Review by Ville Kokko -- The Wanting Hearts

Ville Kokko · Post by **Ville Kokko** » 27 Apr 2021, 06:43

[Following is a volunteer review of "The Wanting Hearts" by Nicole Jordan.]

2 out of 4 stars

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The Wanting Hearts by Nicole Jordan (not the same one who writes about “legendary lovers”) is a collection of stories in a slightly unorthodox format. All the stories involve different fantastic elements, and many have interesting twist endings. The book shows a lot of potential and was fun to read, but it’s very unpolished.

All the stories were entertaining to me and kept me guessing until the end or near it. Their tone varies from humorous to serious. They use existing tropes and set-ups of speculative fiction to make interesting enough stories that I never got bored. The settings and characters mostly have a vivid feel. The description of the book I read in advance, as well as the quote by Stephen King at the beginning, set up an expectation for interesting endings. Aside from one story, where it was easy to see where the last scene was going, all of them indeed had some twist or other at the end. I’m a reasonably experienced reader of twist endings, and none of the ones in this book blew me away, but they were satisfying and juicy. If this is one of the author’s first efforts at writing fiction, I’m looking forward to seeing what she can do with some experience.

The biggest problem with this book is that it seems unfinished and unedited. (An editor is credited, but they seem to have ignored very many of things it would have been their job to fix.) Most simply, there are a large number of language errors of all kinds, from punctuation to grammar. This is worse in the first stories and gets better in the last ones, though it’s never fixed completely. The storytelling itself also could have benefited from an editor’s touch, again more so in the first stories. Some scenes simply needed to be written better, some details made more believable. Two of the stories are literally unfinished, ending with the words “To be continued.” Both of those do have a nice twist at the end, but not a proper ending.

Most of the stories could be classified under urban fantasy, one being science fiction instead, but they all have a somewhat different style. “The Dream” is about a woman trying to understand the meaning of a mysterious dream that keeps becoming clearer. “The Unknown” is about a human being kept as a pet by aliens. “Reunion” concerns a woman who returns to her old hometown and finds out the secret that was kept from her through her youth. “You Stupid Vampire” is the humorous story of a vampire who needs to get a job, whereas the last and longest “Young Sire” is a serious and dark tale about forbidden relationships between vampires.

The format of the book isn’t exactly what you would expect from a collection of short stories. It’s normal to have a number of literally short stories that have clear endings. Here, two of the stories are “to be continued,” and the last story is very long, more like a novella. If the unfinished stories are continued in the next book in the series, I think this unorthodox format works all right – as long as the reader isn’t too invested in the expectation of a traditional collection of short stories.

I’m forced to rate this book only 2 out of 4 stars because it’s so “unfinished,” even though I did enjoy it. I would, nevertheless, recommend this book to anyone who would like a mix of imaginative, humorous and dark speculative fiction stories with twists at the end – provided the reader can still enjoy those things in spite of the unprofessional look of the text, sometimes unpolished writing, and the unorthodox format. Some stomach for potentially disturbing elements is also needed, particularly in “Young Sire”, which contains violence, killing, child abuse, and sexualised vampiric violence.

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The Wanting Hearts
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