Review: Hex Breaker

Hex Breaker by Stella Drexler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

At the end of this book, for some reason, there are "questions for discussion". One of them is "Which character did you like the most?"

It brought me to the realization that not only did I strongly dislike the main couple, there wasn't anyone in the book I didn't dislike. I suppose I disliked the heroine's friend (the one with the magic shop) the least, but that may be because she was more of a vending machine for solutions than an actual character. And, like every other person in the book, she was obsessed with sex.

The book itself has three very explicit sex scenes, two of them with a character that is not the one the heroine ends up with.

I was going to put spoiler tags around that last bit, but really, it's obvious pretty early on, because of the strongly structured nature of romance, who the couple is and that they will end up together, despite the fact that he's an arrogant rich guy and she's angry at everyone, but especially him, because he was involved in the death of the love of her life ten years before. I didn't like either one of them, as I mentioned, and I didn't like their interaction (which was angry and hostile and involved quite a bit of grabbing one another's arms and shouting), and I didn't believe for one moment that getting together would be good for either one of them, or would last very long. Consequently, I didn't care if they got together or not, and in fact wished they wouldn't. I had more sympathy for the heroine's original boyfriend; sure, he was a bit of a tool (but no more so than anyone else in the cast, and less than most), and sure, he was jealous, but he absolutely had good reason to be. My feeling was that he had a lucky escape when she dumped him.

The heroine's hostility gives her a conversational style where she spends a lot of her time blocking her conversational partners by arguing against everything they say, which drags out the dialog scenes and kills their momentum (besides making her extraordinarily annoying).

I know the "hate to love" arc has a long pedigree in romance, going back to the ur-romance, Pride and Prejudice, even though it rarely happens in real life (I'm aware of only one example among people I'm personally acquainted with). In this case, though, the characters were so unappealing that their past trauma, and the revelations of how things had gone differently from how the heroine thought, weren't enough to make me care about their relationship or make me want to see them together.

The mystery subplot was OK. The paranormal aspect (magic exists in the contemporary world and is publicly acknowledged) I felt had the usual problem of that scenario, whether the setting is contemporary or historical: it wasn't sufficiently developed, and the world didn't feel different enough.

So this one was not for me, though it's probably for someone.

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