This is me thinking about how much of a wallbanger The Cursed was. Distraught, Overwhelmed and just a little bit Peeved. I’ve followed this series for about two years now, have faithfully purchased every book the day it was released and talked it up to anyone I met. But The Cursed…I don’t know if Leslie was off her game or if I’m being too picky these days, but it was a complete and utter disaster. I rushed out to buy it and for some reason I wasn’t feeling it, so it sat on my desk for a week and a half before I could even muster up any enthusiasm to read it. And as I slogged through, my initial instincts were correct: this book is bad.
Banks usually meanders a bit in the beginning of her books, picking them up where the last book left off, but I wanted to cut out the first 70 pages of this book so badly. It was repetitive, irritating and flat. For some reason the characters that left me giddy with enthusiasm and laughter were cardboard flat and the villains were just too much and too “eevil genius”/Dr. Evil for me. One thing that really nagged at me was the constant trips into Hell. If these are the Last Days and the Guardians and Neteru Council’s are on edge, ready for battle, why is it that it’s so easy for them to run down to Hell and exchange menacing words with Lilith, Dante or whomever is that books arch-enemy but they never kill them?
I’m just so disappointed in this book I can’t even go into detail how bad this it is. And I don’t even know if I want to continue on to the last three books.
August 5, 2007
The Templar’s Seduction is the final book in McCall’s Templar trilogy as well as being her final book. Basically a re-working of The Return of Martin Geurre and Sommersby, I found the novel plagued by inconsistent characterizations and poor plotting.
A disgraced ex-Templar accused of thievery, Sir Alexander de Ashby is saved from the gallows by his face, for he is the image of the recently deceased Earl of Marston. Marston being a border lord during the height of the Scottish wars for independence, Ashby is forced into assuming the guise of the dead earl in order to infiltrate the castle. The first chapter details Ashby bemoaning over his status as a self-centered scoundrel, a man who doesn’t care for anyone but himself, but this is quickly negated by the torture of a fellow Templar named John, of whom the English use as collateral for Ashby’s obedience. He is quickly taken to the Border by Stephen and Sir Lucas de Compton, the former an English knight and the latter another ex-Templar with an axe to grind against Ashby.
It is there he meets Marston’s wife, Lady Elizabeth, who has led her demesne against the English for five years. Despite her strength, Lady Elizabeth his beautiful, well-mannered–and keen. The moment Ashby enters the compound she doubts this man is her husband. Her instant doubts are refreshing in the midst of so many TRoMG-type plots leaving one of the protagonists absolutely clueless for most of the book, but I found McCall’s twisting of the expected made the story so much weaker, because it felt that she scrambled back into typical romance novel plotting in order to get them into bed. I found it inconsistent with the character Ashby claimed for him to offer to give Lady Elizabeth her space, and for Elizabeth to be disturbed by her feelings that something isn’t right with them, only to find her panting over him a few chapters later.
The plotting and characterization took a definite nosedive with the over-emphasis on mental lusting, sex and foreplay when the set-up for the novel was supposedly action-packed and suspenseful. The fact that I never truly felt I was reading a book set in 1309 didn’t help the plotting either. I began the novel with high hopes having never read a novel by McCall, as well as missing the medieval romances of yore, but I struggled to finish the book, setting it down time and time again when the plot took a turn for the sake of it and the characters never leaping fully to life or consistent. What could have been a rejuvenation of this dormant sub-genre of the historical romance sadly missed the mark. D
August 5, 2007
