Darkfever

I don't know if I was reading a different book than everyone else, or what.

Positives: It was a fairly quick read. Which was probably the only thing that kept me from Lemming it.

Negatives:
The main character - was not someone I could get behind. This may just be me, as I can be a tom-boy sometimes, but her fussing over clothes and nails was totally lost on me. She was also a strange combination of whiney and get-along-go-along (by that I mean she was willing to just blase go along without any answers).
The side characters - were totally unlikable. I wanted to like Jericho, but there was never a thaw in his rude behavior. As for the other characters, the author barely brush pasted them and the attention they get showed them in a very negative/annoying light.
The world building - was not there. Having Jericho be so aloof with his answers means that I know more about Mac's fashion sense than the world.
The writing - felt very repetitive and time-skip narration was a total distraction.
Oh well, turns out I am in the minority disliking this book, but to each his/her own.

This is a really refreshing series. I'm absolutely obsessed with Mac and Barrons! Plus their banter is great. I'm really looking forward to continuing this series and seeing their slow burning romance continue to unravel. I also really want to learn more about the Fae and Alina, and even Barrons and Mac and what their powers are.

WHAT
A cheap erotic fantasy story where a innocent hot young girl meets an older dangerous hot guy, thrown in some vampires and sex addicted faes for some flavor. Her sister is dead and she wants to find the murderer by herself, never mind she can't kill a cockroach to save her life or have the capacity to go to the store to buy poison to kill it from a distance.

TLDR
+ readable
- unexciting plot
- foolish protagonist
- self spoiled narrative

SUMMARY
MacKayla Lane if a typical southern belle. She is in her early twenties, works as a bartender to pay the bills, spends her time by the sunbathing at the pool. She is very beautiful, curvy and innocent. Her world is turned upside down when her sister who is living in Ireland is brutally murdered.

Upset because the police has given up finding her murderer after a few weeks, she decides to fly there in order to convince them to continue the investigation. Alone in a strange country where she can barely understand what the people are saying, she is unable to talk to the police inspector assigned to the case of her sister's murder right away. So, she decides to investigate it herself.

Some weird things start to happen around her, as she slowly finds out there is more to this world then the eyes can see, and she is uniquely capable to see them.

Out of her depth, with no especial skills that can help her to defend against natural or supernatural threats, she is forced to rely on the help of a mysterious stranger, a handsome older and wiser man, with chiseled chin and... you get the drill.

This emotionally unavailable, chauvinistic bad boy, father figure, decides that he can use her for his purposes, and so their partnership forged. Now MacKayla must avoid the dangers of sex to the death with faes, vampires and whatnots, who have supernatural abilities that makes them drop panties irresistible to women.

ANALYSIS
Well, it was pretty clear where I was getting myself into right from the start:
- the book is called called Dark Fever
- it has a cover showing a naked hot, naked male and female upper torsos
- its written by Karen “Moning”
- took quite a while to find a male reviewer on Good Reads
- the first few lines mention that there are two kinds of faes: the ones who kill you on sight and the others who use you for sex

Exposition through describing future events was kind of annoying. I would rather discover about faes and the protagonist's powers together with her, along the development of the story. Instead that is described in the prologue. This artifice is also used sparsely through out the book, ruining the “surprises” it could have presented.

“I would later find out that he was lying but at this point I believed him

faes

Just what I was looking for!

I adored Karen Marie Moning's Highlander series but it took me a while to decide if I was interested in the Fever Series. Now, I'm kicking myself for not giving it more of a chance years ago. Granted, it's October and I'm super primed for the paranormal reads right now but I'm really happy with where the series is headed. This is a world and character building book, so be patient with Mac if she annoys you at first. I'm still not sure what I think about Barrons but I'd love to spend some time with Vlane!

Dear Hype, Why have you failed me? Again.



I wanted to like this book. KMM has a flare for writing potentially addicting stories. The Fae and the murder mystery were intriguing... BUT there were a lot of things that did not sit well with me.

