A review by its_tara
Fury of Fire by Coreene Callahan

2.0

This review was originally posted on my blog

Okay, so in honour of Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d read a nice paranormal romance novel. Unfortunately, I could have picked a better book.



Admittedly, I finished this book, and it wasn’t terrible, I just didn’t really enjoy it, and I had a few issues with it. One of those was the writing style. It just wasn’t for me. It was one of those things where I can’t really explain why I wasn’t enjoying it, I just wasn’t.



Another issue I had was the characters – I wasn’t particularly keen on any of them. Eventually, I came to almost-like Bastian – he might be this big alpha male type (and okay, given the genre of the book, I should probably have expected that one) but he did genuinely seem to care about Myst come the end, and some of the things he did for her were almost sweet. Even if he didn’t always tell her the full truth. However, Myst herself, I found to be far too headstrong, and too whiny all at the same time. It was pretty obvious she was going to get herself into trouble by leaving the lair – was it not obvious there’d be police looking for her? – and yet she went and did it anyway. I just… yeah, I didn’t like her. The supporting cast, for me, were fairly unremarkable, though I understand that subsequent books in the series follow them in more detail.



In this, Ivan was the leader of a renegade group of dragonkind. Now, dragonkind, are half-human half-dragons who ‘feed’ from human energy. Now, Ivan at one point states a desire to wipe out humans. Now, if you need to feed from humans to survive, this idea seems a little half-baked, to say the least. Later it does transpire that he actually wants to perform genetic experiments which would help overcome the shortcomings of dragonkind as a race (such as their inability to birth daughters, they only have sons – meaning they have to breed with human females… another potential flaw in wiping out humans?) Okay, so an evil scientist bad guy that Bastian and his crew (the Nightfuries) are fighting to stop – I admit, it was fairly plausible, but didn’t feel particularly original.



Now, I’m not saying this is a bad book – the sex scenes were generally pretty well done, and didn’t feel ridiculously cheesy, and it wasn’t a case where you had a “bare all” scenario – some things were left out, and I think this was for the best. It didn’t feel sleazy or anything, which can happen with this kind of book. Also, the attraction between Myst and Bastian was well written, and it was obvious when it moved from lust towards affection, which was good.



I also liked the idea of the dragonkind, and the ways that they managed to hide themselves from human view were pretty clever. It was also nice to see a paranormal race using human technology as well as their own, rather than being scared of it, because let's face it, to survive in the modern world, they'd probably at least need to have a working knowledge, and that isn't always portrayed in fantasy novels.



Also, the story moved along relatively quickly, meaning I didn’t end up getting bored at any point. This book wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t particularly for me. Definitely could have been worse, but a couple of things bugged me overall.