Review: The Demon Lover

Goodreads Summary:
I gasped . . . or tried to. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t draw breath. . . . His lips, pearly wet, parted and he blew into my mouth. My lungs expanded beneath his weight. When I exhaled he sucked in my breath and his weight turned from cold marble into warm living flesh.

Since accepting a teaching position at remote Fairwick College in upstate New York, Callie McFay has experienced the same disturbingly erotic dream every night: A mist enters her bedroom, then takes the shape of a virile, seductive stranger who proceeds to ravish her in the most toe-curling, wholly satisfying ways possible. Perhaps these dreams are the result of writing her bestselling book, The Sex Lives of Demon Lovers. After all, Callie’s lifelong passion is the intersection of lurid fairy tales and Gothic literature—which is why she finds herself at Fairwick’s renowned folklore department, living in a once-stately Victorian house that, at first sight, seemed to call her name.

But Callie soon realizes that her dreams are alarmingly real. She has a demon lover—an incubus—and he will seduce her, pleasure her, and eventually suck the very life from her. Then Callie makes another startling discovery: He’s not the only mythical creature in Fairwick. As the tenured witches of the college and the resident fairies in the surrounding woods prepare to cast out the incubus, Callie must accomplish something infinitely more difficult—banishing this demon lover from her heart.
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My Review:

     I walked into this book expecting an urban fantasy with demon lore; it turned out to be more about fairies.  I really did like the beginning, but the story quickly began to lag.  The plot twists (who was draining the students, who Liam was) were all so obvious that it was hard for me to believe that the heroine didn’t see it coming.  The secondary characters were not fleshed out enough for me to really care about them.  Plus the plot seemed to disappear someone around the middle and I don’t feel as though there was a satisfactory conclusion.  

     There were a lot of little things that just did not make sense to me (like how a professor, even one who had a successful book, could afford several pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes, or how she knew that only a descendent of the witch who created a curse could remove it and yet she went straight to her grandmother to ask her to remove the curse even though she knew that she had magic and that she was a descendent of the original witch – she could have asked one of the other witches in Fairwick and been saved the trouble).  I also did not really understand why the character could love the incubus in his shadow form but not love him when he was a man made of flesh and blood.  

     I think that there were just too many side characters, even those who we did learn more about were not very compelling because we didn’t hear much more about them than where they came from.  The main character started to irritate me after a while because she started out as this calm, logical academic and then she turned into this woman who was just reacting to everything rather than taking action herself and her actions made very little sense to me.  Plus, I really don’t see how she could not realize that there was something wrong with Mara.  

     The ending was really unsatisfying, I understand that authors want to leave cliffhangers (and there are some who do it beautifully) but here I just felt as though a large portion of the book was spent setting up for the next book.  I understand that sometimes series need to have a transition book that will lead up to the next but this was the first in the series, it should have spent some time making me care about the overarching plotline and about the characters in the book.  I have no interest in reading the next book because I don’t care that much about the characters, and the plot was barely there and then was basically forced to continue by the last chapter.  (Also, as a side note, the book spent forever discussing Nikki’s curse, and then in the end she finds out that all she has to do is say a few words to Nikki and we don’t even get to see her remove the curse . . . what was the point in this?) 

P.S. – Regardless of how I felt about the actual book, I still love the cover – it is so pretty!