Monday, February 3, 2014

Charlotte: Prowling for Enchantment by Mima

The Basics:
Charlotte: Prowling for Enchantment by Mima
Pocket Star
Book Two in the Dare to Decide series
Erotica
Published on Jan 6, 2014
Source: Received from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Amazon.ca Kobo.com

Why I picked up this book:

An erotic choose-your-own-adventure? Colour me intrigued.



Blurb:

Sail away on a moonlit adventure! It’s the readers who guide Charlotte’s romantic fate in the Dare to Decide series’ next interactive erotic ebook. From the mermaid beach to the fairy ball, you steer Charlotte’s passions with the click of a link.

Finally, it’s Charlotte’s time for a sexy single’s cruise, the kind of trip Gram would have loved. Umbrella drink in hand, she finds herself with a choice...a tawny Viking of a man beckons from across the bar, while a leather-clad rocker gets tossed at her feet. Neither man is as human as he seems…but then again, neither is Charlotte.

Before she knows it, Charlotte’s dodging curses and negotiating extraordinary pleasure. The elder tales warned us against trusting a pretty face…do you dare to decide where Charlotte goes next? Find your way through the eleven mysterious, magical endings.

My thoughts:

This is definitely an experiment in all that the ebook format has to offer.

Poor Charlotte is in over her head when she hops on board a singles' cruise and finds herself with the attention of two sexy men.

Because your choices lead you down such different paths, it's hard to really offer up a solid review based on character and plot and so on. Instead, let me say that not all choices result in happiness. Some lead to a lot of violence, and awkwardness that felt at odds with the erotic tones of the story.

There's definitely interesting paths that you can take, and there's one involving a Fairy Queen, with various variations, that I kind of wish was written out in a linear, non-choice fashion.

The difficulty with the CYOA format is that you want to go back and read different paths, but rarely do you want to re-read material, which means any kind of emotional arc is kind of sliced into over and over. The story becomes a little disjointed.

I definitely didn't get to all 11 of the endings - I did try to hit all of the endings for the options from picking the Viking, and very few of them seemed positive for Charlotte. Poor woman!

Bottom line:

This book was just not for me. I think it's probably a lot to do with the format (unfortunately because it is one of the things that drew me to the book in the first place) - but I also didn't enjoy the balance of erotic with violent in the paths that I ended up reading.

It's not unreadable by any means, but I didn't enjoy it.

2 stars
For fans of choose your own adventures.

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