I gave up after Chapter 5 for the following reasons:
1) A book that starts out with action and throwing the hero & heroine immediately together is one of my peeves. I feel like the author is forcing me to care/identify with two people who I'm not even on the first name basis with. Lofty also dropped so many details about other characters and their relation to the H/h, that it was dizzying. So Meg has a sister named Ada, and Will knows Ada from some fair, and the sheriff is good, except he's not, and there was some betrayal going on, and Will kills men he was just in alliance with a few pages earlier. Sure, movies start out with a bang sometimes with great success (like Gladiator), but there was simply no groundwork at ALL in the first chapter here to give me any connection whatsoever to the people who were scrambling around with swords in the woods. The cryptic way Lofty shared these details seemed like she was writing about characters and their backstories which she knew quite well in her mind, but didn't bother to fill in the reader. It's sort of like a careless fanficcer in that way - writing within an established universe and leaving stuff out because knowledge is assumed. I think having a bang of a first scene was given higher priority than coherence. My impression of the first couple chapters was watching a soccer game played by 8 year olds with ADD. It was ALL over the place.
2) Meg, the "heroine." How ridiculously angry she was, and her emotions were utterly wasted because, apart from a cryptic comment that she hadn't seen anything in 5 years, I had absolutely no idea why she was being such a harridan. Maybe I was supposed to be intrigued by her behaviour and be impressed when it was slowly revealed that she had loads of baggage involving her sister, but I transferred the premise to real life and found it lacking. If someone comes at me like a raging b!tch, but then their twagic past is revealed afterwards, that first impression is still the one that will linger.
3) And what was up with the inexplicable male rape? So Meg needs to scratch an itch after clawing the dude and being thoroughly disagreeable, and we get treated to that in Chapter 5. Again, who are these people and why should I care? By the end of that chapter, Meg could have died and I wouldn't have cared. Likewise, I cared not a bit what she and Will would get up to in the rest of the book, so I threw it to the side. Why waste time?
The more I read some of these hot new titles, the more I prefer the older romances - obnoxious sexual politics and all. By the time the H/h embark on a shared path, the author usually established each of them on solid ground. Love 'em or hate 'em, I know who they are as people. This tendency for instant gratification to have the protagonists thrown together from the first chapter just isn't my cup of tea. What is the theory? That my love for the characters will come later? I'm sorry I fell for the hype surrounding this book. I'll get my Merry Men jollies elsewhere.
1) A book that starts out with action and throwing the hero & heroine immediately together is one of my peeves. I feel like the author is forcing me to care/identify with two people who I'm not even on the first name basis with. Lofty also dropped so many details about other characters and their relation to the H/h, that it was dizzying. So Meg has a sister named Ada, and Will knows Ada from some fair, and the sheriff is good, except he's not, and there was some betrayal going on, and Will kills men he was just in alliance with a few pages earlier. Sure, movies start out with a bang sometimes with great success (like Gladiator), but there was simply no groundwork at ALL in the first chapter here to give me any connection whatsoever to the people who were scrambling around with swords in the woods. The cryptic way Lofty shared these details seemed like she was writing about characters and their backstories which she knew quite well in her mind, but didn't bother to fill in the reader. It's sort of like a careless fanficcer in that way - writing within an established universe and leaving stuff out because knowledge is assumed. I think having a bang of a first scene was given higher priority than coherence. My impression of the first couple chapters was watching a soccer game played by 8 year olds with ADD. It was ALL over the place.
2) Meg, the "heroine." How ridiculously angry she was, and her emotions were utterly wasted because, apart from a cryptic comment that she hadn't seen anything in 5 years, I had absolutely no idea why she was being such a harridan. Maybe I was supposed to be intrigued by her behaviour and be impressed when it was slowly revealed that she had loads of baggage involving her sister, but I transferred the premise to real life and found it lacking. If someone comes at me like a raging b!tch, but then their twagic past is revealed afterwards, that first impression is still the one that will linger.
3) And what was up with the inexplicable male rape? So Meg needs to scratch an itch after clawing the dude and being thoroughly disagreeable, and we get treated to that in Chapter 5. Again, who are these people and why should I care? By the end of that chapter, Meg could have died and I wouldn't have cared. Likewise, I cared not a bit what she and Will would get up to in the rest of the book, so I threw it to the side. Why waste time?
The more I read some of these hot new titles, the more I prefer the older romances - obnoxious sexual politics and all. By the time the H/h embark on a shared path, the author usually established each of them on solid ground. Love 'em or hate 'em, I know who they are as people. This tendency for instant gratification to have the protagonists thrown together from the first chapter just isn't my cup of tea. What is the theory? That my love for the characters will come later? I'm sorry I fell for the hype surrounding this book. I'll get my Merry Men jollies elsewhere.
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