Reviewed by Carissa
TITLE: Owner of My Heart
SERIES: Mending the Rift #2
AUTHOR: Valentina Heart
PUBLISHER: Totally Bound
LENGTH: 76 pages
BLURB:
Can King Merin face his loss, save his husband and protect his kingdom, or have his enemies finally found a way to defeat him?
When an enemy Merin thought defeated takes his unborn children away from him, he’s at the end of his rope and still has to find enough strength to save his husband Rin from the clutches of sorrow. Unable to find peace, Merin and Rin must deal with an aggressor who plots to ruin any chance of happiness that they might have. To make things worse, the newly united countries must prepare for a new trial—a war against a vicious invading army that’s using the weakened state of the kingdom for its benefit.
How will Merin and Rin recover from their terrible loss and give their people heirs? Will the newly united countries work together as one to save Merin’s kingdom—and his family—from the ongoing dangerous challenges? Can love truly push through all obstacles, or will their enemies discover their weaknesses and finally achieve victory?
Reader Advisory: This book contains a male pregnancy. It is best read in sequence as part of a series.
REVIEW:
(I guess I should warn you, if you haven’t already been spoilered by the blurb, that this review is going to have a few spoilers in it, so if you haven’t read the first book, and don’t want to know what happens with Rin and unborn children, you might want to come back to this review later.)
After how the last book ended, I was looking forward to this one, and to seeing what happens with Merin, Rin, and their unborn children. This book is told from Merin’s pov, and starts basically with a recap of everything that has happened so far, but from Merin’s perspective. Then the story picks up after Rin goes into labor, and moves forward into the second book.
The first half of the book is basically the resolution to the plotline of the first book. The attacker, thought dead in the previous book, is actually still alive and plotting. And Rin and Merin have to deal with the repercussions of Rin’s fall down the stairs–leaving both of their children dead. They both struggle to handle the loss, as well as fending off more attacks.
The second half of the book is dealing with the threat of invasion from a neighboring country. Merin is still weak from the attack on his person, and Rin is still heartsick over the loss of his children, but neither of them have much time to deal with it, seeing as how a drought has pushed a neighboring kingdom into invading Rin’s homeland for their resources. And while Merin knows that he is required to have a child to succeed him, he don’t know if he can handle going thru that again. Not at the risk of Rin.
My feelings about this book are mixed.
I still love the mpreg aspect of this book–it is unique and doesn’t make me spend a lot of time trying to figure out just how the hell a guy can have a baby, because these guys are not human so they don’t have to play by the rules of our human physiology. Which is nice. And I’m I really glad to find out what happens with Rin and the kids. Even if I was totally crying when the kids didn’t make it. It was a cool, is very sad twist on their story.
But honestly, this book lacks plot coherence. The first half of this book feel like it should have been stuck onto the end of book one. In fact, I can’t for the life of me figure out why it wasn’t. I don’t know if the author didn’t want to end that book on a sad note, or they just wanted to create a cliffhanger so you’d be forced to buy the second one to find out what happens, but whatever the motive, it left both books feeling off. The first book had no natural ending, and this one had a climax and resolution smack dab in the middle of the story.
And because the first half of the book spent all that time dealing with what should have rightly been handled in book one, there was no time to fully build up the issues plaguing the couple in the second half. There is a lot of political maneuvering going on in this second half. Both within the two newly joined countries, and from without. But it doesn’t have enough time nor space to really do any of it justice. It felt like the author realised that they had killed off their bad guy half way thru and now they had no one to play black hat…so why not just send them to war! Forget that there clearly isn’t enough page space to do it justice, they only need a new and interesting place to have the kids.
If the plot had simply been Merin and Rin need to have children, this book would have flowed so much easier. But it was burdened with the issues of the first book, and took on a much bigger problems in the second half. I don’t know if the author intends to finish the second book in the middle of the third, but I really hope that they don’t. If only because a book with one single coherent plot line would be nice.
This is feeling closer to 2.75 stars, but I’m bumping up because it made me cry.
RATING: 
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