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A review by courtneydoss
Hunting Prince Dracula by Kerri Maniscalco
3.0
I have heard it said by other Goodreads reviewers that the Stalking Jack the Ripper series gets better the further you go along, and so far that has proven true. Hunting Prince Dracula was a better story than its predecessor, but it still had its fair share of negatives.
I said in my review of Stalking Jack the Ripper that I thought Kerri Manscalco was not particularly good at writing. Her story is good, but the way she puts it on paper is lacking. She is repetitive in her language style, using the same phrases over and over. I was particularly annoyed by how often Audrey Rose mentions her skirts. Unless you've read it, and noticed what I'm talking about, I can't really express how frustrated this particular quirk in the writing was to me. It was as though the only way that she could fill the page was by bringing attention to Audrey Rose's clothing every other sentence.
Other than the constant use of skirts as filler, Kerri Manscalco's sentences were sometimes rather clunky. Why convey an idea in five words when you can do it in ten, and make sure that the idiots really get how sexy Cresswell is, or how cool and before-her-time Audrey Rose is. The additional words did nothing to add to the sentence's power, and instead drew my attention to grammar and syntax rather than the images the words were meant to conjure. Maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm just used to reading books that are more polished than this one. Maybe Kerri Manscalco is just as good as any other awesome writer but they just had better editors. Who can tell? Regardless, the writing was not good in my opinion, and it took me out of things a little bit.
Happily, Audrey Rose improved in her general pomposity in this book as compared to the previous one, and although she spent most of the book with a stick still firmly shoved up her ass, she definitely wasn't clenching as hard in this book as in Stalking Jack the Ripper. This made her slightly more tolerable as a heroine, and by the end I was actually rooting for her. Thomas Cresswell, too, won me over in this book. He has always been more likable than Audrey Rose, but he was much more vulnerable in this book.
So yeah, this book was much better than the previous one in the series, and I'm curious to see if the trend continues through the next one.
I said in my review of Stalking Jack the Ripper that I thought Kerri Manscalco was not particularly good at writing. Her story is good, but the way she puts it on paper is lacking. She is repetitive in her language style, using the same phrases over and over. I was particularly annoyed by how often Audrey Rose mentions her skirts. Unless you've read it, and noticed what I'm talking about, I can't really express how frustrated this particular quirk in the writing was to me. It was as though the only way that she could fill the page was by bringing attention to Audrey Rose's clothing every other sentence.
Other than the constant use of skirts as filler, Kerri Manscalco's sentences were sometimes rather clunky. Why convey an idea in five words when you can do it in ten, and make sure that the idiots really get how sexy Cresswell is, or how cool and before-her-time Audrey Rose is. The additional words did nothing to add to the sentence's power, and instead drew my attention to grammar and syntax rather than the images the words were meant to conjure. Maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm just used to reading books that are more polished than this one. Maybe Kerri Manscalco is just as good as any other awesome writer but they just had better editors. Who can tell? Regardless, the writing was not good in my opinion, and it took me out of things a little bit.
Happily, Audrey Rose improved in her general pomposity in this book as compared to the previous one, and although she spent most of the book with a stick still firmly shoved up her ass, she definitely wasn't clenching as hard in this book as in Stalking Jack the Ripper. This made her slightly more tolerable as a heroine, and by the end I was actually rooting for her. Thomas Cresswell, too, won me over in this book. He has always been more likable than Audrey Rose, but he was much more vulnerable in this book.
So yeah, this book was much better than the previous one in the series, and I'm curious to see if the trend continues through the next one.