Werelove Midnight Revelations by Lakisha Spletzer

Title: Werelove Midnight Revelations

Author: Lakisha Spletzer
Publisher: CreateSpace/Smashwords

Release Date: May 13, 2011

Pages: 454 pages (paperback)

How I Got the Book:Review copy from the author

"Hi, my name is Laylah Cherie Le Croix, and being ignorant can be life-threatening."

Laylah Le Croix is searching for answers. Dissatisfied with the silence from her caretakers on the subject of her kidnapping and, unnerved by her Father's sudden interest in her life, Laylah eagerly anticipates graduation day and the freedom to pursue her own goals.

She secretly continues to see her boyfriend, Donil Silentshadow, who values her as a person and gives her the love she desperately needs.

Were Council politics and a familiar enemy's insidious plans collide with the couple's happiness and threaten to unleash the hidden inter-tribal feuding amongst the Weres.

Will Laylah be able to navigate the onslaught of this latest disaster or will the secret, those around her are keeping, finally consume her?

Review:

After being kidnapped and then rescued a month before, Laylah Le Croix is becoming more and more unsatisfied with her sheltered life and seeks to be free from her father's control so she can live her own life. Meeting with her boyfriend Donil in secret because her father has forbidden contact with him and his family, she remains blind to the plans others have for her and their machinations. As these plans come to fruition, secrets are revealed and the free future Laylah thought she had is threatened. If she wants to be her own person, she will have to take some risks.

I very nearly gave up on this book--at the 74% point, I said I couldn't do it and planned to stop there--but I gave it my best try and finished the book. While Werelove Midnight Revelations has its merits as a book and points that I like, there were more that I did not like and/or had a problem with.

The biggest problem of the book would be the characters and the relationships between them. Laylah is the focal point of everything and matters to everyone's plans because of the circumstances of her birth and who her parents are. There are certain expectation for focal-point characters like Laylah to be interesting because if they're supposed to be so important to everyone, they should have suitable personalities for that. But she isn't interesting at all. I find it frustrating to read about a character who is so important and yet doesn't have the personality to match that. While the world around her and the plans involving her held my interest, Laylah did not.

Her relationship with Donil doesn't make me believe they are really in love with one another, nor do I think they know each other well enough and have the proper development for their relationship to advance to the level it does during Midnight Revelations. Being mates does not excuse skipping proper development or having bad to mediocre development. Despite Donil's insistence that he will tell Laylah about himself "on his own terms," it comes off like this won't be until they are engaged or married (which is Donil's obvious intent). A part later in the book made me feel vindicated with some of these concerns, but it's not enough.

Of all the characters, Jacques and Violet are the only ones I like. Jacques has a genuine conflict over whether to follow his Alpha's orders so he can stay around or do what's best for Laylah at the moment and get fired. His flip-flopping attitude of "I love you, you're like a daughter to me" and *cold shoulder attitude* got on my nerves and his character was not that likable, but he's got a good conflict. While Violet may be a one-dimensional mean girl character and a reprehensible person, at least she isn't driven by men in one manner or another like the antagonist from the last book, Laylah, or Naiya. She does what she does for herself and her own desire for power. Violet is the closest thing to a feminist character in this book and she's still not even close to being feminist.

Some of the issues I had with the writing in the first book persist in the second. It got better about telling-not-showing, but there are still occasions where the reader is told something about a character where the information is not of importance to anything and either the character or the information never turns up again. I did some grammar nitpicking (which is less a reflection of the book and more of my nature as a reader), such as with the sentence "Laylah laid on her back and stared up at her ceiling (Werelove Midnight Revelations, 56%)." If my knowledge of grammar is correct, that should be "lay," not "laid." Please correct me if I'm wrong.

As early as the 9% mark, I predicted that a certain twist would happen, and it did--all the way at the 77% mark. It seems like this was supposed to be a big twist, but everything was pointing at it for the entire book  and I was impatiently wondering for much of the book when it was going to happen. This was pretty much the story of the entire novel: There was no turn of events or twist that surprised me because unnecessary scenes pointed right to it. Cutting some of those scenes would have improved the book and made some of these twist shocking rather than predictable. Regardless, the pacing was quite good.

