Book Review: The Mark of the Vampire Queen by Joey W. Hill

Review: The Mark of the Vampire Queen
Series: Vampire Queen – Book 2
Author: Joey W. Hill
No of Pages: 370
Release Date: 5 February 2008

Full Servant. With his new title, Jacob must now attend to Lady Lyssa’s every need, venturing into a world of passion darker than he’s ever known. His time as a vampire hunter certainly hadn’t prepared him to embrace a world where humans are sexual commodities, but he adapted. Now he finds the integrity of his soul challenges as he serves his Mistress’s needs as fully as he services her desires.

As much as Jacob loves her, other servants wan against giving her his soul. Everyone knows that vampires have no regard for humans, so why would a vampiress bother treating a mere sex toy with respect? But Jacob knows a human servant is far more than that. His Mistress needs a warrior, a friend and a lover – a man who will serve her in all ways, even if he has to betray the priceless treasure of her love…

My Thoughts:
The Mark of the Vampire Queen was a very hard one for me to finish, purely because it bored me.

Jacob is now a full servant of the vampire queen Lyssa. With this title comes the knowledge that Lyssa is very sick and dying, and now, because of his new stature, so will he die along with her.

This pains the pair of them as in their own way, they love each other, being soul mates throughout Lyssa’s incomparably long life and Jacob through his various incarnations, to have found each other in this capacity Jacob wants to hold on to as her for as long as he can.

I will be quite frank and say that this book bored me literally to sleep. There was far too much detail wrapped up in politics and medieval fairs that I had to force myself to finish just to have the pleasure of writing this review. The politics interest me, but the way they were written in reminding me of watching Parliament Time on the ABC, a lot of people talking quietly for two hours and once every three months having a raving blue with each other that can be quite entertaining.

I originally picked up this series because I read an excerpt of book five, Vampire Mistress, and thought it intriguing. It might still be, it’s just a shame that I will not get to it because of the quality of the first two books.

In hindsight I remember the first book being relatively slow, to the point of having to force myself through it as well. There just isn’t enough driving this story for me to enjoy it. Sure you have a problem in the form of Lyssa’s impending doom and the effect it will have on Jacob, you also have the likes of Carnal trying to upset the order Lyssa has been trying to build between vampires and humans for the last thousand years.

Yet when it’s put on paper in the way that Hill writes it, it just drags on and on. In the end I was marking chapter ends so I felt a small victory each time I reached one.

The sex was hot in this series overall, I will admit that, some of the scenes Hill came up with were especially well written, but there just wasn’t enough built around those scenes for me to remotely enjoy this story at all.

Others in this series:
The Vampire Queen's Servant
A Vampire's Claim
Beloved Vampire
Vampire Mistress
Vampire Trinity
Vampire's Keeper

Book Review: Comfort Food by Kitty Thomas

Review: Comfort Food
Author: Kitty Thomas
No of Pages: 186
Release Date: 21 March 2010

Emily Vargas has been taken captive. As part of his conditioning methods, her captor refuses to speak to her, knowing how much she craves human contact.

He’s far too beautiful to be a monster. Her attraction to him and his lack of violence has her walking a fine line on the edge of sanity.

Told in the first person from Emily’s perspective, Comfort Food explores what happens when all expectations of please and pain are turned upside down. As whips become comfort, and chicken soup becomes punishment.

My Thoughts:

Comfort Food was a powerful read, but it didn’t truly touch me in the ways I was expecting.

Emily is a captive of a man that has an obsession with her; he intends to make her his slave. After months of conditioning and training Emily is a shadow of her former self, but she’s not entirely sure that she truly hates what she has turned into.

Emily is a strong woman, one I admire simply because I don’t know if I could have done what she did. Instead of fighting, instead of being taken by force Emily survived and submitted to what was being done to her purely because she couldn’t stand being deprived of human contact, and because she always had a sliver of hope that she could escape.

Comfort Food is confronting in ways that it forces you to really ask yourself, what would you do? Taken captive by someone who is obviously sick do you survive by submitting or die by being stubborn. I have been thinking about this ever since I put Comfort Food down, I can think of ways that I would want to survive, but I also think that maybe I would just prefer to die. Emily’s choice was survival but her way of thinking truly makes one question the meaning of inner strength.

