Book Reviews: Short Reviews of New Ebooks

Well, the usual suspects in the erotic romance epub list was visited by me to examine this weeks crop.  Didn’t see anything that interested me at Loose-Id or Siren and nothing at Ellora’s mid-week release appealed to me, but I had one left from last week and found 3 more – all at Samhain.  None really lit my fire but none were awful either.  The other odd thing is all felt more mainstream than usual.  Aside from some brief elements in Dance of the Dragon and Songbird, none really qualified a ‘erotic’ in my mind.  Romance, yes, but two of the four were romantic adventure and less erotic than Lora Leigh’s Nauti series, which is sold as mainstream.  The other two didn’t hit the ‘hot’ level of her Elite Ops books.  Just because a book is sold by Samhain, doesn’t make it erotic romance, and unlike many publishers, Samhain does not provide a relative measure of intensity for the sexual content.

Book Review: What a Dragon Should Know by G. A. Aiken

• Title: What a Dragon Should Know
• Author: G. A. Aiken/Shelly Laurenston
• Type: Epic fantasy romance
• Genre: alternate world/dragon shifter
• Sub-genre: conniving liars meet their match
• My Grade: A- (4.5*)
• Rating: NC-17
• Where Available: Everywhere books are sold

G. A. Aiken is Shelly Laurenston’s alter ego for her dragon fantasy series.  In the first two books, Dragon Actually and About a Dragon, the author builds a world where various species of dragon exist side-by-side with humans, who are often seen by the dragons as a food source.  The dragons rarely trouble themselves with short lived humans, but somehow the off-spring of  Queen Riannon of the Southland fire dragons, keep finding human mates, much to their father Bercelek’s annoyance!   She’s added an interim story of the parents of this mob – Queen Riannon and Bercelek contained within Dragon Actually, and Everlasting Bad Boys had a great novella, Can’t Get Enough, about Ailean the Wicked and Shalin the Innocent, the grandparents of the dragons in the Dragon Kin series, written as Shelly Laurenston.  I love Laurenston’s humor and strong female leads and the males who love them for being exactly what they are, tough as nails schemers and fighters.  What a Dragon Should Know is book 3 in her Dragon Kin series and it’s far more of an epic fantasy than a romance.  Regardless, it’s another complex, laugh out loud story of wildly eccentric dragons and the equally eccentric mates they choose.