In my list of books I'd read during my hiatus I forgot one: Enigma by Robert Harris. I'll review that in a couple of days, but in the meantime here's one I just finished. Whisper Cape by Regan Walsh.

I'm not usually a romance/paranormal romance reader, but gave this a crack since it was on free download at the time. The novel's true target market might very well have a different perception of the novel.

My first main grouse was the manner in which the main characters came into their powers. With the heroine it was "You might be able to do such-and-such." "Let me try. Oh, so I can." Straight away. No practise required. With the hero it was "I can't do such-and-such. Oh hey, yes I can after all." There was no cost to using the powers either, beyond a little dizziness after teleporting. In my opinion, they need to have costs and consequences of magic-using, not just an unlimited vat of power.

The characters themselves were standard romance fare. Both impossibly beautiful and both spending a lot of their point of view scenes thinking about how sexy the other is. Trouble was, I didn't believe them. I had no real feeling of Cael's irresistable nature. Dare I say, he was obviously a man written by a woman for women?

The other thing that was missing in this novel was the concept of "in late, out early" for the scenes. Almost invariably, the scenes went on that little bit too long and ended with a bit of a whimper, where if they had finished 100-200 words earlier there would have been a nice punchy end line. But this is the author's first novel (and as such, she has written one more than me!) so maybe that will come with experience.

Along with "in late, out early" the author could do with googling "deus ex machina" since the ending definitely smacked of it to me.

I've given it 3 stars as it entertained me for a few hours and I finished it. I will abandon books if they really aren't worth finishing, so at least I got to the end. I won't be reading the follow-up though, free download or not.