Jessica ❁ ➳ Silverbow ➳ ❁ 's Reviews > A Hunger Like No Other

3.5 stars

Reviewed by: Rabid Reads

A Hunger Like No Other is actually the first book I read in Kresley Cole's Immortals After Dark (my favorite PNR) series. I went back and read The Warlord Wants Forever when I finished it b/c I wanted to know what was going on with Myst and Wroth (you could tell there was a story there, but had no idea what it was). For that reason, I recommend reading The Warlord Wants Forever first, even though it's a more of a short story than a full installment.

In A Hunger Like No Other, we meet Emmaline Troy, a Valkyrie/vampire hybrid, and Lachlain MacRieve, King of the Lykae.

Emma is in Paris looking for information about her father.

Her Valkyrie mother died of HEARTBREAK shortly after Emma was born, never revealing to anyone who the father of her child was. All anyone knew was that she had been in Paris with him until she returned to her coven in New Orleans with baby Emma in tow.

SO. Off to Paris Emma goes.

After spending a semester there taking night classes and researching, Emma has nothing to show for her time abroad except disappointment. She is about to be recalled home to Louisiana where she can be kept safe from some vague threat when she is attacked by a very large, very hot, very ANGRY man.

Lachlain MacRieve has been held captive and tortured for over 150 years.

The vampires have made the catacombs under Paris their very own personal prison where they subject their enemies to unbelievable cruelty. For Lachlain that means being chained in front of a roaring fire that waxes and wans, burning him over and over again, but never killing him b/c he is IMMORTAL. He simply burns until he passes out, only to reawaken when his body has adequately healed him only to endure more torture.

Until her smells her, his mate. The woman he has been looking for for nearly a millennia.

*rolls eyes*

I'm wracking my brain trying to come up with a way to make all of this sound less ridiculous, but I can't. Maybe it is ridiculous and I just don't care b/c I love this series.

Despite that love, I think this is my least favorite IAD book.

The Emmaline at the beginning of book is vastly different from the kickass Emma at end of the book, but end-of-book Emma can't entirely make up for the spineless ninny that is early Emma.

And Emma's little epiphany moment is both confusing, and once you figure out where she's going with it, hard to accept. She seems to mark, with pin-point accuracy, the pivotal moment that turned her into a big fraidy-cat, and this "aha" only served to make me have a, "sure . . . whatever you say, boss" moment of my own.

But, like I already said, by the end, Emma is straight-up kickass. Kicking lycae ass, kickass. And this happens slowly and incrementally enough that it's believable.

Lachlain, on the other hand, is a RAGE monster pretty much from beginning to end.

And I know that I said in my The Warlord Wants Forever review that I am totally down with intensely sexually aggressive males, but Lachlain is a little bit OTT, even for me. His early interactions with Emma skate that fine line between aggressively hot and aggressively-bound-for-prison so closely that it's uncomfortable. Especially taking into consideration that early Emma was a spineless ninny. If she wasn't, and she gave as good as she got, then it probably would have worked for me, but as it was . . . Emma's fine line between arousal and terror . . . not a big fan.

But I do love this series, and once RAGE monster Lachlain starts controlling himself a bit better, and Emma grows a backbone, I remembered why. There is, however, no denying that the early stages of their "courtship" were rough. If you have a problem with that sort of thing, I'd skip this one, but if you're more of a "the end justifies the means"person, you should be fine. The uncomfortable part is fairly brief, and the rest of it is typical Cole awesomeness. Your call. But don't let one scary RAGE monster scare you off the whole series, b/c then you would be missing out.



My other reviews for this series:

The Warlord Wants Forever (Immortals After Dark #1)