because I kept finding things to be persnickety about. Heroine overreacts to the hero telling her to sit down and claims that she doesn’t get ordered around like a dog. Native American music and history is referred to as “primitive” or a “simpler, more natural past existence.” Hero is terse, stoic, temperamental, and emotionally unavailable. Heroine is sweet and nurturing and has to convince the closed off hero that he wants more with her than just sex. Her ex-boyfriend was selfish and terrible in bed and sex with the hero is the best the heroine has ever had. The hero “probes” the “opening of [the heroine’s] womanhood” and I wonder if anyone has ever considered “probe” to be a sexy word. It’s just a long list of moments or tropes that do not appeal to me and add up to a mediocre reading experience.

In conclusion, this was not a book written for me. The things I was picky about might be the very reasons that someone else picks up this book and enjoys it. I considered backing out of the RITA review challenge altogether, but I figured that someone else might read my litany of turn offs and think, “That’s my catnip,” thereby making this review somewhat useful. As for a letter grade, how do you assign a letter grade to something so subjective as reading for pleasure? For the purposes of this review I’m going to go with a C grade since it wasn’t the worst written book I’ve ever read. It also wasn’t an amazing reading experience for me by any means. Bayou Shadow Hunter left me feeling “meh” and I probably won’t be reading tons of paranormal romance in the future.