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Her fist-size nipples spiral hypnotically.
Olivia is a fallen angel of desire, which means she's a vampire. She feeds via "quills" in her mouth, which make cuts so small and sharp that people don't even notice them, but need to be frequently sharpened. This can only be done by grinding her quills against the quills of another angel-vampire. She can also bite people harder with "full fang," draining "several quarts" of blood which doesn't harm them so long as they get a blood transfusion within a couple hours. She and other vampire-angels pay $8000 a pop to hunt people whose blood has been tested for drugs/blood-borne diseases.
Like other vampangels, she has no vagina.
This book has some pleasingly batshit angpire worldbuilding, but unfortunately Olivia is only half the narration. The other half is the story of tormented neuroscientist Dominic, who is plagued by visions of past lives. He is extremely boring. His assistants are named Peter and Paul, in case we missed the religious themes.
I assume Dominick's love causes Olivia to grow a vagina, but I didn't get that far.
Berkley marketed the book as dark fantasy, not paranormal romance, which explains why it goes on for so long before Dominick and Olivia meet - I gave up before they did, but flipping ahead, it looks like it's about a quarter of the way in. For either genre, it's weird.
This is the same Skyler White who co-wrote The Instrumentalists with Steve Brust - a book which I made several determined attempts at, but never got past the first chapter.
Olivia is a fallen angel of desire, which means she's a vampire. She feeds via "quills" in her mouth, which make cuts so small and sharp that people don't even notice them, but need to be frequently sharpened. This can only be done by grinding her quills against the quills of another angel-vampire. She can also bite people harder with "full fang," draining "several quarts" of blood which doesn't harm them so long as they get a blood transfusion within a couple hours. She and other vampire-angels pay $8000 a pop to hunt people whose blood has been tested for drugs/blood-borne diseases.
Like other vampangels, she has no vagina.
This book has some pleasingly batshit angpire worldbuilding, but unfortunately Olivia is only half the narration. The other half is the story of tormented neuroscientist Dominic, who is plagued by visions of past lives. He is extremely boring. His assistants are named Peter and Paul, in case we missed the religious themes.
I assume Dominick's love causes Olivia to grow a vagina, but I didn't get that far.
Berkley marketed the book as dark fantasy, not paranormal romance, which explains why it goes on for so long before Dominick and Olivia meet - I gave up before they did, but flipping ahead, it looks like it's about a quarter of the way in. For either genre, it's weird.
This is the same Skyler White who co-wrote The Instrumentalists with Steve Brust - a book which I made several determined attempts at, but never got past the first chapter.
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I was wondering!
I did make it through The Instrumentalists, but remember nothing of it, and was not sufficiently impressed to read the second book. But also I can't necessarily ascribe that to just Skyler White, because my track record with Brust's solo non-Dragaera books is similar.
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I love Brust's Agyar and The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, but not his other non-Dragaera books.
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Oh right XD haha, even though I've not watched Breaking Bad myself, I knew his wife's first name and (presumably) last name, but never put it together that the author shares her exact name.
I still have a bookmark stuck somewhere in the middle of Agyar -- I appreciated what it was doing, but just wasn't enjoying spending time with Agyar necessarily, so it was easy to wander away. I haven't tried The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, and maybe I should at some point, because that's a different subgenre and maybe it'll work better for me.
(At one point I also had plans to try Cowboy Feng's, but striking out with the other non-Dragaera standalones made me backburner that to the point that I almost certainly won't get around to it unless I come across it in a Little Free Library or something and trust in serendipity.)
(also, lol, your icon! :D)
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I extremely do not recommend Cowboy Feng's. On a prose level, it's very well-written. On any level above individual sentences and paragraphs, it's TERRIBLE.
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I was incredibly disappointed at the time when I read it because it was not a more overtly fantastic take on its source folktale, but in hindsight I suspect it of being good and just not the novel I wanted it to be.
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Ok, good to know! (it doesn't look like you have a write-up of it, but now I'm kind of curious terrible in what way XD Although maybe I don't want to know...)
Also a Hungarian folktale kind of shoehorned in so the book could be released under a fantasy imprint.
Heh. I think I remember that one coming up in interviews as being the one he wrote very quickly because he wanted to be the first of that "retold fairy tales" series, but that was all I knew about it, I think.
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Cowboy Feng's Space Bar & Grille - SPOILERS!
The narrator is a first-person wiseass folk musician in a folk band. The chapters are all headed with evocative quotes from folk music. His band happened to be playing in a bar and grill when Earth was nuked. The bar then reappeared in another oddly Earth-like world in another galaxy. Then that world was nuked, and the bar then reappeared in another oddly Earth-like world in another galaxy. This has been going on for some time when the book begins. The musicians unsurprisingly spend most of their time in the bar.
Everyone seems weirdly unconcerned with all of this. Most of the book is the musicians, all of whom seemed fairly interchangeable and none of whom I could keep straight, exchanging witty dialogue and jamming and eating delicious food.
There's a disease that's never clearly described but it's obviously an AIDS metaphor.
The narrator gets involved with a troubled manic pixie dream girl who I think turns out to be one of the bad guys?
There's a giant gunfight and most of the characters are gorily killed.
It turns out that the narrator is Cowboy Feng, the owner of the bar, who had amnesia for some reason?
It turns out that some shadowy group was nuking all the worlds to stop the spread of galactic AIDS?
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Re: Cowboy Feng's Space Bar & Grille - SPOILERS!
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https://amzn.to/4b6Qc07
The entire book is more of that.
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... what.
I assume Dominick's love causes Olivia to grow a vagina, but I didn't get that far.
Guess it could be interesting if it did and that was treated as the weird Cronenbergian body horror it should be? Or if it explored it in a trans resonances way, maybe? Or if it didn't, and you actually had het romance without vagina.
Unfortunately I am guessing that the book is not nearly interesting enough for any of these.
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I kiiiiind of doubt that the vagina appearance, if it happens (I did not find it and yet I am positive it appears) is not explored in any way either of us would find interesting.
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I gave up fairly early in, but I don't recollect either vampires or tormented neuroscientists. Maybe they were hidden in the Celtic Twilight.
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All my problems now have an explanation.
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Why? I don't mean narratively-diegetically, just . . . why?
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That runs intriguingly counter to the more standard idea of angels as sexless and passion as a condition of the earthly world, but also still no.
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As a regular blood donor, I call absolute bullshit on this. That's the vast majority of human blood volume!
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Same for Good Guys.