Cat Johnson Braves Doll Lil’s Word Association Challenge!

This book is the first in The Curse Breaker’s Trilogy. The writing style is unpretentious and the main female characters are funny and relatable. The story moves at a good pace and avoids most issues that plague new authors. Unfortunately, there are several things that are just too disquieting.

On the minor side, the book is in desperate need of a good proof reader who can eliminate all the typos and fix the grammatical errors. Almost every page has a least one typo or wrong word (in example using the word buzzard in place of the word buzzer.)

Plot wise, I was willing to suspend reality and believe that Aria, the main character, could agree to marry someone that she has just met after having tons of sex with them. It was extremely odd that she never asked to see his home or meet his friends but, I went along to see where this would go.  When Aria agrees to have sexual relations with this stranger and doesn’t consider birth control until she is reminded by a friend to consider it after already well into the relationship – I disagreed with it philosophically but decided to hang on a little longer. But when the author incorporates rape SEVERAL times into the story and doesn’t treat it with the seriousness it requires, I found it very difficult to support this book.

Two female characters in the book are raped by a ghost and do nothing about it. They are physically assaulted several times. They casually mention it to one another but that’s it. There are several examples of sex that is non-consensual or of sex that is initially against the female partner’s will.  I found this all very disturbing. Why would Aria and her friend Melissa stay in a house where she was being physically assaulted? Let’s put it this way, if they are freaked out about a haunting and call in a ghost hunter, why don’t they call in other help when they are being raped? It just doesn’t make sense.

As a plot device, I thought it showed the weaknesses in the story line mainly Drake, the evil brother. His character could have been developed and his abilities amplified to an extent that would not make it necessary to resort to rape to establish his depravity or malevolence.

After the rape scenes, the story just spirals at high speed into the realm of suspended logic. The heroine never notifies her family when she gets married or when she ends up pregnant and alone. This is very out of character for the close knit family oriented character that is introduced at the beginning of the book.

The plot line involving the Indian curse, the blood curse and the final spell required to bring back Dominic are each resolved in rather confusing ways. This is a shame because there was so much potential here.

The book is a relatively short read but I just can’t get past the violence against women. That and the fact that almost every man in the book has a name that begins with the letter “d”.