I don't like hating books, it gives me a headache and makes me feel bad whenever I think about it. I can't help it, though - some books just need to burn.

The book was a blatant ripoff of Twilight, which it loses points for before anything else. The writing was bland and cheesy; the characters were either loathsome, brainless, just plain annoying; or a combination of the three. There were so many plot-holes and lazy-author conveniences in it there was barely anything left of it to read at all!

The message in this book is disgusting. Every character's inner thoughts were disgusting, the way they executed their ideas was disgusting. The "romance" in it was cheap and sour and consisted mainly of people mooning over each others' pretty faces and other bodily attributes.

Damen is the absolute dumbest "hero" in existence. Ever is, I think, one of the most despicable and nasty characters I've ever stumbled across. She spent a huge chunk of the book drunk, slobbering all over her bedroom floor, because she thought she wasn't good enough for Damen! Well, girl, it isn't actually that hard to be good enough for a loser like that, so what does that make you?

This book is also a sackful (a dirty, grimy sack that's been dragged across an eight-week-untended stable floor and then stuffed with fuzzy handfuls of mold) of cliches. Every romantic cliche you can think of, and most character cliches to boot, are in here. They aren't lightened by touches of originality, either - rather, they were all thrown into the blender with the aforementioned sack and put on "high" until it vomited from pure disgust.

And do you know what the sad part is? It wasn't the mold or the stable-residue that made it vomit.

This book is greasy and foul. Books like this make me wonder why humans are the dominant race on Earth...and if they can be redeemed.

Be smarter than me; stay away from it at all costs.

My younger sister read this book. I don't know how she made it all the way through. Now, in our family, we get easily starved for books, and sometimes we read each other's bad books just for something to read and talk about. Pitiful, maybe, but there it is. Such was the case with Stoneheart. The cover art was amazing, and there was one excerpt-paragraph on the back that I read and liked, so I thought, okay, I'll give it a try. Nothing else to do.

I never finished it. The characters and their accents were abominable. I actually celebrated when The Gunner "expired", but then, having seen the book accomplish one good thing, I put it down and resigned myself to a throbbing skull. I was ready to burn the darned thing when my sister then informed me that he comes back.

I think I whined and shouted and snarled quite a bit, after my initial disbelief. She just smirked at me. I suppose, even though she didn't enjoy the book either, she liked watching me rip out my hair. Go figure.

The paragraph on the back was the only well-written paragraph in the book, so I know why they picked it. The story was annoying and senseless. I don't know if the author avoided solid explanations like the plague, or if he just dumped them all at the end, but that irritated me, too. I suppose I'll never find out, one way or another. I can't and won't read any further.

Oh, and I hate it when authors write books like this, and then people defend it by saying "it's a children's book". Children have the right to read good literature, just like anybody else. I've read good children's books. This wasn't one of them.

You know, there are some authors who look up to Tolkien. There are some authors who take bits of what Tolkien gave them and put it into their own works. There are authors who imitate Tolkien.

Richard A. Knaak wants to be Tolkien. And he fails, dismally.

This book never seems like it's going anywhere. I've seen Knaak praised because "his ideas never stop coming"; to me, it seems like he hits a lot of dead ends and then throws something ridiculous and unexplained into the pot to send the ride jerking further on its way. He can't think of a smooth, coherent plot, so he puts in whatever comes first to his mind.

Nothing in this book connects. Little of it makes sense. There are some aspects of it which are truly disgusting, like the romance between "the Lady", Cabe, Cabe's dad, and Cabe's grandfather. Talk about insta-love all you like; Cabe remarked how beautiful she was, and then it was never spoken of again, until 200 pages later he falls to his knees and tells her he adores her, and would do anything for her. Uh, dude, this woman was in love with your grandfather, and your father is lusting after her still. Could Knaak's romance angle be any more irritating, abrupt or twisted?

The action seemed disjointed to me; and I didn't care about any of it. And I want to know how a man with furry fingers and a bird's beak, or at least who has a nose that looks like a bird's beak, can repeatedly be called "handsome".

