Pure Healing by Aja James Published by Selfpublished on 4 May 2012
Genres: Adult, Paranormal
Pages: 250
Source: Author
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Queen Sophia is 17 and just started college at Harvard. Somehow, she is amazed she got in at Harvard at all, and that is actually kind of annoying me. Why would she think she isn’t smart enough for Harvard?
She met a guy at the cafeteria one day, a teacher’s assistant called Ere, and if I am right, he is the bad guy of the story, planning some attacks against the Pures. Sophia is very immature, she gets all flustered because Ere is sending her little notes during class, and that truly is not the way I would expect a 17-year-old to act. At the beginning of the story, I thought that Sophia was the protagonist, however, that changed a little later, and I think that Velerius and Rain are the true protagonists of Pure Healing.
Pure Healing started out really well, there are vampires, pure ones, humans, a very young pure Queen, a protector and a healer who uses some kind of magic, and has a very special way of sustaining herself. The premise is very interesting as it gives a new take on vampires and other mythical creatures we may or may not have heard about before.
However, at 1/3 into the book, there was a very graphic description of a young boy being raped, and even if it is important to understand that it happened because of how this character is behaving later, I really don’t like to read about that kind of violence in great details! Just having been told he was raped would have been more than enough for me. It would have still been enough to show how damaged he was because of the rape and being kept as a sex-slave later.
Valerius, the protector and Rain, the healer become mates for a period of 30 days, the healer and her phoenix cycle mates are the only ones who can have sex and not die if the person they have sex with is not their lifelong mate. Of course, even during the phoenix cycle, it is important that neither one of them actually fall in love, because un-requited love is what kills the Pures.
Valerius and Rain are the two characters that have the most development, and they both need to learn to trust both themselves and other people. However, since the story also focuses a lot on Sophia, there are still a lot of pieces missing from the whole.
The erotic scenes were often cliché, with some body-parts seemingly too large, and the way a couple interacted. Throughout Pure Healing, there was a third person narrator that changed to Sophia’s first person view in the epilogue.
The writing is quite good, no obvious or horrifying grammatical errors, and the flow is mostly quick-paced. There is sometimes a little too much information being shared at one time, though, even if it is more show than tell, it does come out telling as well, and that halts the pace, and makes the flow less even. There are a lot of characters, and quite a few of them are at least two-dimensional, and mostly likeable. There is still a lot of things the readers don’t know, however, and I think I will read the next instalment in this series.
About Linda @ (un)Conventional Bookworms
Linda is an English as foreign language teacher and has a Master's degree in English Language and Literature. She's an avid reader, blogger, compulsive one-clicker and a genre omnivore. Ever since she learnt how to read she has been seen with a book or two in her hands everywhere she goes.
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