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Title: The Awakening
ISBN: 0821772287
Author:
Shannon Drake
Publicate Date: 2003-10-01
Publish: 2003-10-01
List Price: $6.99
Average Customer Rating: 2.5
Format: Mass Market Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $2.29
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $0.01
Amazon Merchant Price: $6.99
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1: Not Good
I'm new to the Shannon Drake Vampire series. The first 4 books - 1. Beneath a Blood Red Moon, 2. When Darkness Falls, 3. Deep Midnight and 4. Realm of Shadows are excellent books! They are well written and interesting, expecially when the author recesses into the past explain how certain main characters became who and "what" they are. Having said that; I must say that The Awakening is awful! Yes, I said AWFUL! I haven't yet finished the book, at this point I am almost 3/4 of the way through it and I keep skipping pages to get through it faster! I have found the two main characters "Finn and Megan" to be redundant and just plain annoying! I want to say "GET OVER IT ALREADY"! I will read the next book - which is the last in the series (Dead By Dusk) only because I have already purchased the book, but if the series continues on this downward spiral, I will not purchase any more.
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2: Desperately in need of an editor
This book has all the elements of a bad novel.
First: No one apparently proof read this book before it was published. It's full of spelling and grammar mistakes, the main character's name changes several times etc...
Second: It is excruciatingly redundant. There's this blue fog. It's blue on the first page. It's blue on the last page.
It's blue on every page in the middle. Wiccan's are good, satanists are bad. On every page. Don't worry if you don't get it the first fifty times, it will be explained over and over to you.
Third: There's nothing really sexy about it. It's not enough to tell readers that something is seductive... show them!
In short, the novel is an insult to the intelligence (and literacy skills) of readers.
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3: even under a different name
Heather grahams work shines through once again. She can't hide behind another name as she continues to write her stories. Shannon drake is a great name. But the stories that unfold, like this book, as well as many others are beyond. I can never put down a book i read by shannon drake(heather graham) And thats hard because i have 3 kids!
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4: Contrary to all others
I loved this book. It's the first Shannon Drake novel I've ever read, but I immediately loved both Finn and Megan. I liked the depth between them and the way the author kept us guessing who was really the satanists.
The first part did drag a bit, but once you get towards the end you realize there was a reason she had to tell the backstory, and a reason for the tension between the two main characters.
I hope to see more of Finn and Megan and definitely advise anyone looking for a good mystery with some romance to pick this up and read it.
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5: I'm a Glutton for Punishment.
At the end of my comments on Realm of Shadows, I said I would never read another Shannon Drake book again. I'm such a sadist that I decided to try this one when I found it in a used book store. ACK! I was never a fan of Shannon Drake to begin with (though I read all of her vampire romances and parts of her historicals), but I can see this is book where she really jumps the shark. It seems that she has slowly been moving away from romance in her last couple of books and more towards general fiction or horror. Frankly, that's really going to alienate the romance fans that have been following her over the years under this name and as Heather Graham. I doubt she's going to find a very receptive audience among horror fiction readers. Drake proved in her first vampire romance book Beneath a Blood Red Moon that she can be a fair romance writer, but the last couple of books have shown that as a horror novelist she is pathetically, hideously bad.
The book isn't a complete waste of time if you're into the stupid camp horror that you find in 70's B-flicks. Then again this book lacks the gore factor to please that audience too. The Awakening trots out the ding-bats caught in a Conspiracy of Darkness plot that Drake is so fond of again. This time some Satanists are manipulating this overly-complex web so they can resurrect a demon to suit their one-demensional motives. It certainly is a nice change of supernatural window dressing compared to her increasingly silly and tired vampire yarns.
To set the scene, Drake pulls out every horror cliche she can think of: fog, looming darkness, cursed graveyards, troubling dreams, an old man who pratically screams "It's evil! Evil I tells ya! EEEEVIIIIILLL!" Too bad none of these elements are used effectively. Thought I am impressed they she didn't try to work the Necronicon in here somewhere.
The characters are another problem. They lack distinctive personalities. The main characters are Finn and Megan. They are a young married couple. They love each other, but they've been having some marriage troubles. What kind of troubles? I don't know. Seeing as Drake is trying to make some statement about how love and trust overcomes obstacles- even pure evil- it just doesn't work when the conflict that threatens to tear them apart isn't fleshed out. Megan is cardboard flat, and only trait that compelling sexy Finn displays is his ability to be a condescending butthead. In the last quarter of the book, Drake tries to cram into all the characters from his last four books to help fight the great evil. If you haven't been following the series you'll have no idea who these people are and they seem to be there without rhyme or reason. The secondary characters' personalities are so monotone that if you just read the dialogue bits, you'd be unable to tell them apart.
But the books biggest problem is that it is nearly 500 pages long, but it's padded to heck and back. The proses are longwinded and repetative. The details of the Salem witch trials are hashed and rehashed. Megan insists that Wiccans can't do evil at least once a chapter. And Drake won't let you forget that men do evil. Maybe the biggest thing that irked me, is that very little happens in the way to warn the characters that something bad is on the way. Maybe an unexplained murder or too would have done the trick, but Drake wants us to buy into her premise because it's scary and foggy and we feel it in our bones. The people who want Megan and Finn to believe in this demon resurection thingy but offer little in the way of proof, and just say that because a handfull of superstitious nitwits believe or once believed in demons, hey, it must be true! If not for Drake hammering again and again about fog and evil, I would just think that many of these characters are fools who got sucked into some Halloween fantasy gone too far.
This is a bad,bad book, but strangely enough, I'm curious to see if Drake's next one is even worse!
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