She used to be so clever...

After being such a clever strong leading lady through 2 brilliant books (and I thoroughly enjoyed Bks 1 and 2), the author then lets Benella spend most of this book pondering questions with obvious answers.

I can understand that "the horrific" event would make her wary, angry, distrustful... but not stupid! Yes he needed to re-earn her trust but for a girl who spent most of the first 2 books asking all the right questions and quickly puzzling out the answers, I found this sudden reduction in intellect to facilitate a longer story truly frustrating. Thus, this last book didn't do its two precedessors justice.

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Fan fiction writer's almost successful experiment

This story is part of the Beastly Tales series and as such should be reviewed as all three “books” because frankly they’re all the same book. To split this up into three separate items is, well, a bit of a con to the audience.

Book 1 –
The story begins with some effective character introductions, which moves the level of writing beyond the smut of most erotica. But only slightly. The characters are not terribly deep but that is a good thing in a story like this because it avoids clumsy chapters that aren’t relevant to the, lets be honest, soft-core fun. It’s gentle tension building and teasing that is well done.

Book 2
The second part is simply an extension of the first. There’s not a lot to be said on development, as it doesn’t really differ much from the first. Continuing with a slightly heated storyline with the occasional somewhat juicy scene, the plot begins to steer into unnecessary directions. This doesn’t particularly detract from the middle chapter but certainly does set-up the final chapter for crushing boredom.

Book 3
The final chapter of the series spent a very long time, and completely unnecessarily mind you, doing a character reshuffle that simply turned out to be lumbering and graceless. The author finally introduced some level of dialogue and shift away from the 1st person perspective but it was impossible to shake the feeling that so much of it was filler. Even so, this did not help the flow as it seems the author had suddenly forgotten the point of this soft-core tease and mistaken it for an actual story.


Overall the full story should have been about half as long as it was.
It’s very easy listening but absolutely not the best quality of writing.
Better than most amateurish fan-fiction stories like this but definitely not worthy of a 3 book series, as it was undoubtedly trailing off by the end of the second book. A great buildup but massive anticlimax.

The arousal scenes were “achingly” repetitive and just completely lacked any variety in vocabulary. The main character is actually not that likable – her presentation is sickeningly passive-aggressive and unjustly self-righteous.
The two-dimensional character just falls apart by the end of the 2nd book and becomes annoyingly repetitive. For somebody that is supposedly intelligent and studious, she is incredibly stupid and ignorant. What I suspect is the written view of an imbecile for what a clever person is. She’s also annoyingly prude and frigid.

Final note – the first two “books” are written almost entirely in first person. This just feels a little strange.

All this being said - Sierra Kline once again made an excellent delivery of it. Great narrator.

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