Christine Feehan - Dark Prince

This is first book I’ve finished in 2019 and hopefully the first of many. It took me a while to get through this one mainly because it’s a hard book for me to get into. The text was small and frankly, I found most of the book boring.

As a side note, I was reading through some of my older reviews and it seems that I’ve decided to be more PC of late. I’m not sure why, maybe I’m afraid of offending people by having an extreme opinion that may differ from theirs and on that subject, Dark Prince could be a very dangerous book for me to review, especially with what’s about to follow. So here goes.

Dark Prince is the first in a long series of books about a race of creatures known as Carpathians. These creatures are somewhere between human and vampire and need to from a connection with a life mate in order to not be fully consumed by the beast inside. This story follows the Carpathian male, Mikhail who finds his life mate, Raven and the whole experience is essentially a study on how not to date women.

I won’t go too much into the detail of the story but essentially Raven has psychic abilities and can use these to communicate with Mikhail with just her mind. Upon the first contact with Mikhail, he gets annoyed when she tries to read his mind and in response… he mentally breaks into her bedroom and plays with her vagina. There is a lot of back and forth from then on mostly involving Raven continually claiming that she is going to leave him, is a totally independent woman who doesn’t need Mikhail and can look after herself… but then does the exact opposite of what she says.

The other thing I don’t like about Raven is the fact that she is portrayed as a barbie doll. Blonde hair, massive tits, tiny waist. In a book released in 2006 when I thought we were past objectifying women, even in a book as smutty as this. I also don’t think I’m the intended audience for this book so I find it even more surprising that Raven is portrayed in this way.

Raven appears to be totally submissive towards Mikhail and despite continually saying that she wants to be a strong, confident, independent woman, continually lets him dominate her. There is nothing in narrative that suggests this is a slowly changing character trait and the whole ‘love’ between the two is more of an author’s ‘because I said so’ approach to character development.

In terms of the writing itself, it’s horribly put together. Perspectives change at a whim which makes it hard to tell who’s narrating and from what perspective. This happens all the time and is made worse on page 32 where one of the character names is actually wrong.

The worst thing about the book however is that… nothing really happens. It does that, what I’m finding to be, typical thing of being 308 pages long and only having anything happen in the last ten pages. Okay, I’m overexaggerating here but even if you count the smut as things happening there’s still 150 pages of nothing – just more gesturing by Raven and Mikhail being angry that she was breathing without permission.

The last section of the book sees the arrival of Andre the vampire, a character who has had no visibility in the story whatsoever and shows up as if from nowhere to piss on everyone’s parade. The way he’s dealt with is just terrible too. I cannot believe that there were two run-ins with Andre before the final show down, during both of which he could have been killed… but I’m guessing for plot reasons he wasn’t?

Dark Prince is the first in a very long Carpathian series of which I’ve been informed, they get better. But it’s going to be a while before I test that theory.

Dark Prince by Christine Feehan was published by Piatkus books in 2006. RRP £6.99 (Paperback)