Shea Hulse, $2.99, ISBN 978-1737847137
Fantasy Romance, 2022
Right off the bat, I can tell that Shea Hulse’s Dragonflies is going to not sit well with me.
Wouldn’t that be another lucky break? I thought ruefully. Said husband unceremoniously shoved me, my cue to get breakfast started.
I really ought to poison it this time, I thought. Everyone thought I did anyway; what difference would it make?
The protagonist Bridget describes to me how abusive Edward is the third in line of a series of horrible, horrible husbands that she is wedded off to by her father, but her tone is tart, sarcastic, like she’s dumping on her TikTok some nerdy kid that looks at her funny in the high school cafeteria.
The heroine feels like someone that’s just playing pretend to be a victim of domestic abuse three times over, and I can never take her seriously because of that.
Also, if the heroine is going to be conversing to me directly, first person narration and all that jazz, there is no need for phrases like “I thought ruefully” or “I thought”. The author could have had Bridget just monologue normally, because nobody talks in a “So, that’s really disgusting, I said while wincing, because that boy is so not hot so his looking like me like that is like, so not worthy of him!” way to another person unless they are not wired properly in the head.
Then, chapter two comes in and now someone called Ruad is saying that Bridget has been kidnapped by one Queen of Elphame. Wait, did that happen off-screen? By the end of the first chapter, Bridget was pretending to be some Disney princess and talking to some bird.
No, chapter three rolls in and it takes off from where chapter one left off. In chapter four, Ruad is still talking about Bridget getting kidnapped. What is going on here?
Turns out that Ruad and one Declan guy are both Bridget’s beaus and they want to rescue her when she doesn’t seem that kidnapped.
I’m lost.
So, I look back at the book cover, then at the book page at Smashwords, and realize oh, so when the author says that this is book two of the A Celtic Romance series, she really means that it is book two of an ongoing series. This one even ends on a “See you in the next book!” manner.
You can say oh, then why don’t I go and buy the first book and then read it before coming back to this book? Well, it’s because this book fails to excite me or entice me to go seek out the first book.
Even if the confusing narration stems from me not having read the first book, the heroine constantly narrating her chapters like she’s trying to get everyone’s attention on social media fails to make the gravity of her situation real or compelling. The entire story feels like a made-up fantasy that happens entirely in the head of said social media barfly. Two guys have barely any personality aside from “Penis for Her, One” and “Penis for Her, Two”, so they aren’t exactly selling points either.
The cover is nice, I suppose, but I’m afraid my foray into the adventures of Bridget and her two ding-dongs will have to end here.