> I couldn't get into Mac's ingénue southern belle persona. She had no common sense. Her sister was recently murdered yet she spent an awful lot thinking about her looks, nail polish, outfits, hunky guys, describing them in painful details. WHY? She also had no survival instinct. She kept putting herself in dangerous situations, situations she could have easily avoided. She kept secrets from Barrons even after agreeing to live in his house and become his artifacts detector. I'm not saying that she should have trusted him, but not telling him she met V'lane was a very bad idea. She might have avoided the “incident” at the museum. Her inner monologues were quite annoying. She often sounded, well, vapid and half-witted. I do not understand the love for her. Let's get a peak at her train of thought, shall we?

[...]Rocky O'Bannion was a lodestone, six feet of pure muscle-packed charisma. He was the kind of man men wanted to be and women wanted to be dragged off to bed by—and I did mean dragged off—there would be no dominating this man by any woman. There was no doubt in my mind that the powerful, ruggedly attractive Irishman with the stone-hewn jaw was also a stone-cold killer, and from the way he was trying to pave his way to heaven by plastering over his sins with the putty of religious zeal, he was also a borderline psychopath. Yet none of it diminished my attraction to him one bit—that was the true measure of the man's presence. [...]if those dark, heavy-lidded eyes would turn with favor in my direction, I was afraid I would flush with pleasure even as I knew I should be running as fast as I could the other way[...]

She's talking here about some mobster that allegedly killed at least 27 people who were his rivals, including pregnant women. She probably would've loved Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson when they were young.

> Then we have Jericho Barrons. I'm puzzled. I understand that he's handsome and all but he's a cold-hearted bruises machine. He is abusive both psychically and verbally. The things he says and does are way past teasing. During one of their first encounters he pushes her against the wall, threatens her and chokes her. What a prince! Then the way he treats her when they're on and about parties looking for artifacts is so disturbing. Actually it's not only Barrons, but all the men in this book treat women like objects at their disposal. It is frightening. I guess I need to accept that a lot of ladies out there have some deep dark fantasies. Barrons seems pretty abusive to me, but whatever floats your boat, I can't tell you what you can find romantic or not. But it's kinda ironic that quite a few that swoon over Jericho Barrons, gave “Fifthy Shades of Grey” and “Twilight” a one star rating and not just for the writing but because the male protagonists were abusive. Sure, one could say that Jericho is better than Grey and Edward. But is he really? On the same note, the same ladies were distressed at the results of the American election saying it's because Trump is amongst others a chauvinistic pig. But he's old and ugly, it's not the same, right? I wonder if the reaction would've been the same if Trump looked like the guys in this book.

> And finally we have V'lane. Why are Death-by-sex Fae a thing, why? You couldn't have toned it down a bit, Moning? I thought Darkfever was supposed to be a paranormal romance. Not abuse smut.

Sure the apocalypse-by-fae is an entertaining idea, but I can't ignore that this book has some really disturbing messages. I read some spoilers for the following books and it only gets worse. I will not continue with this series.

When Mac receives the phone call that her sister has been found murdered in Ireland, her blissful days of innocence come to an end. With no witnesses and no leads, the police file it away as one more cold case. But Mac is determined to find her sister's murder. Mac catches the first flight she can to Ireland to demand the police keep searching. But with nothing but a frantic voicemail left from her sister urging Mac to find the Sinsar Dubh, the police turned her away.

Despite the pitfalls, Mac begins to retrace her sister's steps and what she finds is not the picture-perfect version of her sister she knew. Instead of going to school and working her way towards the degree she so badly wanted, Mac finds the trail of a desperate woman. One who became entranced by a man, and slowly let her life slip away. What Mac doesn't realize, is that she is about to fall into the same life that took her sister away. The fae do not take kindly to humans who can expose their secrets, and Mac unknowingly is the key to what they want and desire.

Mac was too bubble gum prep for me. While she's trying to survive in her new dangerous life, she's still worried about how cute she looks and how much she wishes she were blonde. People are hunting you, trying to kill you and you care about your damn fashion sense? I'd be trying to change my appearance every chance I had, thankful I could craft a disguise. And she does nothing for herself. Throughout most of the book, even though she's the main character, she's just a sidekick. And hello, the man that jacks you up against a wall and hurts you is not the one you should choose to buddy up with, let alone start thinking is attractive.