There was so much about the book that rubbed me the wrong way and made me uncomfortable the way a reader is not supposed to be while reading. Trying to organize this in paragraphs like usual resulted in an essay-length section, so I will list it in bullet points:

• "Such meekness is refreshing in a young person. You have trained her well, Henry (Werelove Midnight Revelations, 3%)." Girls are not animals to be trained to obey the man/men in her life. This line made my skin crawl a little bit.
• Laylah never gets to make her own choices, even when it comes to being Donil's mate. From how it appears, she will always be his mate even if she decides that she does not want that. If she wants to, that's fine, but the absence of a choice not to be his mate bugs me.
• (This is a definite spoiler, so I have hidden it. Highlight the text you absolutely must see it.) I would think a society of the future would be past arranged marriages, but apparently not.
• "That sharp vanilla scent that was hers mixed with desire. He knew she wouldn't know that's what she felt, but he did (Werelove Midnight Revelations, 61%)." The implications are staggering and I don't like them. Women don't understand how they feel, but men do? I could call many kinds of bull on that. In that vein, much of Donil's behavior concerning his intent that they will be mates disturbs me. I can't begin to get into it all.
• The principal punishing the vicitm of a fight for being involved when she never threw a punch or touched her assailant. I have been the victim in two fights with other girls. In one, I did nothing to the other girl and she was the only one that got in trouble; in the other, I fought back and I got in trouble too. Laylah getting in trouble like she did felt like a plot contrivance.
• Whenever Laylah tries to make her own choices as a young woman, she is brushed off because she is being a short-sighted, irrational little girl. The implications are not nice ones.
• Laylah telling herself she is unworthy of Donil's affections. I am sick and tired of such an attitude being reinforced in books because this is not okay. If he decided to be with you when he could have had someone else, you are worthy. The question is whether or not he is worthy of you. If he isn't, it's time for a break-up.

I also had numerous personal qualms with the story that were not counted against the book in the end because it had to do with what I like as a reader rather than anything to do with the quality of the book. These qualms include Laylah's dislike of almost anything feminine such as heels, dresses, and lingerie. A female can be a good character and still be feminine. If only there were more books that combined the two. I would like to see more strong (and I mean mentally and in their execution, not just in physical strength) female characters who like dresses and pink, paint their nails regularly, and can rarely be found without a pair of stilettos on their feet. "Girly heroines" needs to stop being an oxymoron in YA PNR.

(For the record, I just took that opportunity to rant about something that has been on my mind for months. I would have said this in a review one way or another; this just happened to come along at the right time.)

While this series has turned out not to be my thing, I encourage anyone who is even slightly interested by the premise to try the books for themselves and develop their own opinion. What I love is what others will hate and then I will dislike something other readers could fall in love with. My opinions are ultimately my own and no one else's. While book reviews are a helpful tool to have when trying to decide whether or not to buy a book, a person shouldn't decide not to buy a book they were interested in just because of one negative review such as mine.

1 star!

What am I reading next?:Ultraviolet by RJ Anderson

Werelove Dusk Conspiracy by Lakisha Spletzer

Title: Werelove Dusk Conspiracy

Author: Lakisha Spletzer

Publisher: CreateSpace/Smashwords
Release Date: April 30, 2010

Pages: 384 pages (paperback)

How I Got the Book: Review copy from the author

Seventeen-year-old Laylah Le Croix has a rich father, mansion, and servants. Yet she is lonely and neglected. Her father would rather work than speak to her. At the academy she is bullied and mistreated.

When Weres attempt to kidnap Laylah, she is saved by the mysterious Donil Silentshadow. Donil rouses feelings in Laylah that make her question her life and her father's animosity toward her handsome rescuer. Confused by these emotions, she seeks answers from those closest to her and is rebuffed.

She must make a choice. Obey her father's edicts or follow her heart to learn the truth about her past.

Review:

Born into a rich family where her father puts her down at every turn, her mother has been dead since she was a child, and the servants that care for her are more like parents than her actual parent, Laylah Le Croix is lonely and bullied by her classmates. After a group of shapeshifting men nearly kidnap her for what she thinks is no reason, she meets a young man named Donil Silentshadow and a wish to be free from her constricting life takes shape. Meanwhile, a werewolf Alpha who killed Laylah's father thirteen years before has returned and she's after both Laylah and her father Henry, sending the Were world into a frenzy to stop her for their own reasons. 

