The Compass Rose by Gail Dayton

I simply could not finish Gail Dayton's The Compass Rose (and have already donated it to my public library). It begins adequately and has decent world-building, but about halfway in (once the strong-yet-unremarkable protagonist, Kallista, and company start toward the capital city) it sinks into a nauseating quagmire of romantic pseudo-plots and issues. The scenes are poorly paced, and for no apparent reason (other than weak attempts at creating tension), chapters begin and end in the middle of the same scene. Most glaringly, the writing is at best pedestrian and, at its worst, contains some of the most awful sentences I can recall.

An example from p. 220: "[His] hips bucked, his tip just nudging her entrance, and they both hissed with the feel of it." (Note that neither character being described is a snake-person. Also, how could neither the author nor edit... Read More

New Blood by Gail Dayton

The blood sorcerers have been exterminated; The last one was killed almost two centuries ago. Her magical servant has spent the intervening years looking for a successor, and finally finds her — a young woman wounded by the world around her — and now has the unlucky task of trying to convince her to take up the forbidden power. As they struggle to make sense of the crumbling world around them, they are forced to draw closer together, and they may find the most magical thing of all: love.

New Blood has an interesting premise and I enjoy paranormal romance novels when they are well written, but the prose just didn’t live up to the promise in this one. I was getting increasingly irritated with the odd writing style, but when I got to the line “The nape of his neck, exposed between his shirt collar and the slight wave of his hair, looked so vulnerable.” (p.17), my eyes liter... Read More