BTT: Recently Worst

Booking Through Thursday's question for this week is:

What’s the worst book you’ve read recently? (I figure it’s easier than asking your all-time worst, because, well, it’s recent!)

Well, if I thought last week's question was difficult to answer, I certainly did not see this one coming. The one thing I always try to stay away from is putting books in the "worst" category. Even when I dislike the book, even when I write a negative review, I still find it awfully uneasy to point to a book and say, 'Here's the one, it is the worst book I've read'. I think that it's just such a final step and I have a tremendous respect for a written word that I just say that I dislike a book the most.
Without further ado, I'll now talk about that recent book I disliked the most.

It's Dark Prince by Christine Feehan, the first in the series featuring Carpathians, a race of vampires who are not quite vampires as long as they find their life mates. In Dark Prince, Mikhail is the prince of Carpathians, who after centuries of living alone is on the verge of giving up hope for finding his mate. If this indeed doesn't happen, he will face either turning into a full-fledged evil beast, a vampire seeking only to inflict pain and suffering on the human race or ending his life instead. And suddenly things change when a psychic American girl, visiting the Carpathian mountains, connects with Mikhail via her psychic powers. Before Raven, the mysterious girl, realizes what hit her, she is claimed by Mikhail as his life mate and there is no turning back.

I actually found the premise of this book and the whole series quite interesting, if a little silly. But silly doesn't mean bad and we all need all kinds of books to feed our souls and intellects.
The reason why I would not call it the worst book is because I know that there are readers/bloggers who enjoyed it thoroughly and I have too much respect for their other reading choices to discard this one so drastically.

I still however disliked Dark Prince and was quite frankly annoyed with it. The main reason for it wasn't the plot but the writing. First of all, I am not a prude but there really was a sex scenes' overload. Every thirty pages or so, I felt I was experiencing deja vu, reading pretty much the same description of Mikhail and Raven copulating, as if they just never stopped the first time they had sex and everything else happening in between was just a form of daydreaming (or nightdreaming in this case). The repetition trend Ms. Feehan displayed was unfortunately not only in regards to sex. There was an awful lot of 'retribution', 'retaliation' and 'lethal' in there. So much so, that I still get a nervous tick when I see these words mentioned anywhere else. I'm sure there are plenty of words that could replace the three used if only either the editor or the author had a thesaurus handy. Another example was the phrase 'white, hot heat'. When I saw it for the first time I figured it's bad editing, everyone can make a blunder like that and I forgot about it. But then, there it was mentioned for the second time and by the third time I was certain that Ms. Feehan particularly liked this horrid phrase and saw nothing wrong with it. Add to it not a sprinkle but a shower of how Mikhail's hair was coffee colored and how Raven's eyes were violet blue and you feel like you're attending a brainwashing session.

Okay, enough about the bad writing, because I am actually going for part two now, Dark Desire, because I am willing to give it another chance. I realize that the first tries are not always the best and it takes practice to get better, and because the idea of Carpathian males is compelling to me, I am hoping that the series gets better with each book.