Monday, November 13, 2017

Review: The Elven Prince's Kiss by Abella Ward

The Elven Prince's Kiss by Abella Ward

The Elven Prince's Kiss by Abella Ward
Purchase link: Amazon

My rating: Small star Small star

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The Elven Prince's Kiss by Abella Ward

The Elven Prince's Kiss is a mildly entertaining short read and it's a shame that it's bundled with so much rubbish that it makes the ebook unwieldy and misleading.

Let's start with the story itself. It's fairly basic. Victor hires Eloise to protect his sister, Charlotte as they travel to her fiance's property to get married. Along the way they get attacked and something happens to Charlotte. While they continue to sort out the troubles they find themselves in, Victor and Eloise hook up. There's very little character development and while it's not insta-lust, it's pretty dang close. Victor and Eloise both fall for each other quickly. It's fairly obvious that they end up together since this is supposed to be a romance. I don't fault the story much since it's short and doesn't have  room for any depth whatsoever. The writing style is decent and engaging enough to carry me for the half hour or so it took me to read it but in reality, the characters where one dimensional and the story was predictable. And for someone who enjoys a good sexy scene, this one left much to be desired. There was no passion and no emotion. Very slap dash, wham bam.

That said, now let me tell you what bugs me about this book. When I first opened it, my eyes bugged out because it said it would take 27 hours plus to finish. This had me looking at the size of the book and it read at 22,268 locations (on the Kindle). Now to give you an idea of size, a 200+ page book is about 4000+ locations in Kindle terms. So approximately 100 pages to 2000 locations, give or take. The math is a bit more specific than that but it's not necessary for this discussion.

This 22,000+ locations immediately raised alarm bells in my head because I have just written an entire blog post on how to spot a fake book on Amazon. A short story upfront of the book you thought you purchased and then about a thousand pages of "bonus" material of more mediocre short stories. I looked up the table of contents to discover that I was right. If you downloaded a sample of this book, you could probably read the entire story without having to buy the book because the sample would be the entire short story cos the story was just THAT short.

After my discovery, I thought, what the heck. This would be a good exercise and I'd learn my lesson. Sure enough, the story itself ended at 4%. The remaining 96% was all "bonus" material. I am not going to waste my time going through the bonus material of questionable writing quality. The book ending at 4% really got me cranky.

This whole thing annoyed me immensely because:
(1) I paid 99c for the book and I question whether it's even worth that - I can't blame the person who recommended it, she probably didn't know. I don't think she read the book.
(2) This book is sneaky. Other books of similar ilk list their number of pages in the 1000+ to "show" how much value you are getting from the book. This one didn't. I should have looked at the file size. It was 4,355 KB. That's over 4 MB of book when your average book is only 200 to 500 KB. I had no way of identifying this as a questionable book and I feel duped.
(3) It wasn't even that good of a story.
(4) And this one is a biggie - unlike other similar books, this one had over 100+ reviews. At the time of me writing this review, the book has 117 reviews on Amazon. Because of the number of reviews it had the book itself didn't raise any alarm bells when I bought it.

If I didn't have a personal rule of never returning a book after I've read it, I'd be taking advantage of Amazon's seven day return policy and returning this. I'm disgruntled they even made the 99c off me because I feel cheated. I'd be happier if I had gone in knowing the book was only 30 pages long and I'd paid 99c for 30 pages.

If I was in a good mood and I knew this was a short story going in, I might have given it three stars. Since I feel I got misled and the story wasn't great, it gets two stars and a ranty review from me.

I had a look at this author's other books on Amazon. Unlike this one which actually had a rather nice cover and sucked me in, the others look questionable. That said, she seems like a popular author because most of her books have a decent number of reviews. Perhaps I have been hasty in my judgement but I am feeling very disgruntled and these are my opinions.

UPDATE: While putting the blog post together, I read the blurb on Amazon again, and it did say it's only a 61 page story, but still ... 4%!!!

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About the author

Abella Ward

Abella Ward:  Goodreads - Amazon


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6 comments:

  1. I don't think I will be picking up this story to read I would be really angry as well

    Have Fun

    Helen

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Don't pick it up. Let my experience be a lesson to you.

      Delete
  2. Well damn, that really annoys me. It's annoying to know that there are so many books out there like this. I don't buy many ebooks but I do read some of the free ebooks that I've found on Amazon. Thankfully, I haven't come across anything like this yet.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You're fortunate not to have come across any like this. It's very frustrating. I was so annoyed.

      Delete
  3. It ended at 4%?! That is insane! And I was annoyed at one that ended at 56% recently :( I'd be extra annoyed and disappointed at this one. You basically just pay for advertising.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yep, it ended at 4%. So disappointing and such a rip off!!

      Delete