Cabe's hair changed literally from scene to scene. One scene it was a thin thread of silver, and then it was a chunk of it, and then it was half of it, and then it was a single lock of it, and then it was half again, and then all of it, and then just a piece of it--good grief, man, make up your mind! I think he lamely tried to explain this inconsistency in the next book, but I certainly won't be reading it to be sure.

And I can't complain enough about the scene at the beginning, in the bar, before Cabe was anything but Cabe. A shadow-man literally talks to Cabe for the first time, and within five sentences calls him "Cabe Bedlam"--a more pompous name an author has rarely dared to give his MC--and instead of blowing the shadow-man off or even politely saying he was mistaken, Cabe thinks to himself, Yes, that sounds right. I am Cabe Bedlam, of course.

Didn't he have a childhood memory of being called that, once? Or someone mistakenly called him that on the street, once? Something to explain it? No. And there is no explaining the timelines in this book, either; years or days or months, weeks, seconds--none of it is relevant. All of it warps around to conform to whatever the author is speaking of at the moment.

The dragons were all right, to be fair. They were almost interesting. They were, unfortunately, not nearly enough to save the book.

This review won't be pretty, and it will contain spoilers. You've been warned.

First, okay, let's start with the obvious one: Hacky-Sack-Zack. He's been dead since he was like 8 years old, lived in a mental institution for almost that long, survives on drinking "strawberry milkshakes," and breaks out in spots if sunlight reflects off of linoleum and bounces in his general vicinity. He reads books and watches TV for a living. His "best" friend visits him at night, because that's when he's active; Hacky can only walk around the institution at night, and spends every day shut up in his room with the curtains drawn.

*sigh* Okay. So, this guy lives close to a decade of his life DEAD, growing up the entire time (although he'll probably conveniently stop aging soon), and never notices that HE DOESN'T HAVE A HEARTBEAT. Never, not once, honestly. He thinks he's alive. He has his own personal nurse who comes in at night and whips him up strawberry milkshakes to drink, because anything else makes him sick. She isn't. Has he ever tried a strawberry? Smelled a strawberry air-freshener, perfume, soap--anything--and decided that it didn't smell like blood? No. He's "allergic" to sunlight, and with all of the TV and books he comes across, he doesn't put that with the strawberry milkshakes and missing pulse and maybe think it's a bit odd?

Oh, no. Hacky doesn't notice things like that.

Throughout this book, all the character does is go someplace, whine about his life, and wait for the cops to show up. Then he runs someplace else, and the cycle repeats. In the middle of this you get excruciating details about his love interest, with whom he has shared a handful of moony glances and a handful of words. Her name is Luna.

Let me explain something: Vlad the Impaler is the villain for this book. Again. (I swear, if he comes back one more time..... why do vampire villains always have to be Vlad or Dracula? Why can't they be someone original?) Near the end of the book, he captures Hacky's girlfriend and Hacky's best friend, puts them in front of Hacky, and says that one of them will die, blah, blah, blah--it's one of those useless monologuing scenes that's so long and repetitive and obvious, Dr. Doom would cringe at it.

Long story short, Hacky chooses Lovely Little Luna over his best friend who has known him basically since birth. Hacky then proceeds to get into a catfight with Vlad that lasts about half an hour and took me about twice that long to plow through, while (in the book) the sun is coming up and pouring through some huge windows.

During this scene, Nurse Vampire - remember his personal nurse who only showed up at night? - appears on the scene, and we are told later that Charlie and Luna are both "infected" with the disease that stops your heart from beating: vampirism. And vampires apparently burst into flames in the sun, so we've got Hacky, Vlad, Nurse, Charlie and Luna, all vampires, all in the same room, while the sun is coming up.

NOBODY DIES. 

Hacky HIDES UNDER A DESK, which is apparently a safe spot, although earlier in the book bouncing sunlight fried his face. Vlad, of course, disappears mysteriously...and so on and so forth. But nobody's dead, and at the end Hacky and his crew all throw a cheerleader fit and share a group hug and exclaim, "We're all dead vampires now, yay!"

Also, at one point in the book Hacky runs straight out IN FULL DAYLIGHT with a tarp over his head, his fingers clamping the top of the tarp, and neither the direct nor the bouncing sunlight get to him. He then proceeds to get into a boat, and we all know what sunlight bouncing off of water can do, but....oh, no. Holding the tarp over himself like an inadequate umbrella is enough to keep off ALL sunlight.

