Notice

Title: Notice
Author: M. Raiya
Cover Artist: n/a
Publisher: Torquere Books
Amazon: n/a
Genre: Fantasy/Gay Romance
Length: 176 pages/50200 words
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

A guest review by Sirius

Summary: I enjoyed the world-building and the characters in the story, but was not so sure about its pacing and consistency of how the magic works in this universe.

Blurb:

High school teacher and dragonshifter Adrian Kendall is given notice in his classroom, which means someone is out to get him. He doesn’t know which student left the notice. He doesn’t know how the attack it warns of will come. All he knows is that his three very carefully separated lives are about to collide.

There’s far more at stake than Adrian’s sanity. The clan of dragons who depend on him will be left vulnerable. The teaching career he treasures will be over. And if all his secrets are spilled, then the peaceful world he’s built with his flamboyant and passionately gay human lover, Josh, will implode. As a thousand years of hatred take aim right at Kendall, all he can do is offer himself as the price of peace.

Review:

I was not sure how I felt about this story when I finished it so I had to re-read it right away. There were parts of it that I enjoyed, including some characters and world-building, but I guess if I were to describe my overall impression I would say that I thought that the writing was a bit clunky and clumsy and failed to live up to its potential.

It started in a way that made me worry that the supernatural element was not going to be incorporated too well in “our world”. It has happened to me more than once in the past where the writer takes a paranormal element — be it some artifact, or abilities, or just the whole existence of shifters, like in this book — and it just does not mesh it well with our reality. Interestingly, while the beginning of the book irritated me, as the story progressed, I thought that the author was really creative and had integrated dragon shifters in “our society” quite well. I have to say, though, that soon enough I was again not a happy reader and reviewer.

I thought that while the author took pretty good care with making the existence of dragon shifters and their mixing with humans quite believable, for me anyway, she did not establish consistent rules as to how magic and supernatural abilities actually work in the universe she created. For example, when something bad happens in the beginning, the protagonist and another character basically turn the clock back and return to the initial event before the something bad happens. However when something bad happens again, they say that they cannot change history, and their explanation why they cannot do so was not convincing to me at all, especially since they could do it before.

Adrian and his helper (allow me not to elaborate on who his helper is because it would be quite a spoilerish revelation) have plenty of magical abilities and while it was explained well why they have these abilities, the way they use those abilities was pushing at my capacity to suspend my disbelief, fantasy or not. Every time it seemed that they could not do anything to fight against the bad guys, it felt like the author was pulling something new and unexpected out of her sleeve. I was wondering if there was a limit to their abilities and to the new places they could visit. I think that I was getting too strong of a superheroes vibe from both of them — and I do not think I was supposed to get such a vibe.

I also thought that pacing was odd in places. For example, the author spends time telling us how the good guys prepare their plan of attack on the bad guys, and instead of showing it to us, she breaks the chapter and the next time we meet the characters, the week is passed and we have to learn about what happened from characters’ retelling of the story.

I admit to liking the romance element in the story and felt it was handled better than the action/adventure storyline, with which it shared about equal page time to me. I thought that Josh, Adrian’s boyfriend, was the most endearing character in the story and I enjoyed his and Adrian’s interactions. I wished for more page space for Josh as I liked his optimism and his curiosity. I am still trying to decide what I think of Adrian, though. I am realizing that I thought that his interaction with Josh was when Adrian is the most human, but that Adrian as a noble leader of dragon shifters was unfortunately too much perfection to me. Although we were shown more than one side of Adrian’s personality, and while I suppose he had some multi-dimension, I would have liked for him to have been fleshed out more.

Recommended with reservations.