Paranormal & Urban Fantasy, Monthly Group Reads discussion

This is where you can chat about the BOM once you've finished the book.

Liked the book! But man, there were parts that made my brain hurt ^_^... namely scenes where the action took place in the mind/PsyNet. I kept envisioning this "Tron"-like environment...with lights and stars and all manner of wackiness. Creeped myself out, sheesh.

I read this book a while ago. I know it takes some getting used too, with lots of the action being mental. Lucas is one of my favorite heroes!

I read this book last month and loved it! I just started the second one in the series and so far liking it

Delicious Dee the book slut wrote: "I read this book last month and loved it! I just started the second one in the series and so far liking it"

I've only read the first three so far, and have loved all of them. I'll probably read book 4 sometime this month or next month. If you want to do a buddy read let me know :)

will do!! i might see if my library has book 3 (I need to borrow a book from somewhere for another groups challenge and nobody said I can't return it later on...lol!)

Delicious Dee the book slut wrote: "will do!! i might see if my library has book 3 (I need to borrow a book from somewhere for another groups challenge and nobody said I can't return it later on...lol!)"

Great! Just let me know. That's one of the many series that I want to catch up on, and I do better to read along with someone. We don't have to be on the same book, just within the series. Maybe we can add it to the buddy folder here whenever you're ready. :)

yeah, we should! see if anyone else wnats to...i'm enjoying visions of heat so far, but i'm only like 6 chapters in...I have like 5 books going at once, so I try to give them equal attention

whoever picked this one, i'm really glad that we're sorta going somewhere different. the shapeshifting bit is pretty standard for us by now, but the somewhat sci-fi setting is a nice change - there's a thread somewhere talking about really good sci-fi-flavored romance books, and i've never really read any of that, so here's to new stuff!

that being said, i'm only 3 or 4 chapters in, and wow, this book just dumps you in it, huh? i generally expect my romance novels to be in either a familiar setting, or else set up the world a bit more before diving into the plot...but plenty of times regular sci-fi does the latter, so i just have to shift gears a bit. lots of people have recommended this one, so we'll see where she goes with it!

I read this a few months ago and loved it! A totally different take on everything. What a nice change to the cookie-cutter type books circulating now.

I love Lucas, the leopard shifter. Yummy. I have book 2 and can't wait to fit it into a challenge so I can actually read it. I put off reading this for a long time and now wish I hadn't. A really good series.

i may end up being odd chick out here - the rating for this book is rather high, so apparently everyone loves her writing a whole lot.

this book pretty much drove me nuts. i was super excited to read something sci-fi flavored, instead of the same-ol same-ol vamps & weres (love em like i do, the worlds start to get interchangeable). i found this world to be really interesting, what with the sharp class delineations and the smoldering cold war between the psy and the shifters.

but geez, her writing! she's really really fond of very short sentences that build on each other (e.g., "they were out for blood. psy blood."), and given how often that choppy technique got splashed across the page, i just kept hearing it as a corny voice-over for a movie trailer with lots of explosions. did anyone have any shock whatsoever when the ending showed up? the very first time that guy walked into the room, i was "ah-ha! here's our villain," and i'm always the last person to figure out what's up in a mystery. the backstory was so intriguing, the lack of sensical details messed it up for me. why do the psy and the shifters hate each other so very very much? what's wrong with the psy that there is a "very high incidence of serial killers" in their population??

i think i'm intrigued enough to check out the next book to see if more of these questions get answered...yet i'm hoping the writing gets better as the series finds its feet.

I think the very high incidence of serial killers is due to the fact that the Psy experience no emotions. Hence no value of right or wrong, so they are all pyschopaths.

very first sentence of the prologue: "in an effort to reduce the overwhelming incidence of insanity and serial killing in the psy population, the psy council decided...to instigate silence." and then later in that prologue, "they base all their decisions on logic and efficiency."

that first sentence was what initially threw me - she went straight to serial killing being an issue; do not pass go, do not collect $200 at alcoholism or drug use or any of the more garden-variety symptoms of mental illness (any of which would be totally believable for someone struggling with being so different from the rest of the population at large, before the whole psy culture was there to act as a social safety net). apparently, i'm supposed to infer that being telepathic makes you want to kill everyone in a ritualistic fetishistic fashion.

then, later in their history with the silence conditioning in full swing, they definitely have values of right & wrong. their values are simply determined by "logic and efficiency" rather than emotions - hence the razor sharp business acumen. and there's NOTHING logical or efficient about kidnapping random chicks and cutting them into itty bitty pieces. there's nothing that benefits family or psynet by doing such things, and plenty of risk and expended effort in the cover-up, so i doesn't make sense to me.

I just read for the enjoyment of the story but wow you're really getting into it. I tend to suspend my beliefs when I read paranormal or sci-fi books since 99% of what's happening can't really happen anyway so why dissect it to such an extent. Oh well, everyone reads and enjoys differently. :)

yeah, i saw that too...i try to suspend disbelief while i'm reading..if its a topic i'm not that sure on its easy to do, but if its something I know lots about then its hard...for me, I have a hard time with military romances because i'm in the miltiary and there are very ew people who can actually portray it really well (suzanne brockmann is one) - I gave up on Lora Leigh's Tempting Seals and Elite Ops because it was soo bad...

i call it "the pretty factor".

see, i'm way way way into costume drama movies. many sins can be forgiven if you dress everyone up in corsets & waistcoats - a movie can be truly mediocre in every way as long as it's gorgeous. dialogue can be merely serviceable, plot can be paper thin, but if there's something so awful as to be distracting me from soaking in the pretty, well, it all goes to hell.

romance novels are kinda like that too, especially "porn with fangs". it's super fun, so if things are good, i'll forgive a lot of silly stuff. there's a lot of pressure for authors to crank 'em out as quickly as possible, and for them to fit into a pre-approved formula (i.e., one that has sold well in the past and so will likely do so again). that's ok, and i know what i'm getting into - as long as my romance novels are fun and escapist, i judge them a good bit less harshly than some other types of books i read. but if something's so off as to be distracting from light-weight breezy enjoyment, the author lost me there.

I just finished last night and was pleasantly surprised by this book. I've been meaning to read it for a while, but I wasn't very excited for it. I'm glad this was a BOM because I really liked it. I thought this was a very unique world and I really enjoyed the PsyNet and PsyMind parts. I loved Lucas and Sascha together, they make the perfect pair. I just started Visions of Heat and I'm really excited for the rest of the series.

I finished this a couple of days ago. It was one of those books that had been part of my TBR for ages before I finally read it, and I don't get why I didn't read it sooner!!! I loved it - so unique with the whole psy world. I'll definitely be looking for the other books in the series :)

That's why I loved it too, Nairabell. It was a unique concept, and I wanted to know more about both groups and how they worked.

I ended up hunting down the rest of the series, to the point where the 3 I couldn't get from amazon UK are on their way from amazon US!!! I've never ordered from there before so hopefully all will go well - though I probably won't get them till August :(

when I was at borders today I found an anthology that features psy-changlings 4.5 in it...I haven't read it yet, but it looks like its about Tamsyn and Nate