Title: Rock Addiction
Series: Rock Kiss, Book 1
Author: Nalini Singh
Publisher: TKA Distribution/Amazon Digital
Release Date: September 9, 2014
Reviewing: eARC from Netgalley
Reason for reading: Nalini Singh is a huge favorite of mine
The Short Answer
To be honest, I was a little disappointed.
The Blurb (from Singh's website)
A bad boy wrapped in a sexy, muscled, grown-up package might be worth a little risk…The Whole Scoop
Molly Webster has always followed the rules. After an ugly scandal tore apart her childhood and made her the focus of the media's harsh spotlight, she vowed to live an ordinary life. No fame. No impropriety. No pain. Then she meets Zachary Fox, a tattooed bad boy rocker with a voice like whiskey and sin, and a touch that could become an addiction.
A one-night stand with the hottest rock star on the planet, that's all it was meant to be…
Fox promises scorching heat and dangerous pleasure, coaxing Molly to extend their one-night stand into a one-month fling. After that, he'll be gone forever, his life never again intersecting with her own. Sex and sin and sensual indulgence, all with an expiration date. No ties, no regrets. Too late, Molly realizes it isn't only her body that's become addicted to Fox, but her heart…
Just this morning, my Twitter feed included a quote attributed to Henry James: "The only classification of the novel that I can understand is into that which has life and that which has it not."
I checked the quote attribution, because that's how I roll, and it turns out that the actual quote is "the only classification of the novel that I can understand is into the interesting and the uninteresting." (based on two different archives of the full text of "The Art of Fiction"). There are numerous documents that attribute it the other way, but they are not the primary text. Just so you know.
However, the apparently incorrect version of the quote intrigues me more as a reviewer and a reader. And I think it sums up a bit of the difficulty I had with this book. It just didn't have the life, the crackle, that I associate with Singh's paranormal romances.
The characters were on the cardboard side to me; the heroine a meek everyday librarian with a tendency to run when scared, and the hero a blustery, occasionally over-stepping alpha male. While the characters are technically beyond New Adult age, it had that feel to me because the heroine was quite young and inexperienced, and there was also a surprising amount of sex -- bordering on erotica-level heat and frequency.
The book falls naturally into two sections, the division of which is a bit spoilery, but I I liked the second half better. The pacing picks up, the action picks up, and I liked the scenes with the other band members. On the downside, there isn't a compelling plotline here to keep things moving -- it's a very internal, overcoming-our-issues story, which works great when you love the characters, but doesn't help if the characterization isn't working 100%.
The Bottom Line
Lots of people are loving this title so maybe I just had an off day, and I suspect there is no way the average Singh fan is going to bypass it no matter what I say. And honestly, I will most likely pick up the next book in this series, but I have to hope that it works a little better for me.
Around the Blogosphere
Romance Reader At Heart
Book Swoon
Feeding My Addiction
2 comments:
Can there be a category for book is meh but you should buy it just to gaze at the cover? :)
I don't see why not!
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