Friday, July 17, 2020

ARC Reviews: Only Love is Deathless, and Dragon Dilemna




In Only Love is Deathless, two men fall in love and fight a dragon (as well as an assortment of creepy otherworldly beasts).

In Dragon Dilemma, two men are in love, and one of them is a dragon (who can shift back and forth to his human form).

The story in Only Love is Deathless jumps into the action right away, with a prince coming to an agreement with a thief that they will get married, but it will be a fake marriage and only for a year. This will allow the prince's younger brother to marry his true love, because the rules of the land dictate that a younger member of royalty cannot marry until their older sibling does.

From the start, nothing goes as planned. The fake dragon the thief (who has magic) was supposed to conjure up so he and the prince could "meet" by dramatically battling the beast together, is actually a real one sent by someone unknown (but clearly evil), and the thief gets badly injured. Cue the prince and the thief pretty adorably falling in love with each other while the thief convalesces.

From there, the story essentially follows this format. Sweet love story, lots of battles with mythical creatures, a quest, and some highly dramatic tragedies. Just a note that there are quite a few explicit "strong sexual content" (as the movie rating system would say) scenes in this book. I know some people prefer to skip the erotica, so just a heads up there. The scenes start out well-written, demonstrating the love between the two characters, but then there are so many of those scenes, and they are written so similarly, that it just becomes very repetitive. Some variety in writing style would have helped there I think. But it's an enjoyable read with some sweet romance and a lot of page-turning drama, and flew by pretty quickly.

Dragon Dilemma is the third in a series, I have read the previous two. Dane, the extremely powerful son of a god, and Mercury, an extremely powerful dragon, are raising a group of dragon kits together (dragons can shift to human form). Dane and Mercury originally joined forces to stop a series of dangerous experiments being done on dragons, but quickly fell in love and are now a family with the younger dragons as their children.

In this entry in the series, Dane's mother, who is also extremely powerful, unexpectedly comes to visit, as do leaders of other supernatural territories. Someone is spreading lies and rumors in an attempt to cause dangerous conflict, which means readers get dramatic battles, mysteries, and protective family scenes.

This is a series I enjoy. It makes for fun, quick reading, with a good group of reoccurring characters. I would like to see more focus on Dane and Mercury's relationship, it is depicted as very strong, but we don't get a lot of scenes of just the two of them centered around their relationship and not around an ongoing emergency.

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