So I recently decided to give Secret McQueen’s world a spin. This fairly new series by author Sierra Dean focuses on Secret (yes, that’s her real name), as she takes on the supernatural underworld. She herself is a vampire/werewolf hybrid bounty hunter, giving her the best of both worlds, though neither side realizes her other half. They just know she’s a little different, and she’d like to keep it that way.
Everything is thrown upside down when a former vampire foe returns to exact revenge upon her and destroy the supernatural underworld’s secret existence as we know it. To make matters even more complicated, she meets a potential werewolf suitor…or two and her knowledge of her werewolf heritage is awakened, among other things.
There’s really not much else to it besides that if I’m being honest. The beginning started off really promising but it just didn’t sustain for me. I thought it read like fan fiction a lot of the time and the writing was on an amateur level. With such a short page count I was expecting a story that shouldn’t really drag, but I felt that it did. I can’t really put my finger on it, but the lack of originality made it a little boring for me. I also had a big problem with how her heritage is supposedly a secret from the other half. Vampires have interacted with werewolves and vice versa, so how could they not suspect that she could be a hybrid? They should know better than to buy that her job as an assassin is the reason why she “smells of death.” She takes showers and her enemies are alive when she kills them, so I just couldn’t buy that reasoning.
The characters are all pretty cookie cutter. Nobody stands out as particularly interesting or eccentric. It doesn’t help that we know right away that her love life is going to be complicated. A triangle is bad enough all its own, but there is an allusion to even more suitors being on the way and nothing turns me off more than that.
The book is a short read, but it took me quite a while to get through it. Maybe it’s because I lost my kindle and have been reading on the tablet, which I really don’t like because it makes nauseous (I read on a moving train), maybe it was my personal family issues that slowed down my motivation, maybe it just wasn’t the right time to read this book, but all I can really say is that it just didn’t do it for me.
Hmmmm….I downloaded this book a few months ago, and I lost interest early on and never got back to it. I just didn’t like the writing style at all. I might give it another go if I run out of things in my To Be Read basket (not likely), but it’s interesting that you didn’t particularly care for it, either. Makes me feel like my instincts to stop wasting time on it might have been valid.
Maybe it would have been better if you had started off with the story The Secret guide to dating monsters? I started off with book 1 and was frustrated with all the references to how Secret had screwed up and the council was keeping an eye on her because of this. Then I found the monster book it is only a novella and it looks like a story to introduce us to Secret and I found that the story in book 1 was lot more understandable because I read this novella, I also found that the rest of the books where more enjoyable once I had the background from it. All that said it’s a good job we don’t all enjoy the same books.
Thanks for that insight, Jacqueline. The books have good ratings. Maybe I’ll give it another try. Does the writing style improve?
@Marcia: So far it doesn’t really stand out from anything else, so we may be okay skipping it.