Bane’s Choice by Alyssa Day: review

3/5 stars on Goodreads

Bane’s Choice by Alyssa Day

Bane’s Choice starts the Vampire Motorcycle Club series, and I received a copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I haven’t read books by Alyssa Day before and based on this one, I’m not sure I will.

It’s a fairly typical first book in a paranormal romance series. There’s the main couple, a group of secondary characters that are given enough airtime to make the reader curious about their stories, and a larger enemy that will threaten the wellbeing of the characters throughout the series. Yet it failed to engage me.

Bane is a three hundred years old vampire living in Savannah who runs a motorcycle club with ruthless anger. Ryan is a doctor who believes herself boring. There’s instant lust between them, brought on by her inebriation and his fascination with a human he can’t control with magic. She has a rude awakening into the world of supernatural, but she rises to the occasion and discovers she’s stronger than she believed. Along the way, they fall in love.

I found the love story slightly problematic. It wasn’t that Bane had a tendency to force his will on Ryan, because she soon taught him to ask for consent in everything. But their love relied too much on other characters telling Ryan how wonderful Bane is when all the evidence she—and the reader—got was the opposite. Yet she based her love on the testimony of other people. So I found it difficult to believe in their happily ever after.

Beyond the romance, the story was all over the place. There was a vampire whose turning was going badly; there was a mystery concerning Ryan; there were issues between secondary characters; there were werewolves to deal with and the emergence of the enemy, warlock necromancers who were trying to take over the territory. None of it guided the narrative in any way. The enemy showed up when it wanted to and was gone in the next chapter (that dealt with something else as if nothing was amiss), and the solutions to all the problems showed up on their own at the end.

At no point were the characters in charge of the narrative, or their fates, including the final battle. They just spent the book reacting to events around them. In consequence, I spent it wondering when it will properly start. On top of all this, the book was filled with placeholder scenes that didn’t advance the plot and only existed to tell Ryan once again how wonderful Bane was, or summed up the plot in a couple of sentenses of ’the enemy was found and dealt with.’ All this made the book overly long and gave the notion that the author didn’t really know where she was going with it.

I had issues with the characters and the setting too. All the main characters were constantly angry and aggressive, reacting to one another with violence and rage. I found it difficult to understand what had kept them together all these centuries if they hated each other so much. I didn’t find them interesting or likeable, and I don’t want to read more about them. Savannah as a setting was an odd choice too. I just couldn’t fathom why it was of such strategic importance that a powerful organisation of warlocks would start their conquering of the US from there. If the author had utilised the special features of the place to paint a better picture of it for the reader, it might have worked as a unique location, but now it was just a lifeless backdrop that could’ve been anywhere in the world. And the greatest issue of all: why is it called Bane’s Choice when he doesn’t get to choose anything, and why is it called the vampire motorcycle club, when none of the characters showed any interest in motorcycles and—apart from the opening scene—the bikes played no role in the story?