Tricia Andersen, $3.99, ISBN 979-8201762018
Fantasy Romance, 2020
Wait a minute, is each Hollow brother in Tricia Andersen’s series in a weight category of his own? That’s actually some meticulous planning that can put a boyband manager to shame. I’m impressed.
Anyway, this is a series about MMA-dabbling brothers that are also shapeshifters because why not. Bantamweight is Abraham Tiberius Hallow’s turn to feel the mate-mate-mate bond and voila, it’s love.
Wait, you want me to describe the plot?
He was the legendary Luchador.
He was also Abraham Hallow, the youngest of the infamous Hallow brothers.
I’m sure those words are supposed to mean something, and that something is meant to drive me into a frenzy of lust, but sadly, let’s be real here. In urban fantasy, having a reputation, being the best in everything, and having a 24-inch pee-pee will only qualify one as “just one of those billion guys in the genre”.
Our hero spends the first two chapters whining about how hard it is to be the best of the best, and then he meets a woman with “multicolored hair”. He immediately wants to get it on with Kai.
No. Correction. He wanted to fuck her senseless over and over. Then he wanted to hold her tight in his arms and fall asleep with her.
That’s also how we all know this is love and not lust.
As for the rest of the story, and there are so many more chapters to go…
Sigh. Here’s the thing. The heroine’s a mermaid with some issues that caused her to leave her underwater home in the first place. This is the perfect chance for the author to take me to a different scenery, do a rip-off Aquaman or something, show me some new stuff like maybe fish people politics, but no.
Instead, this is the same old crock. Pages after pages filled with lusting and frivolous thou-protests-too-much nonsense that are pointless because it’s established by the third chapter that these two are forever joined crotch to crotch, so the whole thing is a freaking waste of time and words. It gets worse when the author throws in aimless chatter of Abe’s siblings having a grand old ball of a time, er, balling their mates or whining that their mate has yet to be found (buy their books, people).
Really, the whole thing is such a waste of time and missed opportunity that I actually feel cheated and even angry. Why even make the heroine a mermaid when she could easily be anything and anyone else? Are these characters under some kind of curse that will kill them outright if they do anything interesting?
My god, this story is such a… you know, I’ve run out of words to express what a waste of time it is. The author is content to just recycle her past stories over and over at this point; she probably wrote this thing and the last few in a single night for all I know.
Such a waste. Such a waste.
There should some kind of law that will make such laziness a crime! I’m actually angry, come to think of it, even when I’m typing this review because of just how much the author had squandered the opportunity as much as my time.
This one could have been a grand adventure in a new setting, but it’s instead just the same old tepid rushed sex and plenty of boring chatter that bogs down the whole thing like an anchor dragging a leaking boat straight down to the bottom of the sea.
Anyway, this is a half-baked tepid review, but I feel that I’ve put in far more effort here than the author did in this thing.
