Santino the Eternal
The Eternal Series Book 1
Paranormal Vampire Romance
March 28, 2017
246
Reviewed by: Douglas C. Meeks
Member of the Paranormal Romance Review Team
I seem to be stuck in some loop of books that fall into that category of “books that you were not sure you liked, but the story was good enough you just kept reading”. Well here we are again. I was much more disappointed this time since it started great with a lot of promise, but the author just could not turn this story into the book it should have been.
Slow burn romance is hard to write, probably why many authors use the “insta-love” in paranormal romance so much. This was supposed to be a slow burn romance (I think?) but instead it faltered after a great beginning into a fairly boring attempt at a slow burn romance. It has high points but the heroine fluttered all over the place and veered into TSTL (Too Stupid To Live) territory several times.
The writing came across to this reviewer as wooden and the plot would stall and spin in place then suddenly jerk forward with several things that happen in a jerky manner and then back to boring. The whole book never sucked me in and I was always “on the outside looking in”. At the end I still never felt like I knew the characters.
This is just another book that did not live up to its potential, sadly. I did enjoy the bit of interplay between our hero Santino and the author in a short at the end of the book she labeled as “The Author and the Muse”, actually I thought it may have been the best written and most consistently interesting part of the book and it was not really part of the story at all.
3.5 Stars and wishing it could have been more