L A Banks: Minion

Best selling spoken word artist by day, vampire hunter by night, this young woman was born with a calling and together with her group of guardians she’s on a mission to keep the streets demon free for us all.
That’s not easy when a lot of the evil in the world is aided and abetted by men seeking a fast route to power and glory, especially when you’ve got a burning passion for one such man and under no circumstances can you tell him of the evil at the heart of what he seeks or that you’re the millennium slayer.
Any of this sounding familiar?
Minion read like bad Buffy fanfic with a black cast and a liberal splattering of ‘90s street slang.
It’s difficult to write dialect well, it’s even harder when applied to stilted dialogue-the result was clunky at best; difficult to understand at times, and somewhat dated.
I would expect that the first book in a series to spend time world building and developing characters and I would have forgiven the thin plot if this had been the case but it was not. The reader is dumped into a world without explanation, the heroine is a whiney arsed brat, her support cast cardboard cut-outs and the large slabs of exposition that substitute for plot fail dismally.
But the greatest sin of this book, and there were plenty to choose from (the heavy right wing Christian elements, the aforesaid large slabs of exposition, the complete lack of action through most of the story, the excess of introspection, a heroine few people could relate to), was simply that it was boring.
The horror scenes lacked horror-I’ve seen scarier things in the bottom of my veggie crisper. The erotic scenes (no sex please-the slayer must be pure) had all the sensuality of those scary things I found in the bottom of my veggie crisper. This book was dull, dull, dull. The only reason I finished it was because I thought it might just pick up once it settled into itself. I was disappointed. Very disappointed. Not recommended.-Lynn