Review - Breathless by Anne Stuart - or sometimes we do read the new shit...

Karla jumped into the Stuart boat first and was unimpressed - and then her sister picked up one of the books that we both happened to own and the challenge was on - for me my first take and for Karla one last take - so we could all see just how bad/good was she. Well the reviews are in...

Catt's take =- a ***** star favorite...
**sigh** Karla will smack me up side my head and no longer take any of my reviews seriously but, but, but - I can't help it! I loved this book! My goofy ass fell head over heels in love with the villain/hero. He was all kinds of Gothic awesomeness and I couldn't get enough. I even ended up liking the heroine and the secondary romance as well! Okay on with my plotness -

The Girl - Miranda, she thinks she is plain and ordinary but she is better than average. She becomes the pawn in a revenge plot as our evil hero tries to hurt her family through her. He plots her downfall by having her kidnapped and ravaged by a rake hoping she will be forced into marrying him. But she is ruined in society's eyes but refuses to marry the idiot and her family supports her. Being wealthy she can live independently but she is lonely.

The Guy - Lucien, of the awesomeness!! He is tall, dark and Gothic. He has a limp, he is scarred by whip marks, he is wealthy, he works at being evil, he has a gloomy old mansion on the edge of society, he is best friends with the king of the thieves, and he wears all black all the time. He is awesome. (Karla thought he was cheese and would be best portrayed by Dr. Evil but I fell for it). He hates Miranda's family because her older brother disgraced his half-sister and she later killed herself so he is after their family and wants to hurt them as much as they hurt him.


The Setup - After Miranda bounces back from being ruined and doesn't marry the rake, Lucien decides on another plan - he will woo her and marry her and then abandon her at his remote country house and not let her family ever see her. Of course things never work the way they are supposed to - they both end up liking each other more than they should - fireworks and fights follow.

My Lucien!

The Good Stuff - Everything for me. I ate it all up. I was in love. I will end up reading this again. Yes I'm a cheese ball - I don't care - Lucien rocks. I'm also seriously considering taking Lucien and his best friend, King of the Thieves Jacob and slashing it up a little - I could have some fun with that...

My Gripes - I really don't have any, I like it all!


Karla's take - a DNF WTF...

Decided to bail when reading it at WORK instead of WORKING seemed like a rather piss-poor decision about sneaky time management. Stuart's writing and her characters bore me, pure and simple. And considering I wasn't that enamored with both the H/h AND the 2ndary romance characters from Reckless, I thought, "Why in the name of Flying Spaghetti Monster am I reading about both of their spawn?"

The hero here, Lucien, was so camp that I got an image of Mike Myers hijacking Gary Oldman in Dracula. I'd probably eagerly watch a movie of that, but in book form it was excruciating.

Also, if an author is going to use historically accurate slang terms like "snabble", the least she can do while the Google page is still up is make sure that "to clock" someone was in usage at the time as well. (It wasn't.) As with Savage Ecstasy, when the book annoyed me, I started paying attention to details. Call it nitpicking if you will. In the age of the internet, it's not hard to get the small details right if you're going to have them in the first place.

I'm not going to rate this since I only made it through pg. 65.

This is Karla's take on Lucien...