Book Review: Cupid's Match by Lauren Palphreyman

Author: Lauren Palphreyman
Series: Cupid's Match #1
Audience: +16
Genre: YA, Fantasy, Paranormal
Publisher: Self-Published
Release Date:
My Rating: 3.5 cups
Source: Wattpad
Blurb (from Goodreads):

In a world where everyone has a perfect match, what if you were matched with the dangerous, notoriously good looking, original bad boy....Cupid himself?

***
Dear Lila,
I am contacting you on behalf of The Cupids Matchmaking Service.

You will not have heard of us but we are an organisation that work behind the scenes of society, identifying each person's perfect match.

Usually we would not contact our clients. We prefer to work in secrecy - setting up the ideal environment for the two matches to have a chance encounter.

Recently, however, we ran your details through our system and...well....in your case...

We think you'd better come in.

Please respond at your earliest convenience.

Yours Urgently,

The Cupids Matchmaking Service

I think we all know by now I love books inspired by mythology. I probably said it so many times y'all are bored and annoyed already, but it's true. I love them. I read Cupid's Match on Wattpad when I hit a bit of a reading slump phase, and it was the perfect book to get me out of it.

The story focuses on the idea that each person has a destined partner, a so-called match. The Cupids Matchmaking Services organization is basically the name given to a group of cupids that have heen around since the beginning of time. As per the company rules, no cupid can find his or her match, it is forbidden. So what happens if this rule is broken and a cupid does find his match? Enter Lila, a regular teenager that finds herself matched to the Cupid, and all hell breaks loose.

I really enjoyed the idea of love being forbidden to the very creatures whose entire existence is dependent on love. It was an interesting aspect of the story, and it was a fun, new thing to do with the myth of love. I also liked how this was explained. For me it felt like a truly selfish reason from the organization's boss to have such a rule, because it meant that this person wasn't in the business of love for selfless reasons, but for the feeling of power that comes from playing with human emotions, but also from feeling loved by humans and served by cupids. The concept of love in this book is seen from many perspectives, from what some refer to as true love, to obsession, to adulation, all the way to envy and hate. So you get the positive and negative aspects of love, and I liked reading about that.

Lila was an enjoyable character to read about. At times she was a bit difficult to like though, probably because she was a bit too naive. And she was a bit undecided with what she wanted. I did like her spunk at the beginning of the story, when she refused to believe in the idea of an appointed, already decided-on match for her. While she had courage, I would have wanted to see her keep a bit more of that initial spark during the story. She kind of got it back towards the end of the story.

Cupid was depicted in an interesting way in this story. I got the idea of him more as a rebel here than a true bad boy, to be honest. He has a brother in this story, Cal, which I found insanely funny for some reason. There were moments when you could see a glimpse of Cupid's wild streak, but I didn't truly got a feeling of him as a full on bad boy.

There were a few details that I would have wanted to be more accurate in this story, at least from a mythological perspective. But all of that aside, as I said before, I really enjoyed seeing how the whole concept of love was depicted in this story. The villain in this story is pretty psychotic if you ask me. It's not that this particular villain is full on scary, just more deranged I'd say.

The plot was pretty evenly paced. One little technical thing that kept me from reading this story faster was the way it was put into pages. I don't know how this story translates to printed page or if a true ebook version of it is the same, but at least on Wattpad it felt as if the chapters were too short. I would have wanted longer, and therefore fewer chapters, just because the sudden breaks in reading with getting past the in-between posts kind of pulled me out of the story more than I liked.

All of that aside, I quite enjoyed this story. There were a few things that were left open-ended, and I hope this will be resolved in the other stories from this series. I am planning on reading the sequels, just because I am curious to see what happens to the secondary characters from this story. All in all, a pretty enjoyable read.

Mini Reviews: The DNF Edition: Things I Want My Daughters To Know, Portrait Of A Killer, Ella, Dracula, The Strange Journey Of Mr Daldry

Hey guys! I promised I was going to find my courage to write some DNF reviews HOLD ME and today is the perfect day for it. One of the bookstagram challenges I signed up for this month has a prompt for today that's about books you didn't finish, so here we are. So without further ado, here are some books I didn't finish.

A post shared by Ruby Jo (@rubys.books) on Oct 24, 2017 at 7:32am PDT

• Things I Want My Daughters To Know by Elizabeth Noble

To be honest, this book deserves more to be in the "put aside for now" pile. The story focuses four sisters trying to recover from the death of their mother in the present time, while also telling the story of the mother and her fight with cancer and, eventually, how she simply tries to come to terms with the idea that she can't win the battle, so she decides to write a journal, if I'm not mistaken, for her daughters to read after her death. The story is compelling and it certainly isn't my first foray into the world of sad, heartbreaking books where one of the MCs dies of cancer. But at the time I picked it up, without really thinking about it consciously, really, my grandma was fighting her battle with cancer. So I didn't manage to keep my distance from the story enough for it to not become a painful reading experience, so I felt the need to put it down. It doesn't mean I didn't enjoy what little I read, it just means I needed to step back a little bit from the story. I will definitely pick it up later to read.

• Portrait of a Killer by Patricia Cornwell

I've always been attracted to books or documentaries that focus on unsolved crime mysteries, and there's no bigger mystery to me than Jack the Ripper. I expected greatness from this book, to be honest. The thing that kept me from fully enjoying the book was that I felt like I spent too much time in the author's head, with her focusing a bit too much on her own journey and thoughts during and about this investigation. It's not my first time reading nonfiction about serial killers and unsolved mysteries, but they all managed to somehow not include too much detail about the author. I would have wanted less of that, to be honest.

