Rating: 2.5 stars
Buy Link:
Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novel


Deejay is the most powerful curse-weaver. Cast out from his family of Naiads, as they have no use for males, Deejay made a lot of money in the tech business at a young age. For the past ten years, he has been taking in, caring for, and adopting his sisters’ male children who have all been abused. He was given his own area of land and is a respected and feared member of the non-human community. While the males can’t control the waters like the female Naiads, they all do have magic and Deejay’s home is a busy place. His sisters have now started bringing their stepsons to him to take in and the newest one to show up at his door, Matt, does not hit Deejay with paternal feelings.

Matt and his little brother, Cary, know the best thing their biological father ever did for them was die. Even though Matt can read auras, he wasn’t aware there was a non-human community and every day he finds a new species and something new about himself. He thought the only option was for Deejay to adopt Cary, and Matt was going to make sure Cary was safe. But Matt can’t stop thinking about Deejay and the attraction hovering in the air between them. There are forces at work, however, and attempts are made on Matt’s life constantly. Matt and Deejay fit together though and even though Matt now has a new family and a new relationship in a new world, he’ll fight anyone that threatens to take it away.

I was really looking forward to Bishop to Knight One as the title, cover, and idea of the story all appealed to me. However, it didn’t work out the way I was hoping. We meet Deejay first and he has a lot of story to tell. By 8%, there was a lot of information offered on his background as a male Naiad (water nymph), how he amassed a fortune and a title, and how he now adopts the male children his sisters abuse and don’t want. Matt then appears with his little brother and, although they are not biologically related, Deejay’s sister brings them to Deejay. Matt is a big guy, over 7’ tall, and he’s been told his entire life that he’s not attractive and when he can’t take his eyes off of Deejay, he doubts there is any way Deejay would be interested.

We know that Deejay is a good guy taking in and adopting and providing for all these children. The children all have tragic backstories, which is one area that is not overly detailed. What wasn’t made clear, however, was why if Deejay knew his sisters abused their children, and they kept having so many children (he’s adopted about 14 already in various age ranges), why Deejay wasn’t proactive in getting to the children before they were abused and dropped at his door, as he knew how to find his sisters. We also know that Deejay is the most powerful curse-weaver, but he can go rogue and be careless with his curses with disastrous outcomes. Most of the information that is given throughout the book is done in one info dump after the other and it’s not clever the way it’s done. Matt had no idea there were non-humans and he takes it all in stride and simply asks Deejay for a book to read for more information. We then get to read some of this encyclopedia with him. Matt only gets through about half the book at first and he happens to get far enough to be able to identify a rare threat at the mall shortly after. From the moment Matt arrives, there are threats made on his life and the lives of the family members and, by the end of the book, I still wasn’t sure why. This series is a trilogy, so maybe there will be more information on that, but I needed more clear direction in this story.

This is a long book and a lot of that had to do with the pages of details we get on their lives. I like to know about the characters, but here we get information on them making coffee and heating up milk and the family schedule and on and on and there are so many details that merely add pages, but don’t add to the story. There are many, many, and many more characters in this book. Some play a role and others are in passing, but they are all given names and at least some background information and it was way too many characters for one book. In addition to this, the series is being set up and the future main characters are being set up here as well and it was more and more added onto what was Deejay and Matt’s story. Some of the dialogue was also off for me, with references to “manveries” and “hanky panky,” and getting “frisky.” The men are living together immediately and there wasn’t so much a romance between them as a moving to the next phase kind of feel.

In the author’s notes, she states that the world building from a separate book she was writing was combined into this book and I can feel that, as the story had a chaotic feel. Overall, it was too much of some things and not enough of others at the same time. Underneath all of the massive amount of words was a story of a powerful curse-weaver finding love, but at the end of this book, the goal of the series still felt unclear. There are characters and individual storylines that are still open for the series and, while some are interesting, trying to actually get to their story through this style may be a task that is too difficult to achieve.

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