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Tuesday, August 9, 2016

One Hundred & Thirty-Six Scars

One Hundred & Thirty-Six Scars (The Devil's Own, #1)One Hundred & Thirty-Six Scars by Amo Jones

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Writing: ★
Story: ★
Characters: ★★

Overall rating: 1.3
*1 **Just Nope** Stars*

This book had such potential, but it fell seriously short. I wanted to DNF this one at about 30%, but I pushed through, then at 61% I was seriously struggling.
Am I the only one that noticed that Beast's agent name throughout the book is Agent 316 but on the cover of the book it's shows the tattooed number on his neck is 136?
Not good for the cover to be wrong. Just shows one of the many editing, and not paying attention to detail, mistakes in this book.

Here are a couple more.
"She follows, slipping the gloves on her hands. 'You have two weeks with me. You think you'll get enough information stored in my brain for that?' 'More than enough time,' I answered, intertwining my fingers with hers..."

Okay, neat trick when she just put on boxing gloves in the same paragraph!

"Both their bodies begin tumbling down the steps and I jump over them by gripping onto the railing before running up the rest of the stairs..."

Okay so were they falling *up* the stairs.. again, pretty neat trick.
The grammar a lot of the time was annoying. Switching between tenses sometimes within a single sentence.

We met a lot of characters in this book, most popping in for no reason, then disappearing without a trace or making no sense as to why they were even mentioned to begin with.

We had the MCs.. The Devil's Own Motorcycle Club, the Sinful Souls MC, (be consistent, either call it an "MC" or a "Motorcycle Club" when giving the names of the clubs), The Devil's Own, (or leave it off all together, that works too I guess), then we have The Army, the Russians... and even a rock group. Oh, and at one point, the Irish Republican Army is "mentioned".
If the author had just picked *one* of these to follow, it would have made things less... confusing. I don't even know what the point was of having the Russians in the story, not to mention the rock group. Too many side stories and none of them really tying into the story. There was so much that could have been done with The Army and the MC, but it all got so convoluted when you mixed in all the other organizations and people.

Beast, and other's that have been under The Army's training, are described as "engineered human killing machines". He escapes with his best friend, Hella, then the coincidences started. Just gonna leave it there, as it would contain spoilers. But Beast's transition from The Army to the President of an MC would have been better (smoother) if we'd known how he made that transition. It just seemed like, "oh, I finally escaped with my life. Oh look! I'm now the *President* of an MC."
Don't get me wrong, I liked Beast, I just feel that his character wasn't explained to it's full potential, too much was left out. And at one point in the book, I just didn't feel like he was the badass biker anymore. His whole character just deflated.

Meadow, I liked her too. I liked that fact that she didn't let what happened to her define the rest of her life.

Beast and Meadow, the are the only reason this is a 1.3 star read, but still not enough to bump it up to a 2 star read.
And by the way, what's up with the fade to black sex scenes? It starts out and then at the start of the next page it's the next morning.

Other than the one (yes one), "Holy shit, I didn't see that coming" moment, I felt like I was reading a YA book instead of something that should have been "Dark Romance". The characters conversations a lot of the time felt like something you'd hear around a high school cafeteria. Just didn't make me believe them.

From the opening of the blurb we see, "SO CONSUMING, SO RAW, SO DARK, SO INTENSE, SO GRITTY, SOOOOOO EPIC!!". Raw? Dark? Intense? Gritty? Not really. Epic? Umm... No.

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