• Ella, Dracula by Javier García-Sánchez

This book is about Elizabeth Bathory, one of the bloodiest serial killers ever in my opinion. Which got me excited, because as a psychologist, I love delving into the minds of the darkest human creatures that have lived on this planet. I read this book way, way before I stated book blogging, so I might not remember the finer details as much, but from what I remember the story is told from a male protagonist's perspective, who knew the countess from when he was a boy and was afraid of her, and he tries to tell this story of the bloody countess. That's really all I remember. While this would seem like such an interesting story, I couldn't get past the first 30 pages or so. First of all, I don't know if this was the way the book was written as in the original language, but the translated version was a bit too flowery for my taste. There were some metaphors there that killed me, and not in a good way. But my biggest issue was with the way the author portrayed my country's ancestors. I usually can manage to distance myself from any personal thoughts while reading, so when a book bothers me, it really bothers me. I myself was... I won't say offended, because that's a too strong word, but bothered by the way the Dacians were portrayed (if you don't know, the Dacians are the ancient people who inhabited the territory that is today known as Romania; Dacia was a bit bigger than today's Romania, but that's not the point here). Why the author felt the need to even mention Dacians in a book about a Hungarian countess is beyond me, honestly, and I'm sure they get as much page space in the overall book as a dedication page, but the little that was written bothered me. I understand challenging history, since we know history is written by winners, therefore is not always accurate, but this didn't feel like that. Maybe I exaggerated, but to me it proved to be too much and I couldn't continue reading.

ETA: I feel the need to add this one phrase again, just to make sure nobody got me wrong. I wasn't offended by what was said, but mostly by how it was said in this book. I understand how, if you've read the book, or if you want to, you might misunderstand me and accuse me of something I'm not. It's not about what was implied here, but about the how. 

• The Strange Journey of Mr Daldry by Marc Levy

This book is the most painful of them all. Marc Levy is one of my favorite authors, and I was excited when this book came out, because it felt different than all his previous books. The story takes place a few years after WWII and it's about Alice, who gets her fortune told. She then moves into this apartment that has, according to her neighbor, Mr Daldry, "the best lighting he needed for his paintings". He then somehow convinces her to listen to the fortune teller, and go on a journey. That's the short version of where I got into reading the book. I started reading the book all excited, and halfway through I realized I misinterpreted just about everything about this Mr. Daldry, so much so that I was convinced I was reading about an old guy. Which made sense to me, because the way he talks, the way he acts, even his way of thinking, all made me imagine an 80 year old guy. For some reason I just couldn't connect with the characters, and for me that is just as important as the plot itself.

Okay, so this might not be as painful as I originally thought. Let's discuss. What book did you recently DNF and why?

Comic Book #28: Injustice 2 Vol 1 by Tom Taylor

Author: Tom Taylor
Series: Injustice 2 #1-6
Audience: +16
Genre: Comic Books
Publisher: DC Comics
Release Date: October 31st 2017
My Rating: 4 cups
Source: Netgalley
Blurb (from Goodreads):

From the makers of the critically acclaimed prequel comic to the smash hit fighting game Injustice: Gods Among Us comes the highly anticipated prequel to Injustice 2!

Batman has triumphed over the tyranical Superman! But now he must piece all of the world back together, and to make matters worse, he has to do it while fighting off the former dictator's supporters working to reinstate the old regime. With all the in-fighting a dark shadow appears on the horizon.

From best-selling writer Tom Taylor, scribe of the original INJUSTICE: GODS AMONG US graphic novel series, comes INJUSTICE 2! Collects issues #1-6.

*Disclaimer: I received an eARC of this book from Netgalley and DC Comics in exchange for an honest review. This does not influence my rating or the content of my review in any way.

I really enjoyed this comic book. I was a bit confused at times, because I haven't played the Injustice games, nor have I read the related comic books, but I was still able to follow the story pretty easily.

The story focuses on Batman's struggle to help rebuild the world after the destruction Superman caused, while also fighting off against a pretty strong opponent intent on helping Batman's enemies. This was the first time I've read anything related to the fight between Batman and Superman, and it was the source of my confusion, because there were a lot of gaps there that I don't know if they're from the previous Injustice series or in the game or if they'll be filled at least partially later on in Injustice 2. I liked the idea of Superman being a villain, to be honest. If I had to choose between the two, I'd pick Superman, because I grew up watching the movies many, many times, a lot more times than the original Batman movies, but I've always wondered if somehow Superman's desire to help the world, to save everybody couldn't turn into a dangerous and negative aspect of him. This is probably the reason why I loved seeing Superman depicted as a bad guy.

At the opposite side of the war you have Batman, who is trying to keep the world together, but just before he starts working on fixing everything, new enemies rise. I liked this new foe and I wonder where that will lead the story to. It was an interesting plot device, to be honest. Here you have Batman, trying to save the world, when all of the sudden, a Batman impersonator comes along to wreak havoc everywhere. The subtle hints towards the duality of Batman are also among my favorite parts of this story. I never believed Batman to be a full hero, because he's so dark and he's willing to do some pretty hard choices. Maybe it's also the fact that his hometown, Gotham, is such a dark place, that the darkness of it rubbed off on Batman. But the idea of a fully-dark, villainous Batman fighting with the original, hero version of Batman is kind of like seeing Bruce's inner struggle come to life, so I cannot wait to see how that will progress in future installments. There's also another side to this war, that I won't give too many details about, because of spoilers, but I'm also curious about how that will be explained and resolved.

I also loved the art. There were a lot of details in the panels, but not too many as to distract me from reading. The story itself is reflected in the art, and you can tell there's a big difference between Batman and Superman in the way color is used for these two characters' panels. As for good Batman vs bad Batman, there are subtle differences, but generally you get the same style, which again was amazing, because it made me think of the duality of this character.

I read this pretty easily and I was actually very sad to get to the end of it. I'm definitely planning on reading the rest of the story.