Sunday, January 24, 2010

Gentlemen Prefer Succubi by Jill Myles



From the back cover:
Jackie Brighton woke up in a Dumpster this morning, and her day has only gotten weirder. Her familiar B-cups have somehow become double Ds, her sex drive is insatiable, and apparently she had her fi rst one-night stand ever...with a fallen angel. All she remembers is gorgeous Noah's oddly hypnotic blue eyes...and then a dark stranger whose bite transformed her into an immortal siren with a sexy Itch. With help from Noah, Jackie begins to adapt to her new lifestyle -- until she accidentally sends Noah into the deadly clutches of the vampire queen and lands herself in a fi erce battle for an ancient halo with the queen's wickedly hot righthand man. Who just happens to be the vampire who originally bit her. How's a girl supposed to save the world when the enemy's so hard to resist?

My thoughts:
I received Gentlemen Prefer Succubi as part of Pocket Books Science Fiction Blog Tour. This is the first book by Jill Myles in a series about Jackie Brighton. Jackie is such a fun character and reminded me of other characters from series that I enjoy reading. She had some characteristics of Queen Betsey in MaryJanice Davidson’s Undead series, some of Rachel Morgan from Kim Harrison’s witch series and even some of Stephanie Plum from Janet Evanovich’s number series. She was likeable, sarcastic, and a fish out of water who keeps ending up in situations beyond her understanding or control.

What attracted me to this book was the fallen angel idea. This fall I read Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick which also features a fallen angel and I was interested to see another authors take on the idea. I can’t recall ever reading about succubi before and wasn’t sure what that meant. The succubi part of the novel made it racier than what I usually read. This might not be a book for everyone, I know I have friends who don’t care for books with too much passion. I took it to read at my daughters ballet class and was actually embarrassed at one point hoping no one was looking over my shoulder at it. That said a lot of it was just sexual tension which really added to the novel. In the authors letter she thanks many people and then comments that she plans to go to her parents house and rip out all the sex scenes. A lot of them are clustered at the beginning of the book and part of me wondered what would be left if she removed them all, but then I saw that there was just a lot of it at the beginning but not so much later on.

Jackie meets a vampire when she is out at a bar who drains a lot of her blood and then leaves her where a fallen angel hangs out. The combination of the loss of blood and being intimate with the serim (or fallen angel) changes her into a succubi. As a succubi she has a very appealing figure, wonderful hair, and is beautiful and attractive to all men. She can eat whatever she wants and doesn’t need to sleep anymore. Plus she is now immortal. On the downside, she needs to have sex every other day. Especially in January when so many of us have made new year’s resolutions I am sure many people have wondered how much they would be willing to trade to be thin and beautiful, to have the perfect figure and live forever, and tempting as that train of thought is, I’m not sure we would trade it with some of the other factors involved.

I am used to thinking about angels as being all good, but can anyone, even someone who should be divine, be all good? Does desire to sin go to all beings or just humans?

While I found both of Jackie’s love interests to be alluring, I have to admit that I found a favorite and it wasn’t who I thought it would be. Zane grabbed my heart in this novel! I am so glad that I had an introduction to this author. The beginning of her next novel is included in the back and I have already added it to my TBR list!

2 comments:

  1. I've heard a lot of great things about this book! I really liked your review of it~I'm third in line at the library for it.

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  2. You're lucky your library has this on the shelf, ours doesn't always get things like this. I know they are having a lot of budget problems and are cutting spending in a lot of areas.

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