Heku

This is a good story. It was good enough to get me to commit to the next in the series. I got this book free on Smashwords, but I would've paid for it. I like the liberties Nielsen has taken with the Vampires. I really do not like Emily. She is so stupid and annoying. I can't tell you how many times I kept telling Chev and Kyle to just let her die. So even though I don't like Emily doesn't mean this book is terrible. It's really not. It's average and there's nothing wrong with that. Not every book is going to be spectacular and I'm OK with that.

With that said, this isn't a slush pile book. It's formatted well. I, for one, really appreciate it. You can tell the author put real effort into making this book as professional as she could. I truly hate badly formatted, error-ridden ebooks.

It took me awhile to figure out what was really wrong with Heku. Right up front, it's pretty obvious that the writing would have strongly benefited from a good editor. The idea of “show, don't tell” doesn't seem to have been something the author understood or accepted. Now, that doesn't necessarily have to be a deal breaker. I mean, I've read some fanfic that was entirely engaging and never painted a picture of the goings on. This... not so much.

The real issue, I think, is that there doesn't seem to be a story here. Stuff happens, but it never engaged me. There might have been a villain, but he gets offed early on. The male lead is a bastard, but that would have been okay if he hadn't been one to the female lead, or if he had shown any character growth throughout the story. The female lead, well, I think there might have been some character growth, but it was so miniscule that I am not sure it actually happened.

There were an awful lot of words and unimportant things and very little story and I'd recommend skipping Heku.