WhiskeyintheJar Romance

I am not an avid reader of this general type of genre (we'll call it steampunk, but this book crosses into many) so anything I have to say or think about it comes from a very fresh and outside view. 

If I was asked to describe this story in as few words as possible, I would have to go with Alice in Wonderland....on steroids.  I tagged this book on my selves as Contemporary, Historical, Paranormal, and Time Travel.  It's a whole bag of wackadoodle.  This wild crazy world however, needs what we call, world building.  This being the first book in the series (there is a short story that gives a causal introduction to the series) it suffers from the slow pace and awkwardness this creates.  Don't get me wrong, the author creates a fascinating world you want to read about, but the character's storyline gets dragged down.

The characters are unique but I'm not sure I ever felt connected to them.  Letitia is a woman in the modern world who ends up stealing a necklace that transports her to "Sang", a parallel universe if you will, whenever she falls asleep.  Criminy is a "bludman" (loosely a vampire) in Sang who created the magic necklace.  The necklace is suppose to deliver his one true love.  So we have the instalove, well on Criminy's part anyway. This is where I think the story was the weakest.  As the story is told in first person from Letitia's point of view, we just get a lot of "this is weird" and "you're weird".  Understandable since this world has "bludbunnies" (a'la Holy Grail) and a man claiming to be her soulmate.  The whole scenario makes dialogue between Letitia and Criminy very wooden and you miss the how, what, and whys of two people falling in love.

With all that said, I still enjoyed this book.....somewhat limited. It reminded me and brought out similar feelings I had while reading Stephen King's The Dark Tower series (for the world building) and Shannon K. Butcher's The Sentinel Wars (for romance/characters).  Would say it's worth your time to give it a go whether you're a fan of the genre or not.  I was intrigued enough that I will definitely be continuing with the series in the future.