Tricia Andersen, $3.99, ISBN 979-8201579678
Fantasy Romance, 2020
Tricia Andersen’s Corner is the fourth entry in her Hollow Brothers series, and it is the poster child of my issue with the series on the whole: I don’t have any fogging idea what it is supposed to be.
Here, the urban fantasy elements are more pronounced than ever: there are vampires, a magical amulet that the hero Josiah Hollow is guarding from some woo-woo folks, Josiah and his brothers are werewolf MMA fighters, and they are going to do… something, I guess.
That’s my problem with this story and the series on the whole: there are some things here, but god help me, I have no clue whether these things are of any import.
For now, everything feels like an excuse to get the hero to meet his mate, in this case schoolteacher Sarah Merit, and they instantly boink because the power of contrivance true love compels thee or something. Then the tramp stamp of “Oh yeah, this totally proves that we are in love and not just shagging!” quality appears, and that’s basically it for relationship development. Boinking all the way to the end, baby!
Once the bodies are bopping, all the urban fantasy are shoved off to the sidelines—hence, my bewilderment. Why even bother with all the effort? Why not just have these two hook up at a bar and elope to Vegas at the end of the story instead?
Heaven knows, I’m bored by the whole lazy instant lust is instant love thing, especially when the author makes her characters go through the same routine in every story in this series so far.
Now, the talisman, the vampires running MMA fights that are dog fights in a way considering the nature of the participants—these are pretty interesting urban fantasy elements that I don’t come across often, and I want to know more about this.
Sadly, the author instead focuses on how often, how limber, how flexible, and how energetic the two boinking bots can be, and I feel so cheated of my time.
Also, the author needs to learn to let go of her previous couples. This is only the fourth story, not the fortieth, so there is no need to kill the momentum of the story by including dull and tedious exposition dumps on whom everyone else is, their relationship to one another, who is sleeping with whom… hello, I can just read the official synopsis of those past stories if I wanted a memory jog.
Furthermore, it’s not like Bonko banging Bunny or Himbo humping Honey is in any way relevant to the plot because… what plot? As I’ve mentioned, the set up just melts away after the hero and the heroine hump, and I’m now reading a different story now without realizing how I get here from the previous story, as from now on it’s just sex and cuddles interspersed with past couples’ pregnancies and recaps of their snuggly snu-snu.
What is the point of this story? What is the point of the whole series? Why set up the woo-woo premise and create a potentially interesting world only to just shove everything aside once the hero and the heroine start boinking, to instead focus on mate-mate-mate drama that feels so overdone and played out?
This series has an identity crisis, and this Frankenstein monster of a “WTF is it?!!” story exemplifies this to a most unfortunate degree.
