Enchanted, by Nora Roberts

Enchanted, is a spin-off of Nora Roberts' Donovan trilogy, featuring a cousin we never met in the original books.

Lovely schoolteacher Rowan Murray has always done what others thought was best for her, until she decides to take a vacation at a friend's remote Oregon cabin. There she finds herself drawn to her neighbor, brooding Irish loner Liam Donovan, and to a golden-eyed black wolf who appears at her door. Rowan suspects there is more to Liam than meets the eye when he begins haunting her suddenly very steamy dreams. Together, Liam and the wolf--and the quiet majesty of the Oregon coast--influence Rowan to make her life her own and her hopes reality.

The best word for Enchanted is "blah". It's not by any means an awful book, but it's just not very interesting or compelling. It's only average: a C.

Though I usually tend to like stories about characters who are at a crossroads in their life, who want to figure out what direction they take, Rowan didn't particularly engage me. She's likeable enough, a nice woman, but just not terribly interesting. Neither was Liam, and that's just weird, because there's definitely something wrong when a hero who's an all-powerful witch comes across as a boring, self-involved little boy. His whole conflict about succeeding his father felt like much ado about nothing, and I thought the way he spent the whole book manipulating Rowan and controlling what she ought to know was distasteful.

Part of the problem of this book was the magic. It was fun in the previous books, especially the first, but here it feels unfocused. I think the problem is that while Morgana, Sebastian and Ana each had a smattering of different talents, they were focused on one of them... charms, visions or healing. Liam can do anything. He has no limits, he can shape-shift, he can see things, he can materialize things and move from a place to another with the blink of an eye, he can do mind control stuff and invade Rowan's dreams and make love to her there (that last felt almost like rape to me really, just icky).

Something else that made this an average read was the sex. I just didn't see much chemistry between Liam and Rowan, and the love scenes were a yawn. As much as I love Nora's books, I have to admit love scenes are not her forte, but these were worse than usual.

This was basically a pointless book.