Review: Soulbound

Soulbound by Kristen Callihan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Please take the mediocre rating with a pinch of salt as I have started and dropped sooo many books this week, including pre-ordered books by favourite authors, that the fact that I actually managed to finish this book is a monumental achievement.

From my POV this book suffered with most of the tension having occurred between the main characters in previous books - if you started the series here I feel you wouldn't really understand the tension.

A recap of what happened in the previous books. So Adam is the all-powerful King of the GIM, a shadowy creature allegedly a demon, who has the power to give life to the dead and in return all he requires is other souls of people who don't want to die.

Eliza May was rescued from death by two of the GIM and given the choice of life, in exchange for doing Adam's bidding. However, when Adam saw Eliza he recognised her as his soulmate. Having waited over 700 years to find his soulmate Adam behaves a leetle erratically and binds Eliza to him with golden chains. They indulge in a stand-off, Eliza being the only person not to be enthralled by Adam's physical beauty and she refuses to engage with Adam at all, until she is rescued by St John Evernight on behalf of her Aunt Mab.

So, in this book Eliza is starting to suspect that living with her Aunt Mab isn't all it's cracked up to be. Under the surface beauty and wealth Mab and her entourage are greedy, drunken, boorish, spiteful and murderous - Mab worst of all. But given that Eliza is hiding from the demon Adam AND her past in Boston what choices does she have? Then one night she hears a dog whining and when she investigates finds a dog lying chained and beaten in the cellars. When she touches the dog however he shifts into Adam. Mab has cursed Adam and by rejecting him Eliza has triggered the curse. Now Adam and Eliza's only chance of escaping Mab is to work together, but can they put aside their history and work together?

Although this is the sixth book in the series it felt like the middle book, you know the one where the actual plot gets lost in the furtherance of various other arc strands and there are so many characters from previous books that get mentioned that you never really get much character development in the primary characters. In the previous books I really liked the love/hate relationship between Adam and Eliza and I was really looking forward to seeing their story develop, instead it was all a bit meh. The resolution of the Mab plot was rather disappointing and I thought Eliza's true nature was fairly obvious early on. Overall, too much arc, not enough character development, too much sex, not enough heat.

Onwards and upwards. Presumably the next book is St John's.


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