Barrons, the man of mystery, was not appealing to me at all. He's a control freak and he has no problem using anyone to accomplish his goals. Ok, so he has fancy cars and lots of money, he has no personality. He's basically a machine who just goes through the motions to track down fae artifacts. We know next to nothing about him and he refuses to answers any question Mac has. Not to mention there wasn't much to the plot. What starts as a potential mystery about Mac's sister, turns into a hunt for a powerful fae artifact. While we know what happened to Mac's sister is tied into all this somehow, it's more background noise than anything. It's a boring slog from property to property with hardly any action. Unless you count Mac running away from every fae that comes after her until near the end of the book when she has no other choice. We never even get to hear what is going on in Mac's mind. Anytime her sister is mentioned, the author glosses over the brutal details and sidelines what Mac is actually going through with scant details.

This was the second time around for me reading Darkfever. The only thing I could remember was tapping out at book three of the series because the smut was too much for me. I'm always one to try a new spin on faeries. Some authors pull it off, some do not. This one was not a good read. I struggled through for my book club and to give it a review this time around. I won't be gracing the next two books with reviews because I have better things to read.

(Find my thoughts on this book and the entire Fever series here at The Book Barbies.)

This was my first non-YA Fae book, and it was such an interesting take! I really liked it. With perspective of reading the series, though, even though it was fantastic and addicting and things actually happened, it was totally like Fever Series 101. Here are the characters (be intrigued, be very intrigued), here is the world (Dublin!), now prepare for me to blow your mind in future books (it will happen).

💬: "Sinsar Dubh1: a Dark Hallow belonging to the mythological race of the Tuatha Dé Danaan. Written in a language known only to the most ancient of their kind, it is said to hold the deadliest of all magic within its encrypted pages. Brought to Ireland by the Tuatha Dé during the invasions written of in the pseudohistory Leabhar Gabhåla3, it was stolen along with the other Dark Hallows and rumored to have found its way into the world of Man."

Moning, Karen Marie. Darkfever: Fever Series Book 1 (p. 66). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

📖Genres: fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal, paranormal romance, Fae

📚Page Count: 343

🎧Audiobook Length: 08h 57min

👩🏾‍🏫My Rating: ⭐️⭐️ - 2/5

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TW - <spoiler>Cursing, Death, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Violence, Blood, Grief, Murder, Sexual harassment, War, and Injury/Injury detail</spoiler>

Darkfever is the first book in the Fever series by Karen Marie Moning. MacKayla, more commonly known as Mac, is grieving because her older sister was murdered while abroad in Ireland. Mac's sister left one clue, one enigmatic voice message. So when the criminal murder investigation halts, Mac decides to travel to Ireland to find out who murdered her sister and why. As Mac digs deeper she finds maybe an enemy or ally in the peculiar Jericho Barrons, who happens to be shadowing her. Eventually Mac discovers that she's a sidhe-seer (she-seer), someone who can see and sense the monsters on the other side of the veil. V'lane, an alpha Fae who glamours women into wanting sexual intercourse from him, also has his sights set on Mac. The one thing that Mac discovers is that she needs to get her hands on the Sinsar Dubh, a one of a kind Dark Book that has the power to control both the human world and the fae world, before anyone else finds it.

The first part of the book was really boring, things don't pick up and get more interesting in the book until after the 50% mark. This book also had some inconsistencies as well as several scenes not being explained at all. It felt like nothing relevant was happening in the first 50% of the book. We get world building when Mac learns more about the Fae world and she writes the information down in her notebook, I suppose that's okay? It feels a little like lazy writing. The first time Mac finally sees a monster up close is at the 31% mark and that felt like the story was going too slowly. When Mac sees the monster she notices that it is naked and has a large "member", for some reason the monster stares back at her and begins to stroke itself?!This was never explained "why". To be fair, I think it's okay if some things weren't explained because I understand that this first book is meant the be the beginning of a long series. I just don't understand why the monsters want to stroke themselves when they see her and that is not explained. There are a few inconsistences but I'll just share the first one I found.

