Pack Challenge
After reading Nicole's e-book recommendations, I decided to give e-books another try. Since I'm still riding the paranormal romance wave, I chose Shelly Laurenston's Pack Challenge. In addition to being a better price for the page count than the previous books I tried, it lived up to its billing: 4 out of 5.
Zach is a shapeshifter, and he's just arrived in town when he discovers Sara, a beautiful woman who has no idea about her own paranormal gift. Zach is asked to watch over and protect Sara, and he gets to know her in the process.
Laurenston creates an intriguing world in Pack Challenge, and the characters are equally intriguing. At first, Zach believes his reaction to Sara is merely physical. I loved his response and his protectiveness when this turns out to be wrong.
One aspect of the story that fascinated me is the depiction of Sara's relationship with her two friends, Angelina and Miki. They fight with, shout at, and insult each other. Theirs isn't the kind of friendship I have with my friends, but it felt real nevertheless. Although Nicole's blog indicates that they will have their own stories, the women felt like integral parts of this story rather than mere cameos by future heroines.
Sara goes through an interesting transition as she comes to recognize her abilities. This transition isn't always smooth--she experiences rough spots, which I appreciated, as it adds a realistic touch to the story.
As for the sex, it's plenty steamy.
I still don't have an e-book reader, so I bought PDF format again and read at my computer, which is not comfortable. If I continue to try e-books--and I can see myself reading more of Laurenston's work--I'll have to think about buying some kind of PDA or reader.
In other news, I am slowly but surely going back through my blog entries to change the em-dashes, apostrophes, and quotation marks that show up as weird characters in the new font for my blog. Fear not; I will eradicate them all over time. I'm starting at the beginning of my blog and moving forward.
Alyssa
Labels: 4.0 reviews, e-books, i-l reviews, paranormal reviews
posted by Alyssa @ 9:48 PM
4 Comments:
Yay! I'm so glad you liked it. lol I'd hate for you to take another try at ebooks and then have them suck again. That would just...suck.
Yeah, I like Shelly's books. I especially liked how Sara and Zach have an equal relationship at the end, rather than having him exert his alpha muscles and have her submissive.
I'm definitely planning to buy the second one, though I need to find my PDA (I actually bought one last year, but never use it) and find out if I could use it to read e-books. It's a Zire, but I can't remember the model.
:)
Alyssa
I'm curious about this page count thing. I mean, are ebooks generally single- or double-spaced? Are they formatted to a standard 8.5" x 11" (letter-size) "paper" or formatted to something closer to a 4.25" x 6.75" (mass market paperback) size? Are the font sizes 10pt, 11pt, or 12pt?
Seems to me page count is an unreliable way to determine a good price point.
Most of them are a Adobe pdf page, 8.5 by 11, I think. Um, I don't quite know how to explain it, but you get to have an idea of how long the book will be once you've read enough of them. Word count would be okay, but ebook word count and print book word count is also factored differently. And ebook pubs can price books wildly different from each other and base a lot of their pricing on word count.
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