Also, there is a repressed memory scene where Hacky gets bitten by a "dog" (vampire), and he is SEEING THE MEMORY FROM OUTSIDE HIS BODY. As in, he's watching himself get bitten. And does he think it's the least bit strange? Oh, no. Hacky doesn't think like that.

This book was boring and brainless. The humor was forced and cheap and felt like a bludgeon hanging over my head, ready to whack me again at the first opportunity and worsen my headache. The characters were flatter than the paper they were written on. The romance was insta-love personified. There was no motivation for anything or anyone to move forward in the directions that they did. The plot was pathetic and predictable to a point that it was almost, ALMOST funny. I could call what would happen eighty pages before it did, and I would be right EVERY TIME.

Ugh. I don't like hating books, but oh my gosh, this one was like swallowing sewage. I wish I'd never laid eyes on it; I read it a while ago, and I still feel dirty.

Edit: I read a different version of this book, which had a much prettier and more original cover. The author seems to have erased that cover from existence, but any words of praise in this review for the cover are not for that silly thing up there. They are for the old one.

All right, so, I know this review is going to hurt the author when she reads it, so I want to say first: don't stop writing. You have potential in there, and if you work on it, I think you could come up with something spectacular. I did, however, promise to be honest in my review, so that's what I'm going to be.

I was given a free digital copy of this book by the author, in exchange for the following review.

I wanted so badly to love this book. Any time I see a faerie book that doesn't look like complete cheese, I practically hum with excitement and my fingers itch to start turning pages. So it was with this, especially with that gorgeous cover. Unfortunately, I really didn't care for it. Loosely, I'm going to explain why:

Pros: 

1) Calista's name. It's a very light, unusual, fae-sounding name. I really liked it, and when I realized that was the heroine's name, my hopes for the book skyrocketed.

2) The cover. It's absolutely stunning. It's difficult to read the author's name because of the glowing, curly font, but the name of the book and the picture, and the overall mood of it is gorgeous. So very different and refreshing after all of those eyeball-and-jawline covers that are being thrown around nowadays.

3) The basic premise. I've always wanted a Spring Court and an Autumn Court, and the idea of actually reading about a faerie culture intent on creating them was perfect.

4) The lettering. There were only a bare handful of typos in this book, which very much impressed me. In my experience, first-time indie authors usually bombard their readers with enough typos to make an organized person want to rip their hair out. This book was very well taken care of in this regard; it actually felt to me like the author cared about it.

Cons:

1) Everyone else's names. Ryder is an American punk name that drips modern day. It doesn't sound magical to me at all. Merrick is just unoriginal, not bad but not good, either. Warren is also not a faerie name, it sounds wrong to my ear in connection with faeries of any sort. The list goes on, but I'll stop here.

2) The Fall Court. The Fall Court is such a cheap name, and the circumstances surrounding it were...well, let's just say they weren't good. Why not use the more traditional name for the dying season, and call it Autumn? Why Fall? Don't poets and "educated" people call it Autumn--because let's face it, it sounds both prettier and more magical. Also, I was very annoyed when Calista and Ryder *cough* kissed the first time, and found yellow and red leaves on the ground where they'd been rolling around. Calista went on and on about how there were no colored leaves in the land of the faeries--in fact, she was so dumbfounded that she almost made it sound like she'd never seen them before, even in the mortal realm, but we know that can't be true, right? Right?

3) The explicit content. This is most definitely the dirtiest book I've ever read. There wasn't a page that didn't have at least a couple of foul words on it, and frequently they were as strong and nasty as it gets. Also, the Calista-Ryder scenes were just a little too descriptive for my taste. This wouldn't be a con at all to me, because I believe people can write whatever they like, but it clashed with the juvenile moods of the characters and their narration.

4) The tenses. This book was written in present tense almost all the way through, but a handful of times I would see a random sentence thrown in that was in past-tense, when the narrator was speaking of something current.