"then turned out the light and fell almost immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep. Someone knocking at my door awakened me. I sat up, rubbing gritty, tired eyes that felt as if I’d just shut them seconds ago. It took me a few moments to remember where I was—in a twin bed in a chilly room in Dublin, with rain tapping lightly at the window. I’d been having a fantastic dream."

Moning, Karen Marie. Darkfever: Fever Series Book 1 (pp. 48-49). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

So Mac starts off saying that she "fell almost immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep." only to say at the beginning of the next paragraph, "I'd been having a fantastic dream."

(TW - mention of physical assault)

I don't think the relationship between Barrons and Mac is really possible without Mac continuing to accept Barrons' physically and verbally abusive behavior, at this point. Within the first few days of knowing each other, they get into one of their many arguments. Only this time, Barrons decides to "snatch" Mac up off the couch she's sitting on, by grabbing her by the hair and neck and shoving her against a wall.

He was on me before my brain processed the fact that he was coming for me. It was the third time he’d pulled such a stunt and it was getting darned old. The man was either an Olympic sprinter or, because I’d never been jumped before, I just couldn’t get a grasp on how quickly it happens. His lunges were way faster than my instincts to react. Lips compressed, face tight with fury, he dragged me up off the couch with a hand in my hair, grabbed my throat with the other, and began walking me backward toward the wall.

Moning, Karen Marie. Darkfever: Fever Series Book 1 (pp. 77-78). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

This is not described as consensual non-consent OR romantic behavior at all. This is described as the abuse it is. Barrons is supposed to be the main love interest but he physically attacks Mac several times in the beginning of their acquaintanceship. Towards the end of the book Barrons saves Mac and for some reason the author sort of paints this idea that it's okay to forget or that we should forget that Barrons was physically abusive towards Mac almost every time they were in each other's proximity. Barrons saves Mac and so the character is expected to be redeemed of his earlier behavior. Well I still don't like him, he's awful and abusive, I want Mac to get far away from him.

The audiobook narrator was okay, I didn't love their performance but I could stand it. Mac, the main character, is supposed to be from the United States South and so the narrator tried to use a "Southern" accent and sometimes the narrator would lose the accent for two sentences just to pick it back up in the third sentence. It was a bit distracting and took me out of the immersion of the story almost every time it happened. Someone gifted me every audiobook in this series (there was a sale at $2.99 per audiobook) so I plan on finishing this series. I think I don't mind that the book's narrators changes to new narrators starting in book 4, Dreamfever.

There were no spicy scenes in this book. All the scenes having to do with arousal had to do with monsters, fae, and creatures of the night being sexually aggressive and even almost sexually assaulting the main character by using fae glamour to make her think she "wants it". Nothing happened but I don't want to read about "almost sexual assaults" in my paranormal ROMANCES. I'm giving the spicy scenes zero -🌶️ chilies out of five chilies

Overall, I think the beginning of this book was not good, though the premise was interesting. The ending of the book is where the action and the full story started to come together, it was definitely the most interesting part of the book. I don't understand the "slow burn romance" in here because Barrons is terrible to Mac and even physically abusive to her in the days following their first meeting. That's not romantic at all. Some of the writing was also inconsistent. I'm giving this 2 out of 5 stars.

⭐️⭐️ - 2/5 Stars

I listened to this audiobook for free on [Libbyapp.com]

I'm sure I'm of the unpopular opinion on this one. Even though I loved the dark premise of this story I could not get into it.

The MC grated on my nerves so much I had to force myself to finish. I'm not against a young, female MC that needs growth...the problem while reading this one is that Mac was just as naive and obnoxious at the end as the beginning. So much so I don't really feel like finishing this series. This one just isn't for me.

I'm hooked. This begins with a murder: the protagonist gets the call that her sister has died in Dublin. She goes to Ireland, unsatisfied with the lack of answers... and stumbles into a huge conflict of the Fae, discovering shocking things about herself and her sister as she unwillingly takes her place in this huge otherworldly situation. She is under the guidance of Jericho Barrons, who seems to be on her side, but he's mysterious and enigmatic. I still can't tell. Picking up the next book immediately!