Embracing Destiny

I love Hutchins. I do. That being said, I think the quality of her writing is going downhill. Embracing Destiny was hastily written, by her own admission. And there's a sequel, or rather, a part two coming. That's fine.

Here is the issue. And maybe it's just an issue for me personally, because I require more from my authors than just sex sex sex. There's a lot of it in here, which is fine I suppose. Except that it's not especially sexy. It's kind of rape-y, with a heavy dose is BDSM, which again, is fine if you're into that, and I've been known to be into it. I just couldn't connect to the scenes in any way, which made them unsexy. In fact, I had trouble connecting to the whole book, which has never been a problem for me with Hutchins' Fae series.

Here is one problem: she apparently does zero research for her characters. Yes, they're made up, but some of them are based on existing legends, and if you use some of the facts of those legends to flesh out your character, it gives your book real depth. Take Ilona Andrews and Patricia Briggs for example. If ones of them refers to a character of legend, you can look that character up and see that they've used some of the actual legend to give that character life. That's a mark of a great author.

Then there's the typos and repetitive word use. Flesh is used 61 times (although down from her all time high of 123 times), and pretty is used 54 times (also a reduction, but not enough). The thesaurus is free. Seriously. When you can make it a drinking game, it's too much. There are 47 typos that I personally caught. There could be more. And they were typos. The grammar was pretty good for the most part.

In a conversation, Hutchins told me she used 3 different word processors to edit her books. And therein lies her problem. An algorithm is no substitute for a sharp pair of eyes. They don't catch homonyms. Ever.

I will say this book was edited better than her last one by A LOT. But it's still not good enough.