Reviewed by Carissa

TITLE: Airos

SERIES: Finding Home #3

AUTHOR: Jennifer Wright

PUBLISHER: Totally Bound

LENGTH: 184 pages

BLURB: Zane has everything in his life under control and in order, but can he keep it that way when a young dragon is thrown into his life?

Zane was meant to be a warrior—end of story. Though he may not have had the most pleasant life living at the coven, he still loved being there. But the steadiness of his world came to a halt all within one day’s events. A man he never saw coming has pushed the boundaries of what little normalcy he has, and learning of a secret love is just confusing him even more. Zane has never felt more torn on what he should be feeling…and for whom. Though if he assumed having two men plaguing his every waking thought was hard enough, learning of the danger his mother is in nearly has his head spinning off into another dimension.

The leader of the Dráguns is threatening to take everything away from him, his best friend is slipping further and further away from him, and a little dragon is managing to get under his skin in more ways than one. Sorting out what he has to do, what he wants, and what’s right for him will be the biggest challenge he’s ever been faced with. Will he follow his heart or will he take the easy path…or is the easy path the right path to begin with?

Reader Advisory: This book contains scenes of violence and is best read in sequence as it is part of a series.

REVIEW:  

Zane has built his life on a few tenets: protect his mother, protect his half-blood secret, protect his best friend…and prove to everyone that he is as good, if not better, than the full-blooded vampires that surround him in the Coven.  He doesn’t have room in his life, in his mission, for love.  Or a Mate.  Or anything that would break his carefully constructed mask.

Bo’s life kind of sucks.  Life with the Dráguns has been neither fun, nor kind. But he’ll do an awful lot to be able to stay close to his brother.  Then he is kidnapped by a pair of vampires and his world changes overnight.  Bo doesn’t want much out of life–just his brother, a home, and to be as far away from vampires and Dráguns as he can.  But when he finds his Mate in the most unexpected of places, he might just have to learn to want more out of life.  Because if he is going to keep Zane he is going to have to fight for it.  They both are.

Zane has never been a favorite of mine, in this series.  Part of it is that I don’t really care for borderline-psychotic assholes.  Even if they are not as bad as everyone thinks.  The other part–and I realize this is probably not the best reason to dislike a character–is that I’ve already read a story with a dark, angry vampire with people issues, named Zane, and I didn’t really care for him, either.   They are not the same person, it is two different stories, but for some reason I couldn’t shake my annoyance with that Zane when I was reading this Zane.  Mostly because they seem to share a lot of the characteristics that annoy me.

We first meet Zane early on in book one of this series, Pavarus.  Let’s just say that the book does not exactly reflect well on his character.  And while we have gotten to know him a bit better through the first two books–his half-blood status, his father’s death, his mother’s dependence on his blood–he is not the easiest guy to like.  There are certainly parts of him I sympathize with, but a lot of it is not so nice.  Not evil, as it turns out, but no one is voting the guy for Mr. Congeniality any time soon.  And I like dark and brooding.  It can be a lot of fun…but he wasn’t so much brooding in this book as he was an emotional train-wreck.  I can’t help but feel that he was really a hormone-crazy teenager masquerading as a hundred-plus vampire.  There was simply too much of a woe-is-me and no-one-understands!undercurrent in him for me to really believe that his man was a warrior and century old vampire.

The fact is, the teenage-problem was not localized to Zane.  If these character were dropped into a high-school setting–granted one with vampires, Dráguns, and wizards (oh my!)–they wouldn’t have to change a single character trait.  There is just too much childish anger, petty grudges, and arch-villains in this book.  And after three books I am about ready to slap Damien up one side and down the other.  Dude, just chill the fuck out already!  I don’t know what his problem is, but his ridiculous grudge match with Zane stopped being entertaining somewhere in book one.  Fine, Zane is an ass and Larken is getting his heart battered all over the place, but Zane is not doing it on purpose, and Larken may not be able to control who he falls in love with, but the man chose to stay silent for god knows how many years.  He is not blameless in this whole mess.

I wish we had gotten a bit more time with Bo in this book because I found him really interesting.  I wanted explore what his brother’s secret means for Bo, but it was barely covered in this book.  Maybe it will come up in a later book, but I felt it would have been nice to get it in this one, where he is actually a key player.  I didn’t want a bunch of drama–heaven knows this book has enough of that already–but Bo’s character started to feel a little two dimensional as the book went on.  He simply became Zane’s Mate.  He stopped having any other identity.  And that annoyed me because I really felt like there was more there; we just were not being given it.

I liked that we were not given the simply Larken/Zane pairing that I assumed we were going to get in this book.  It was an interesting twist to the story.  Though I am pretty sure that I spent a majority of the book convinced that a m/m/m relationship was the only way anyone was going to be happy (me included).  I don’t know where Larken is going to go from here, but I hope it happens with a little less drama and angst than this book gave us.  And while I would love to know what happens to these characters, this book might just make me think twice before I pick up the next in the series.  I don’t ask a lot of the books I read, but I kind of expect the characters to not be caricatures…and to, for gods sake, just act their age.

RATING:

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