Indulge by Megan Duncan

Title: Indulge
Series: Warm Delicacies
Author: Megan Duncan
Previous Books in Series: Savor
Rating: 3 stars
Length: 2408 Kindle units

Refresher:  Ordinary girl discovers that she has a special blood type that makes her eligible to be a vampire princess. But there are dangers and intrigues in the vampire court that she could never have imagined.

I decided to read Indulge because I liked a lot of what was in Savor and wanted to see where the story would go. Well, that and because the cover art is really pretty. I really don’t think it is possible to emphasize enough how important cover art is. Even I, who theoretically want to read every YA paranormal book out there, and have absolutely zero artistic talent of my own, totally ignore works that don’t have decent cover art. Savor was one of the first books I read for my blog, largely because the cover was so nice, and I like the cover of Indulge even better.

As for the story itself, I would have to say that I really want it to be better than it is. There is so much going on that is interesting – varying levels of court intrigue, an interesting vampire religion, a complex and shifting adversary. And there are times that I get totally sucked into the prose and what is going on. But I really feel like the book was published before a lot of the necessary nuances were ironed out.

One of my biggest issues was the same as I had with Savor: not enough time passed to warrant the major emotional changes. At the beginning of Indulge, Claire wants to remain loyal to her boyfriend Dmitry, even though she is attracted to Arrick. Then a few chapters later, she finds herself succumbing to Arrick’s charms, but it’s only been a day!  She also manages to become a super-warrior after three days of training, which would be very impressive, if it were believable.

Another problem I had is unique to Indulge being a sequel. I read Savor about five months ago, and I remembered the basic elements of the story. I even recited these to myself as I debated whether I should reread the first book before I picked up the second. I seemed to have sufficient recall of the main plot elements, but I found that Indulge picked up right where Savor had left off and didn’t feel the need to remind us of any of the slighter plot elements.

Indulge was superior to Savor on at least one domain. With Savor, I kind of felt like the author got to her word count and just stopped writing. With Indulge, the book had a story arc with rising action and an exciting climax. I think this second book might have been even shorter than the first, but it felt more like a complete novel.

So will I continue to read more of the series? Probably. I’m curious to see where it goes, and I will almost certainly be sucked in by the pretty cover art. But I will try to make sure to reread the prior books in the series first.

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