The Three

I liked this one, didn't love it. I think Lucien gets better as the series goes on. He was to much of an ass through most of this one...

Oh Kristin Ashley. I know I only have myself to blame for not trusting in the darkness roiling under the blurb, but I'd foolishly put my trust in you after the Rock Chick and Colorado Mountain series. I just don't understand. Why make Lucien...the way he is?

I get some parts. If we're running with the realism line, he could've lost his mind after losing his dear mate. If something like that were to happen to the hero and heroine of a romance novel I love, I know sanity, blood, and morals would go flying. But then there was the option to make Lucien...not certifiable. When Leah first very clearly rejected him, he should've patiently coaxed her to the realization that she wasn't getting pimped by her mother to some celebrity vamp. He should've courted her. But no. What he did was bordering rape and I will never be okay with that, no matter how much her body may have “wanted” it. This wasn't even one of those cases where her no's are teasing and clearly mean yes. This was her emphatically putting her foot down only to be steamrolled. Yes, he could've gone insane with the 20 year wait and his obsession must've festered to obscenely dark levels. But no means no.

And then he cheats on her. Yes, he didn't have sex and he didn't even enjoy feeding from Kitty. But feeding is clearly taken seriously among what is continuously dubbed as “his people.” It's described as an intense, arousing, and breathtaking experience. Grand spaces have been built for mass feedings. You're allowed to kill if you so much as touch someone else's concubine. So yes, he cheated on Leah by feeding on the-slamp-which-shall-not-be-fucking-named. AND THEN HE COMES BACK AND HAS THE FUCKING GALL TO TOUCH LEAH. TO KISS HER WITH THAT SLAMP'S TASTE IN HIS MOUTH. TO USE THE SO-CALLED ENDEARMENT, “pet,” ON LEAH WHEN HE'D ALREADY USED IT ON SOMEONE HE DOES NOT HAVE A HIGH OPINION OF. It's already a propriety and demeaning term to begin with. But then he goes and proves that he uses it on anyone expendable. I will never be ok with that and I will never be ok with him. I don't know why he got so mad at Leah when she expressed her disgust at him because he is just that: disgusting.

But Ms. Ashley tried to smooth things over. It seemed like she was saying, “Oh! The Stockholm's Syndrome is OK to stick, y'all! They're LIFEMATES!” The notion that the status of concrete soulmates can take consent out of the question has never crossed my mind before. So I thank Ms. Ashley for that; this book got me thinking.

That and the fact that I was on the edge of my seat throughout this book is what prompted me to give 2 stars rather than 1 star. I was hooked and that screams of the writing and plot's master levels even if all I was gagging for was the scene where Lucien would certainly get hit by a truck or Leah would finally flee her prison.

To sum it up in diplomatic way (more or less so), this book wasn't my cup of tea at all.
That was disgusting, annoying, disrespectful piece of s... ehm... trash.

i can see why people dont like this book but i thought it was good. if you like tv shows like lost you will probably like it too.

A lot of the other negative reviews have covered what I didn't like about this book - the lack of incident, the multiple POVs leading to a lot of padding and redundancy, the terribly cliched depiction of religious Americans - but it is also worth highlighting that this is one of the worst evocations of contemporary Japan I have come across. It doesn't appear that the author has done anything more than speed read a few articles on the Internet and picked up on a few buzzwords like freeter. Very disappointing.

This book was ok for me, but it was just too weird and boring. At first it was really interesting. Four plane crashes, three survivors. I really wanted to know what happened to them. I kept reading, becoming less and less interested. Then the ending just sucked. I'm amazed at the rave reviews it has gotten. It was not for me.

Meh. I expected more from this book too. I feel like I'd read some good things about it, and the premise was interesting. But once I realized it was a gimmick book, I lost heart. I actually DID finish this one, but it was rough. It was rather dull in parts. And I found it to be vague. As in, she didn't really seem to commit to what sort of creature she wanted to have here. And not in a good way. And the way the epistolary chapters are set up make the storytelling seem far too passive to be engaging. I wasn't interested in most of the action, and I certainly wasn't interested in most of the characters. I didn't feel as though I really could get attached to any of them because of the way she chose to tell her story. I wanted to like this book. And I wanted to like the fact that I was basically reading Elspeth's book IN this book. But it didn't work. Especially given the timeline of the novel, and how certain things have NOT happened, it made this book just a bit hard to believe. She has potential, but this book is certainly not the culmination of that potential. It was perhaps a bit too ambitious an undertaking.

The Three is one of those books that either grabs you and pushes you to finish it in one big gulp, or distances you from its plot early, leaving you free to mow the lawn or bake bread or however else you spend your days. Fortunately for me, I'm in the first group. I found the plot of these three children to be a wonderfully interesting concept, but more than that I liked how I was reading a book about a book about them. And, I liked that the author within the “book within a book” had her own voice, one different than the Ms. Lodz. I found that the plot held together, and that the teasing of the future that we continually got glimpses of was a great and surprisingly effective way to tell a story that had so many facets to it. Having finished it within the hour, I find that I have many questions about what it was that I read, and yet I am not frustrated by that; I look at it as a sign that the book teased and pulled back and that Ms. Lodz is allowing me to fill in some gaps on my own.

All in all, I think this book is fun, interesting, and a good “summer” read.