5) The timelines. In this book, the author used the famous King Oberon of the Summer Court and his wife, and in counterpart, Queen Mab of the Winter Court. This is fine with me, in fact sometimes I even prefer it...but it was mentioned in the book that fae are immortal. If this is true, and these are the same royal fae I've read about so many times before, then they are already as old as time. However, Calista is Oberon's eldest child, and Ryder is Mab's eldest child. I'm sure I don't need to point out that this means the royal fae NEVER had children, in the hundreds, thousands, or millions of years they had existed, until twenty-some years ago. Then they rapidly had child after child...both courts almost at the same time. If there had even been a mention of previous generations of children I might have let this go, but there wasn't, so I can't.

6) The repetition. There were literally more than fifty pages of this book that were nothing but re-explaining what I'd already read. I'd read about a scene from Calista's POV, and her chapter would end and Ryder's would pop up...where he would proceed to re-narrate the exact same scene for me again, from his perspective. Sometimes there wouldn't even be any dialogue, just him saying, "I told him this," and "I asked her this." *sigh* I know you did, man, I already read it from Calista's POV. This made several chapters/scenes in the book entirely unnecessary, because they didn't bring ANYTHING new to the table.

7) The humor. It was flat and childish and slapstick to the third degree. People would crack any bad joke that leaped into their mind first, and everyone else would burst out laughing at it. It was like watching an old He-Man or Thundercats episode, where there's always a joke at the end and the screen goes black to everyone holding their ribs, while you're rolling your eyes at them.

8) The romance. There was no love in this book, at all. There was lust galore, where every character in the book would constantly be eyeing the others' physical attributes and thinking dirty thoughts, but despite the near-constant declarations of love being thrown around, it was all tell, no show. They never really talked, they never hung out together, they were never friends before they were lovers. I don't care about destiny or prophets--these are two people who met six hours ago, they can't be declaring their undying love for one another. Merrick was just as bad, he never did anything but cause strife and pain and then gloat about it afterward, before promptly going to do it again.

9) The tempers. In this book, people would regularly snarl foul words at each other over nothing, sometimes going so far as to hit one another and start a fight. They'd snap and swat and spit like rabid badgers, and they showed about the same amount of grace while they were doing it. There was no reason for this--as above, there was jealousy, not love. Merrick would touch Calista's arm or put his own around her waist, and Ryder would explode with fury and threaten to kill him....No, no, no, no. If you two really loved Calista, you'd let her make her choice, and you'd go on being loyal and devoted and FRIENDLY, not trying to rip away a huge piece of her heart by killing each other. I understand that the author is female, and writing about men can be confusing and irritating, but this is not how adult men act. This is not how any adults act, but even testosterone and macho standoffs don't realistically escalate like they did in this book.

10) The modern world. It influenced this book enough that I think I can safely say that it's set in the present day. The entire book took place in the realm of the faeries, but it might just as well have been on the streets of Los Angeles for all the magic I witnessed. I think this book should have been one about superheroes instead of fae--that way, the author could comfortably have remained in the modern world she obviously prefers, and kept her characters' superpowers. The main plot was so beaten down by the romance that it could have been practically anything, so that's hardly even a factor. There were a few little winged people floating around for effect, and some people lived in trees, and there were kelpies walking around in the grass at one point, but those could easily have been dispensed with--they didn't actually play a central piece to the story.

11) There were a few sentences in this book that I had to stare at to make sure they were really what I thought they were. Like this one: The darkness of the forest feels like it is eating away my courage and replacing it with defeat. Darkness might eat away your courage, sure. But why not put despair, instead of defeat? Darkness can't put defeat in your heart or mind, it isn't an emotion. You can feel defeated, but not defeat.

And this one: Nixie looks over at me and I shake my head 'yes.' You don't shake your head yes, dearie, you nod. You shake your head 'no.' Second graders are learning this everywhere.

There were more of these, too, but I'm too lazy to look them up.

So, I'm finished beating the book about the head. As I said before, I think if the author works hard, gets an editor to help her clean out unnecessary scenes, and does some research on traditional faerie folklore (not that you need it when you're making up your own folklore, but she really didn't do that in this book, so research would help), she could become an amazing writer. I won't recommend this specific book to anyone I know, but even my favorite writer published one book I didn't care for - so, hey, I might pick up her next book just to see what's changed.