Lothaire by Kresley Cole

Lothaire by Kresley Cole

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This series and I have a love/hate relationship. The world Cole has built for these books is pretty impressive and I love her mythology. However, the relationships that she places at the center of the stories are either a hit or miss for me. Because of this I was going to put off buying this book until it came out in paperback, but after reading so many rave reviews about it I decided to take a shot and spring for the hardcover version. Unfortunately, it turns out that I’m in the minority about my thoughts on this book.

Lothaire has found his Bride, the woman who brings his body back to life and is his destined mate. Unfortunately, two souls currently inhabit his Bride’s body. One is an evil goddess who lives for blood, violence, and all around evil deeds. The other is Ellie, a mortal hillbilly who is content to live on her family’s mountain. Naturally, Lothaire assumes that his Bride is the evil goddess and begins planning a way to exterminate Ellie’s soul from the body.

After waking up covered in other people’s blood, Ellie has decided that the only way to stop the goddess from murdering is to kill the body they share. The problem with this plan is that every time Ellie devises a way to kill herself Lothaire seems to know and pops up out of nowhere in order to stop her. After one close call, Lothaire decides that the safest place to keep an eye on Ellie is close by. So he hauls her off to his penthouse in New York where he plans on keeping her prisoner until he finds something to kill her soul.

So, this story basically ranks up there with the first book in the series for me. Meaning, I just really could not stand how the relationship between Ellie and Lothaire played out. One of my large problems is that I don’t usually enjoy stories where the hero takes the heroine captive and they fall in love. It typically ends up smacking too much of Stockholm syndrome for me. Despite that, I’ve read a couple captive heroine stories that I’ve enjoyed. This… was not one of those.

After taking Ellie captive, Lothaire pretty much immediately beings emotionally torturing her. He mocks, he sneers, he threatens her family, he laughs, they boink, he mocks, he has a violent episode, he sneers, and so on. All the while this is happening; Lothaire is hunting for a ring to kill Ellie’s soul. Eventually, he slowly begins to realize that Ellie might actually be his Bride and has tiny regretful moments concerning how he’s behaved around her, but then he goes straight back to being a douche. By the end of the book I hated his ass. I was actually hoping that Ellie would run off with Thad. Yeah, Lothaire had some really awful moments in his life and at first I did feel sympathy for what he went through. However, as the story progressed and he just kept getting worse, that sympathy pretty much died. He was horrendous to Ellie and he never really atoned for his actions. Yes, in the final ten pages he finally comes around but after about 300 pages of him being a total dickhead I needed a hell of a lot more from him to win me back over than what we got.

The saving grace for this book for me was Cole’s writing style and the heroine, Ellie. As I said before, I love Cole’s use of mythology in these books. I also have to give her huge kudos for writing most of these books as if they’re happening either at the same time as a previous book or almost right on top of each other. I imagine that takes some serious effort. But what really made this story for me was Ellie. Yes, she annoyed me at times with her feelings towards Lothaire and her constant back and forth about her emotions, but she had a serious backbone. Ellie knows how to take care of herself. The whole time she’s captive, she’s scheming ways to get out of her situation and goes toe to toe with Lothaire quite a bit. I loved that she didn’t back down, even when Lothaire is having a violent episode. At the end of the novel, I knew why Lothaire would develop feelings for Ellie, I just wish I could’ve seen more reasons why Ellie would develop them for Lothaire.

I would recommend this to people who are fans of the series, but I don’t think I would suggest reading this if haven't read quite a few of the others in the series.

On a side note, I really hope that the ending of this book indicates that the next in the series is going to be Kristoffs story! I have been chomping at the bit for his book.

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