I was hoping for more from Comfort Food in the way of writing though. Emily was a very detached character; even though we were in her head I never really felt her fear or her pleasure. I never really felt happiness when she was in the “good cell” or the complete despair when she was in the “bad cell”. In a way it adds to the book, because it gets into your head afterward, one enters a sort of shock response when reading it and that is only lifted after the final page is turned, so in ways it’s brilliant, but in others it’s lacking because the book while staying with you, doesn’t draw you in while reading, it is easy to put down and walk away to do menial tasks and then come back to later.

I think I may have been hoping for more of a psychological thriller rather than a BDSM romance and that is my own fault, for the purposes of this being a BDSM romance though, Comfort Food is once again hard-hitting in some ways, but lacking in others. The sex scenes were written in third person, to show us Emily’s detachment from them but in doing that the true horror or even eroticism was glazed over.

Stockholm syndrome played a major part in Comfort Food, but because we were in Emily’s head and she was the sufferer that was also glazed over romanticised in some ways. I felt that it could have been better represented, Emily has a psychology degree, she saw it happening to herself and yet she couldn’t stop it, but she wasn’t fazed by that at all.

Comfort Food wasn’t as hard hitting as what it could have been, in ways it was as bland as the chicken soup Emily was forced to live on. Some aspects of this book will stay with me for a while but mostly it is just a flash in the pan.

Book Review: The Vampire Queen's Servant by Joey W. Hill

Review: The Vampire Queen’s Servant
Series: Vampire Queen – Book 1
Author: Joey W. Hill
No of Pages: 373
Release Date: 3 July 2007

Lady Elyssa Amaterasu Yamato Wentworth is a thousand-year-old vampire in need of a new servant – now more than ever as she’s suffering the signs of a mysterious ailment that threatens to consume her. As a gift she’s been given Jacob, an extraordinary physical specimen, but all wrong when it comes to being...used. A total alpha male, he’s not accustomed to submitting to any woman’s wishes.

Lyssa soon learns that what really binds Jacob to her are not her sensual midnight hungers, but something far more provocative. It stirs her blood, renews her life, and awakens her soul like only true love can. And the passion between Lyssa and Jacob is about to yield something else unexpected – a shared history that reaches back through the centuries and is fated to challenge their destiny like nothing ever will again...

My Thoughts:

Although I really enjoyed this story, I wouldn’t call it Hardcore BDSM as it has been coined.

The Vampire Queen’s Servant follows the tale of The Vampire Queen, Lyssa and Jacob her newest prospective human servant. Jacob was sent by Thomas, Lyssa’s previous servant who got to know Jacob in the final months of his life.

Lyssa is originally wary of Jacobs’s prescience as she doesn’t feel she can go on living after Thomas’s death and therefore doesn’t feel the need to get close to another servant. Jacob persists though, through everything Lyssa puts him through he continues to be there and be strong.

Lyssa is an interesting character, she is in a way broken and yet she finds a way to continue on day after day. She is definitely very strong and very stubborn refusing to show weakness even after getting a very degenerative disease.

Jacob on the other hand gets what he’s supposed to do, but throws a lot of it out the window to favour looking after Lyssa instead of just serving her as she pleases. They get on each other’s nerves and are constantly try to make the other give in, yet they are both as stubborn as each other.

The themes in Vampire Queen’s Servant weren’t really as BDSM as I expected after hearing various reviews. I found it more to be a love story rather than a master/slave situation. Yes there definitely were slave issues but it was clear that if Jacob really didn’t want to do something he would either just not, or Lyssa wouldn’t force him.

She started out very hard on him, chaining him down but by the end they were more companions rather than servant and mistress. Jacob truly cares a lot for Lyssa and only wants her to be happy and well. Lyssa we could see started feeling the same way for Jacob even though she tried to keep herself composed and Queen-like.

Although it was very romantic, Jacob still was a slave and he was treated like one, especially in front of other vampires. Even though Lyssa could see Jacobs discomfort she pushed him into a situation he didn’t want to be in involving two other women. But Jacob submitted and they both knew that if he didn’t she would be seen as weak.

Lyssa forced Jacob to come to terms with things about himself sexually, that he never would have realised. She didn’t break him but he did change his way of thinking although still retaining most of his Irish charm and bravado.

The Vampire Queen’s Servant was definitely a hot read, but it was also very romantic which for me was a nice surprise at the time. I definitely can’t wait to delve deeper into Lyssa’s world and see where her and Jacob’s relationship goes.

Others in this series:
The Mark of the Vampire Queen
A Vampire's Claim
Beloved Vampire
Vampire Mistress
Vampire Trinity
Vampire's Keeper