Review: Murderous Little Darlings (A Tale of Vampires Book 1) by John L. Hennessy

Murderous Little Darlings (A Tale of Vampires Book 1) by John L. Hennessy

My Rating:


I grabbed this as a freebie after seeing another reviewer, who was given a review copy, post a glowing review saying that it was dark and an entertaining quick read. It's none of these things. It had a good rating, which is why I grabbed it, but now that I have checked out the reviews I can see why. Most of the 4 and 5 star reviews are from other authors (take from that what you will) wish I had realised that before picking up the book.

To begin with Word Wise is auto enabled and set to high, which means the format is all off and there are notes, highlights and pop-up explanations all over the place before you even start to read. After fixing the word wise problem and the format you then have 10 pages of stuff thrown at you before the story even starts. I was annoyed with the book before I even started reading the story itself.

The dialogue is awful, it's stunted and not natural, what seven year old child speaks this way?...

"That brain deserves to exist in a better body than yours, Rocco. My, what a dreary way to describe our existence. No!"

"I find this such a thankless task. No one will ever understand our work on this earth."

"It's a hell of thing, killing someone. You'll see the light extinguish from their eyes - now that's the last thing to leave their so-called life. Your teeth buried into their neck is the last thing they feel, and you'll be the last thing they'll see. You take all they are, all they were, and all they will ever be. The vampire's kiss is the most efficient of killing tools. One bite takes all."

This is the natural dialogue of a seven year old child?

Near the beginning the author tells us they are 7 year old triplets, possibly vampires but they grow at a normal rate so they are basically normal children (kinda), but it jumps around so much that it's very confusing. One minute they are seven, the next they are eleven years old and no time seems to have passed story wise. The female character Juliana is called many different versions of her own name, I lost count but we have Julie, Juliana, Julee, Joolee and a few more that I didn't take note of. The author used the different versions of Juliana's name to portray the personality or the attitude that the character had at that point, so it changed a lot and started to become rather irritating.

The writing was stilted and had no flow to it, it was hard to read. The whole thing was confusing, there were too many holes in the story for it to make much sense. There are a few twists in the story too but these don't make sense when looking back on what happened in previous pages and also because of the plot holes.

Not one I would recommend, it's a bit of a badly executed jumbled up mess.



Reviews also posted to my blog: Scarlet's Web
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