As a heroine, Laylah just didn't work for me. Maybe it's because I've never been a fan of "shrinking violet" type heroines. Maybe it's because I found it strange for her to apologize to someone for stabbing them when the stabbing victim in question hurt her. It could be my subjective irritation with the little things, like how she had a tendency to take a while to realize something simple or not wonder about her mysterious lucid dream. Whatever it was, I wasn't able to cheer for her and I don't feel that she grew very much in the course of the novel. In the case of her dad Henry, a great job was done making him a hateable prick because I hated the heck out of him.

The Were society, its organization, the differences between Laylah's futuristic world of the twenty-third century and the present time, and how Laylah's world came to be were all points of the story that captured my interest and wouldn't let go. When other elements of the story began to irritate me, my desire to know more about Laylah's world was what kept me going. It was disappointing to find that most of this information was suddenly dumped in at the end of the novel instead of properly worked into the story, but the worldbuilding was something different and I liked it.

There is nothing in this book that makes me believe Donil and Laylah have genuine romantic feelings for one another because of how suddenly and unrealistically it happens. On Donil's side, it feels like an infatuation born of lust and maybe a taste for the forbidden, since he's not supposed to associate with a Le Croix like Laylah; on Laylah's side, she sees Donil as a way to rebel against her father and be free from his tyrannical rule. They may have a mate bond, but that doesn't excuse the lack of genuine romantic development and believable romantic feelings between them. If anything, it seems more like a case of being strangled by the red string.

The main character herself is a plot hole because scientifically, she isn't supposed to exist. Her parents, being a werewolf and a werepanther, should not be able to have a child together because while they are both Weres, they are still two very different types of Weres and too genetically different to be able to conceive a child. Just as a wolf and a panther in the wild wouldn't be able to procreate together, Laylah's parents shouldn't have been able to have her.

The writing has a bad habit of telling instead of showing. I made strikethroughs in my head of what could be cut and would improve the novel rather than hurting it: large sections of text telling us what this character is like and what they do despite never showing up again or having any importance to anything, scenes that had no importance, subpar descriptions ("angry silence" and "Zina's chuckle was filled with malice and violence" are two I remember), and more, and unimportant information that has no bearing on the characters' personalities or the plot. Description are repetitive in that they go along the lines of "He did this. She did this, infitive. He did this, infitive," but this particular flaw is covered up due to the book's dialogue-heavy nature.

This is just a little fun one: considering that the "he" in question is a werepanther and it was hinted just a few pages ago that werepanthers ate people, "the way he looked at her made her think of how a starving animal stared at food" is not a particularly good choice of description of how he's looking at Laylah.

I've got a laundry list of points in the book that made me very uncomfortable. Both of the "evil" women were emotional, lively people, the kind I most identify with, and every single woman on the side of good was quiet and reserved. When the idea that "a woman should be proud of her figure, not ashamed of it" is voiced, which is an idea I very much agree with, it comes from the villain. A scene about a third of the way into the book has Laylah saying things about why Jacques hit her that bear a striking, very uncomfortable resemblance to what an abused woman would say when trying to rationalize her abuse.

This may be the point that offends me worst of all: multiple women in the book are motivated by men, whether it is vengeance for one, anger at one for spurned love, or the desire to be with one. Why do their motivations have to be men? Why can't they be motivated by anger at the an unfair rule or the father's choices in how to raise his daughter, a desire for power due to rough treatment by others over time or to avenge a perceived wrong, or the desire to be free from an mentally/emotionally abusive and neglectful father? Females can have a motivation that has nothing to do with men. The implications of all of these examples offend me as a young woman.

Lovers of romance, worldbuilding that sticks out as unique and original, and a heroine trying to find freedom and her way in life might want to check this out. Werelove Dusk Conspiracy may not have been a book I enjoyed, but there will always be people who will love this book for its characters, plot, and flaws the way I was unable to.

1 star!

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