Lash - L.G. Castillo
Edit: 9/3/13 Well, I see the author reviewed her own book, which is fine. I have done that myself. What is not cool is the fact she has given herself a 5 star rating. WTF? That is not cool. It's biased and skews the ratings, setting the number off. Authors should not be allowed to give their books ratings. It's just NOT COOL!Original Review: 9/2/13Was given this book in exchange for an honest review.So, L.G. Castillo get 3 stars just because I liked Lash and the cover was effing gorgeous. The story was erratic, the timeline moved like a patient having a seizure, and there were enough grammatical errors to employ an editor for days. There was a serious lack of commas, words out of order and run-on sentences galore.The CAST:Lash: A fallen angel with serious baggage, trust issues and a pinch of guilt. I liked him. He felt real. He gets in trouble with the angels for saving someone he shouldn't have saved. That's a nice twist in a world full of asshole angels like Patch from Hush, Hush. I just wish Lash had been more fleshed out.Naomi: Half-Latino (of some kind. We never do really learn her lineage.), just graduated college, loses her parents. She's a loose canon, making rash decisions on the fly and getting herself into trouble. I was indifferent to her. Sometimes, I liked her, sometimes I hated her.Welita: A funny little Hispanic woman with a lot of fire in her belly. She amused me to no end.The angels aren't very detailed. It's clear Gabrielle is a bitch, Raphael likes to speak in riddles, and Jeremy really misses having Lash around as his best friend. Naomi's cousin Chuy was the typical comic relief/level-headed relative that kept trying to keep her from hurting herself. Lalo was...well, I don't really know. He was used mostly as a plot device. I'm not quite even sure what he looks like.The PLOT: Now here's where I take issue. The story in itself was NOT BAD. It was the execution that sucked. Where do I even begin? Key things to building a great story are details, world building, and having chronology that can be followed easily enough. This story fails on all accounts.Descriptions and events play out at such a rapid rate that it makes your head spin. In a span of about 8 pages, we got Lash getting a BJ, his stripper prostitute getting high, Lash revealing his wings and then Raphael showing up and pitching Lash around the room, healing the stripper and delivering some enigmatic revelations. Lash revealing his wings to the poor drug addict was the most lacking thing up to that point. It was very vague, him just standing with his hands at his sides, palms out and "pushing". There's apparently blood drops and then his wings spring out. Uh....More details please? Why was he bleeding? Did it hurt? Anything?The world building was pretty much contained to Houston. Not a lot of real description about the city streets, the neighborhoods or anything. All we can gather is Welita lives in a bad area. Not much else. All scenes outside of Welita's house were vague, leaving you to make up everything as you went. What did Naomi's apartment look like? Where exactly was the community center Chuy taught classes at? What about the motel Naomi and Lash held up in while running from Luke and Sal?The chronology of this book blew my mind. Not only did some things happen in rapid order, leaving you with a WTF look on your face, but time seemed to move at its own accord.For example, they're hiding in a random, nondescript motel somewhere in New Mexico when Luke finds them. Raphael holds off the baddies long enough for Lash to get Naomi out of there. It is stated they are about 300 miles from the safe house they're trying to reach. But in a matter of paragraphs, they can see the landmark they're trying to reach, Shiprock. 300 miles takes a few hours to cover in a car, I'm pretty sure. How they got there so damn quickly seemed to be a testament to the author's lack of details. Castillo reminds me a lot of myself when I was first getting into writing. I used to get to caught up with "getting there" that I left out all the details and clues necessary to build a credible tale. This book should have been several pages longer to fully cover all the lacking points. Slow down, pace yourself, pay attention to what you're doing. And for fuck's sake, use proper punctuation! OMG! I haven't seen so many errors since I read Fifty Shades. There were missing commas everywhere, making several sentences nonsensical and long. There were words out of order, problems with verb tenses, and even character names getting confused. (Raphael was labeled when clearly it was Gabrielle acting). The first time Naomi meets Lash, we're seeing the story from her perspective but it's already labeling "Lash said". How can you possibly know his name when he hasn't told you? That's amateur and something that should have been caught by an editor. But no....The whole mess was capped off by Naomi being a Mary Sue. She's the missing Seventh Angel, the 7th archangel. Of course she is..... What better way to end this book? We never do get to find justice for Naomi's dad, who was framed for drunk driving the night he was killed, Jane Sutherland is still (unwittingly) aiding Lucifer (Luke), and what few details Castillo remembered we might want to know were thrown in as after-thoughts at the very end. That is pretty much what this book felt like right there. Thanks, Turbo Rangers.The angels are relatively incompetent creatures that make poor Lash, a fallen and rather powerless angel, practically fight Lucifer on his own for most of the book. He's left with no idea why is doing the things he's doing, except for the hope he can go home when he's done. I felt really bad for him, being used like some sort of puppet by his own father Raphe. I am getting highly tired of books that leave me in the dark to the point I can't even follow what's happening. Lash kept getting random visions, but, again, the detailing was so poor it made it complicated and unintelligible. Even my husband, upon reading a few paragraphs, was like WTH is happening?! And I just shook me head. I think, if the author had just taken more time and put in more effort, this could have been fantastic. But it felt rushed, lacking and sometimes just down right confusing. I hope the next in the series is better thought-out than this one.