Reviewed by Chris
TITLE: Loving Djinni
AUTHOR: Beryll Brackhaus & Osiris Brackhaus
PUBLISHER: Self-published
LENGTH: 178 pages
RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2016
BLURB:
‘Loving Djinni’ is a charming, screwball-y paranormal m/m romance novel about ancient magic meeting modern men, and how true love still is the strongest magic of them all.
***
Left to die in a sealed tomb, David, an educated and good-natured New York arts dealer and part-time forger, stumbles over an ancient oil lamp. But instead of producing a little light for David’s last hours, it conjures forth a veritable djinni.
An ancient, tempting, puckish djinni, who in David’s company prefers to show himself as an irresistibly handsome, fit and barely legal teenager. Quite literally an incarnation of trouble waiting to happen.
So what’s a modern man to do with his three wishes, when he can literally wish for anything except the one thing the truly desires – to mend his broken heart?
REVIEW:
David is not the kind of man who gets clobbered over the head and left to die in old Egyptian tombs. Well, he wasn’t…right up until he was. And looking back, maybe he should have just stayed in New York and let less-than-savory business partners handle the slightly-less-than-legal acquisition of some new-found Egyptian artifacts. But he wanted to prove to his ex that he was the kind of man that went off and had adventures. And subsequently got clobbered over the head and left to die in old Egyptian tombs.
Luckily the tomb robbers didn’t take quite everything when they left David to die. David was only looking for something to light his way (hopefully out of certain death) but when he rubbed the old dirty lamp he got something he was never looking for. Mostly because no one ever expects a genie in a lamp (excuse me, that’d be djinni). Now David has three wishes, a way back home, and djinni that is more than a little happy to be out of the lamp. Too bad Sharu is also a little pissed about being in the lamp in the first place!
I found this to be a very charming story. I loved the way David and Sharu play off each other, and even though Sharu (understandably) has a few issues to work out in regards to his feelings for David, I liked how they interacted even when being antagonistic.
This is probably a pretty predictable story line. Guy finds lamp, guy rubs lamp, djinni appears to grant three wishes (but never love)…guy eventually falls head over heals with djinni and seeks to find a way they can have their HEA. Nothing over the top, but I found that even guessing the ending did not really spoil my enjoyment of the story. These were two very well written characters and they were just so much fun to have around.
I liked that Sharu had issues with his slavery that were not brushed off. And I liked that (for all his denials) David is not exactly on the up and up with his job. Maybe I shouldn’t like that he is pretty much robbing graves in order to sell the art, but there is something about his less-than-perfectness that made the story more believable.
There were two problems though that I ran across near the end of the book. The big one is the first time David and Sharu have sex. See, David wishes to spend the night with Sharu, and it made it impossible for Sharu to say no. With, yeah, a big no-no. I don’t get how David could not see (beforehand) just how bad a fucking idea that was. The first time they have sex it is basically non-consensual since Sharu can’t say no, and I was more than a little put off by this. I like that it was addressed, after the fact, but I had a hard time understanding why David, who isn’t a dumb guy, couldn’t see the big fat warning signs before he went and made that wish.
The second issue is kinda related. See, I liked this story and it had some really good tension and banter going on between the two guys. It was fun, it was exiting, it was what made it so hard to put this book down. But the second they started having sex, the moment they gave into all that tension, this story turned into generic djinni porn. It wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t even very titillating, despite its efforts to the contrary. It was, to be honest, boring. It was like all the spark in the story was in what they couldn’t have, and the moment they took that leap it just became a constant sex marathon and little more. There was hardly anything but copious amounts of sex from the second they started fucking and it got a bit repetitive. There was a little of that spark gotten back by the time that the last scene came around, but by then I was just looking forward to the last wish.
I don’t know, maybe it’s just the fact that I have been in a very low-sex mode lately. Maybe someone else will read it and find a lot more enjoyment in the sex than I did, but it just was a bit a disappointment.
I did like the story though. For the most part it did a great job of holding my attention and I liked how even knowing how this was going to end didn’t detract from my overall enjoyment. Also, seeing David’s ex getting his what-for handed to to by Sharu was damn fun.
RATING: 
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