Soulswap by Arizona TapeMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’m not sure how it happens, but it does. I seem to bounce from subject to subject by accident. The books themselves might be written years apart, or they all might have been inspired to be written and published at the same time. Like suddenly running through a group of pretend relationship books, or miscommunication books, or women pretending to be men books or . . . etc. etc.
Here the common theme is telling a story in multiple books. Heh. Sounds like a series, eh? I mean telling the same story, from more than one side, from more than one POV, the same chronological moments in time from different perspectives, in different books. I didn’t know I was going to find myself in that situation here until I looked closer at the book series this specific book here is involved in.
Book one, this book here, tells the story of a particular woman in a MF relationship, one in which she repeatedly (and I mean repeatedly) makes note of how much she loves her boyfriend/fiancée, while still acknowledging there’s this spark missing. That specific woman, Tate, is a dragon-shifter who hasn’t really mastered the ability to shift (like, at all).
Book two tells the story of Ayra, a woman in a FF relationship, who both loves her girlfriend and loves being with her girlfriend but also notices a spark missing. I mention book two here in the review for book one for one specific reason: Ayra and Tate look the same. They are not both shifters, but both are ‘fantasy creatures’ (Ayra’s a vampire – like Tate she’s ‘defective’ in that she’s a ‘bad’ vampire – in that she hate blood). Both are in relationships that lack ‘something’, though both believe they are in love matches. That’s not why I mention book two. No, I mention book two because Tate, through reasons she has no clue about, keeps waking up in Ayra’s body. She’d black out, wake up in Ayra’s body, interact with the environment in Ayra’s body, faint again, and be back in her own body.
For the longest time Tate thought she might be having weird dreams or the like. Though she kind of knew things felt just a little too real. Including the part wherein she finds herself strangely attracted to Ayra’s girlfriend Sian.
Somewhere along the line, though, Tate finally realizes that she really is in someone else’s body – that Sian is real, that the events unfolding are real. Takes her longer to realize her own body is getting taken over while she’s gone.
That’s book two – seeing Ayra in Ayra’s body, then Ayra in Tate’s body (like seeing Tate in Tate’s body, then in Ayra’s body). It’s not really important, since I’ll probably come back to it, but I stopped reading Ayra’s book when she referred to Sian as ‘the blonde’ (Tate, when she didn’t know what the fuck was going on, kept getting called ‘Ayra’ by a blond woman, so she took to thinking of that woman as ‘blondie’ – seeing Ayra, in Ayra’s body, referring to Sian as ‘the blond’ looked like fanfiction gone wild – while Tate’s use of ‘blondie’ seemed cute and fitting to her personality (she labeled another person she didn’t know, but was known to Ayra, by his outfit – he had been dressed as Dracula at the time, so yes it’s her personality to use appearance to name people).
Right, so, another series told in parts, then concluded in a third. I can see reasons to keep Ayra’s and Tate’s POV section separate (in separate books), especially since they never actually directly interact with each other ((view spoiler)) and it’s confusing when POV characters don’t interact with each other. I can also see how it might have been easier to read with the two stories interlocked in one book – for the exact reason I stopped reading book two – it’s repeating too much of the same stuff from book one, so I stopped.
Wow, I spent way too much time talking about book 2. Mmphs. Heh.
Rather enjoyed the personalities on display here – specifically the lead character, Tate, and Sian, the love interest (or the second love interest; the first, the original boyfriend guy, is present but . . . more to showcase how much Tate . . . kind of didn’t fit that well with him).
Rating: 4.63
June 15 2018
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