I bought this book and its sequel at a comic con a few years ago. At the con, one of the authors really sold me on the plot idea of this series, over her others, when it comes to my preferences. I read almost every genre, but paranormal romance is my favorite genre to cuddle up with, especially with a glass of wine following a long day at work. So, needless to say, I was excited to read this. I have read self published and/or small local authors before, so I know these works are not always of the same quality as books produced through big publishers, but many times I have been pleasantly surprised. Unfortunately, that was not the case with this book.
My biggest issue with this book is the unbelievable amount of grammar/spelling/formatting errors. I have never seen such negligence in a "finished" book before, and I have trouble understanding why someone who considers his or herself an author would present this as a finished product. The errors weren't just little issues that are easily overlooked either; I'm talking about misuse of your/you're, places where it was obvious they accidentally hit "enter" instead of a "space", and even forgetting to capitalize the beginning of a sentence. It got to the point where I was temped to get my red pen and make corrections as I read.
Aside from the unprofessional presentation, there were several other issues that resulted in a one-star rating. Firstly, the dialog and character development was not believable to me. It is hard to pinpoint what exactly was wrong with the characters, but the best way to describe it is they all sounded so young. The way the immortal gods spoke, reminded me more of frat boys rather than rulers of earth thousands of years old. Everyone in the book just seems so blatantly immature, but we are supposed to believe that the men are immortal and the women are young professionals (late 20's/early 30's). Also, none of the characters had a distinctive voice. I have read many books, in the same genre, where you could remove names, and I could still tell you exactly which character was "speaking". That could never happen here.
Second, anyone can tell you flat out what is happening, but a truly talented author uses words to paint a picture. I don't want to be told what how a character feels, I want to close my eyes and see it. There were hardly any descriptions, back story, etc. For instance, when Syrus was captured, Caine used a "tool of power". At no point leading up to this had any such tool been mentioned. It was as if the authors threw random things into the story to achieve their ends without doing any set-up.
Lastly, there were sooooo many character names (plus, the gods have more than one name), but with everyone talking the same, and random things happening with no set-up, it was very confusing, despite the fact that the entire book only took a few hours to read.
I bought the second book and will read it because I can't bring myself to waste something I paid for. I am hoping that the three years in between books brings along some improvements in the writing.