Reviewed by Sarina
TITLE: The Curious Case of Winter King
AUTHOR: Kiernan Kelly
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 216 pages
RELEASE DATE: January 25, 2016
BLURB:
It’s 1968, and Winter King is a young man with an exceptional paranormal talent for healing. Michael Westfield is a scientist charged by the government with capturing and bringing Winter in for examination. When Michael realizes the military wants Winter only to weaponize his power regardless of the consequences, his priorities shift.
And when they discover Winter isn’t the government’s only target, Michael and Winter band together to free the others and find somewhere they can hide from a government bent on hunting them down. Their plan takes them across the country from the Haight in San Francisco to Fancy Gap, a small town in Virginia where others with talents similar to Winter’s are being held against their will.
Along the way, they touch the lives of ordinary people with King’s extraordinary power and find an unexpected love growing between them that makes the success of their journey even more vital. Because if they fail, their love is not the only thing in jeopardy.
REVIEW:
Winter King is a man on the run. Hunted by those that would use his gifts to harm rather than help, he’s constantly moved from place to place afraid to settle down. When he meets Michael, however, he knows that something is different. Michael may be one of those tasked with bringing Winter in but there’s something about the man that makes him want to take a chance and trust. As Winter’s greatest fears are realized and the magnitude of their predicament comes to light, however, he’ll have to decide whether trusting Michael is the right thing to do or if he’d be better off as he was before, alone.
Let me start by saying that I DID enjoy the overall concept of the story but it seemed like every time I’d start to get into it, some inconsistency would pluck me out of the happy reading space I’d gotten to. You learn much more about Winter than you ever do about Michael and that was a shame as he’s there the entire time and it almost felt as though his character development was a bit of an afterthought. The pacing was good, however, and the story wasn’t completely overshadowed by the romance part of the book.
So while I liked the concept of this story, I’m sorry to say I found parts of the execution a hindrance to my enjoyment. For starters, the beginning of the book sounds more like the intro to a fantasy story rather than from a village in the mountains and that disconnect I felt caused kind of a ripple effect of problems as the story progressed. From there you go into a more modern almost contemporary feel only to be dragged back into ‘hippie speak’. I know the book is set at the end of the 60s but the dialogue and setting just kept bouncing back and forth too much for me to find my footing. Winter is from the mountains but his manner of speaking kept going between talking like anyone else would, to speaking more like his place of birth to reverting back to being a hippie and it just…took away from the enjoyment of what I was reading. Honestly, I probably won’t read this one again as it just drove me too batty trying to get through it but if you like paranormal stories and think you can handle the dialogue problems you might enjoy it.
RATING:
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