This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by ElizaS. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Paranormal Romance category.

Here is ElizaS's review:

I liked this book, but I wanted to adore it. Victorian setting? Love it. Vampires? I’m in. Smart heroine rebelling against the gender restrictions of her time? SIGN ME UP. Evernight has all of these elements, in addition to a sexy hero, a so-crazy-but-it-works method of forcing the two leads together, and lots of cool steampunk gadgetry. However, it also suffers from an overabundance of plot and some unfortunate writing issues that I just could not ignore, no matter how hard I tried.

First, the good stuff.

THE HERO: Do not believe the cover, readers. William Thorne is not a sandy-haired man with a soccer-player build, a type that just doesn’t do much for me. William Thorne possesses long hair as white as “fresh snow” in which he takes great pride, often sports a top hat, and has a body that’s “sinewy and lean of form . . . all sinful promise and decadent indulgence.”

Part of the fun of Calihan’s Darkest London series is that the supernatural creatures are all a little different from those run-of-the-mill vampires and werewolves, so William is technically a sanguis, a type of demon that derives its energy and power from drinking blood and having sex. So . . . he’s pretty much a vampire, but the distinction allows Calihan’s world to have more unpredictable rules and interactions. His banter with Holly Evernight is playful and sexy, yet tinged with a tragic backstory—exactly what I want in a vamp…um, sanguis.

THE SET-UP: Okay, stay with me here. Holly, our heroine, was kidnapped and forced to use her substantial scientific talents to place a mechanical heart in William. When performed on humans after their death, this procedure causes them to be a ghost-in-the-machine, or GIM, one of Calihan’s unique supernatural creations. For William, however, this causes his body to start adapting to the mechanism by transforming into metal, a process that’s incredibly painful and that eventually (once the metal reaches his mind) robs him of memories and identity. Holly, conveniently, is an “elemental” with the power to control metal. What does this combination lead to? A plot device that requires Holly to have to touch William continually (and eventually give him some extended massages that increase in intimacy throughout the book) in order to save him from pain and loss of self. For all its craziness, I loved this idea; it was truly something I hadn’t seen before, and had the potential for great emotion, awkwardness, and seduction on both sides.

THE HEROINE: Holly Evernight is a great mix of strength and weakness, Victorian enough to believably resist William’s vampiric seductions and empowered enough to satisfy a smart bitch’s reading needs. Callihan has created an agoraphobic steampunk queen in Holly: her deliciously huge mansion is filled with her inventions that often actually get used in the novel’s action scenes. She’s incredibly smart, and part of her motivation for working for the SOS (Society for the Suppression of Supernaturals) lies in her need to use her gift of scientific intelligence and creation for people who will appreciate—and allow—it.

At the same time, her kidnapping incident has left her with an understandable amount of PTSD-like anxiety, and she hasn’t left her home in nearly a year. She’s independent, intelligent, and kind to her friends, but she has two challenges to overcome: her fear of the outside world and her overly analytical mind. William helps her with both.

THE SEX: On point. As it should be, with these two characters.

Now, the not-good stuff.

OVERLY COMPLEX PLOT: I’m aware that this may be a fairly personal critique, but I like to dwell with a couple’s emotions and conversations more than I like to see them running around meeting all the other supernatural creatures in London. I highly recommend reading all four books in the Darkest London series before attempting this one. Having read the first two in the series, I assumed that, like many romance series with a different couple in each book, you could jump into any of them once you understood the basic rules of their particular world. Unfortunately, this novel did not work that way for me. This may be embarrassing to admit (forgive me, I read this during a big move), but by the end I had trouble remembering the ultimate reasons behind all the mysterious interactions between characters. I’d have liked fewer characters and a less complicated barrier to the love between William and Holly.

LANGUAGE/WRITING: One of my personal pet peeves is the overuse of language structures that the author thinks fit the time period, but they don’t. For some writers of historical romance, these develop into something like a linguistic tic that comes up so often that it becomes distracting. Calihan’s are “_____, that” and “_____, but.”

Examples:

“Hells bells, but he hurt there.”
“Oh, but he sounded cold now.”
“Saints preserve her, but it was difficult.”
“Odd, that.”

I’ve seen this with other authors, and it tends to happen when the narrator is speaking with the character’s voice. For someone (like many of you, I know) who has read a lot of fiction written in the nineteenth century, these phrases just don’t ring true when they’re used more than, say, three times per novel. It sounds nit-picky, I’m sure, but it distracted me from the story and made the Victorian atmosphere less believable than the demons and elementals did!

In other places the writing was just weak in an unedited type of way. For example, as Holly stands outside, she notices that “even the breeze had died, as though holding its breath.” The breeze, alas, can only perform one of those human actions at a time: nothing dead can hold its breath. Or, in another, more entertaining example, the paranormal briefly goes from serious to silly, as William describes his previous attempt to kill himself: “I can’t. Satan knows I’ve tried. But I simply dissipate. To shadows! Fuck.” I love to jump on board with the weirdness, but that line made me just laugh out loud.

Ultimately, the second half of this book was an improvement on the first half, and I think it will be a more rewarding read for those who are sufficiently warned that, at least for this romance series, it’s fairly necessary to read each book that has come before this one. This novel has glowing reviews on Amazon, so I’m a little reticent about putting this one out there, since I may be all alone in my reservations . . . but the Smart Bitches deserve honesty. If this sounds like only your catnip with none of your personal pet peeves, give Evernight a shot!