Parole Officer's Bitch

Update in 2021: So, I was going through books to rearrange shelves and I remembered this one. Not only did I remember it with a distinct lack of fondness, I got curious about the disparity (it was originally rated 3 stars!) and decided to open it again.

I hated it so much that I barely made it past the 6% mark before not only removing it from the device but actively going into my account and deleting it permanently. Everything from the stilted writing style to the horribly stereotypical voice (and backstory) given to the main character was just... nope.

Whatever mindplace I was in back in June 2019, I'm lowkey ashamed of it. This was just terrible and past-me was out of her fucking mind.

Original, now redacted, portion of my review from 2019 behind spoiler.

My main complaint about this book is that it's actually a short story and it ends on a terribly swift and unsatisfying note. Instead of actually covering the steamy action at the end, it just briefly speaks of a future and some things we don't actually get to see. That's it, the end. Not much of a book... but a nice little romp in the world of smut all the same.The main character's a reformed thug with a heart of gold and a somewhat believable if also cliche inner monologue. I found that I empathized with him and liked him, which is surprisingly rare for these kinds of books as authors tend to overdo it. I liked the style overall here, and just wish there had been more since this is supposed to be a book.

The rest of this remains from the original review with things I no longer feel stricken out:

I'm no idiot, and I know that the story was rushed at the end with the rest put in as page count filler. That's why, despite how good the first two thirds of the story was, I'm only rating it three stars. After the lackluster and rushed ending just before the halfway mark in the book is nothing but self-serving blathering from the author. They stop to complain about piracy of their ebooks and then ramble excessively about what inspired their other books and what the plots of those are.

In fact, there's an uncomfortable rant about how the author focuses so hard on making stories where coerced sex ‘becomes consensual instead of rape,' and the characters ‘come to truly love' their captors. The focus on how they make these situations romantic and loving is unnerving in that makes me question if they truly understand what consent is. The rules are different in fiction where nobody gets hurt, yes, but call a spade a spade. It's not consent if the person is pushed to do something they don't want to but ends up accepting their fate; it's a dark romance novel. Nothing wrong with that, of course, because it's not real, but don't try to take a moral high road with this subject matter.

After that comes more filler in the form of a too-much-information, somewhat self absorbed, ramble about the author. And at least four pleas to join the newsletter mailing list, buried in a run-on paragraph which lasts a page and tells us all about which fictional demons the author finds sexy. No, I'm not kidding. It also appears to have been intended for the ending of an entirely different book or part of an accidentally unedited copy/paste filler as it says: “If you enjoyed The Eidolon's Prey the kindest thing you could do for me is leave a 5 star review. This helps my ranking which in turn helps my sales. I really appreciate people who take the time to do this! <3” Last I checked, I had read The Parole Officer's Bitch.

From the 67% section onward is an excerpt from another of the author's prison romances and one where a straight roommate is seduced into gay sex. I only skimmed the first because I didn't like the narrating character's personality and I didn't even try the second because I have no interest in the plotline. After that is an extremely short excerpt from a demon/human romance; it was awkwardly written with the demon as a narrator.

I'd have rather had a proper ending for the book I actually chose than an entire half of this ebook being other stuff. I'm very disappointed.