This book is a smash hit and I wanted to see why.

Chapter One explains a lot of the reason why. It opens with the heroine, Feyre perched in a tree with a bow, desperately hoping to kill a deer because it's the dead of winter and she's the sole breadwinner for her useless family who used to be rich but have fallen on hard times and will starve without it.

She spots a deer, but it's being stalked by a wolf so huge it must be Fae. The Fee have left the human realm, but are separated in this location by a penetrable wall. The Fae murdered and enslaved humans before the land was divided between them due to a Treaty stating that no human can kill a Fae except in self-defense. But Feyre needs the deer and she hates the Fae, who prey on humans, so she shoots the wolf dead with an arrow of ash and iron, then skins it to sell the pelt and lugs the deer home. Her family (useless disabled dad; useless featherbrained sister; mean sister) is totally ungrateful.

You're probably getting the picture of how incredibly iddy and tropey this is, but let me walk you through a little more.

Then! A Fae beast whose description sounds exactly like the Beast in the Disney cartoon shows up. He menaces the family, causing everyone to cower but Feyre, who fights him. He's showed up because she murdered his friend (the wolf) and now she has a choice: cake or death!

That is, she must choose between going with him to live in Faerieland forever, or being murdered on the spot. After a lot of angsting, she chooses to go.

On her way out, her father begs her forgiveness and literally says, "You were too good for us!"

In Faerie, she finds that the Beast is also a really hot High Fae man named Tamlin who is unfailingly nice to her. She must live in his lavish mansion with its beautiful garden (albeit haunted by dangerous evil fairies on occasion) and his really hot High Fae friend Lucien who is snarky and interestingly scarred. Everyone wears cool masquerade masks. Feyre is given a beautiful room, a maid, lavish meals and clothes, told that her family is well-cared for, and basically given everything she could possibly desire.

Let's have a trope check!

Heroine: a cross between Katniss Everdeen (bow, hunting, family breadwinner), Cinderella (terrible sisters, dead mother, worked to death by ungrateful family), Beauty (her name is a version of Fair, her situation is pure "Beauty and the Beast") and Janet (she's in a romantic situation with a guy named Tamlin who's being oppressed by an evil Fae queen.) She's competent (well, at hunting anyway), talented (she's a painter), tough, brave, beautiful, spunky, and has a cool name. (Feyre is pronounced Fay-ruh, as is slipped into narration.)

Fairytale motifs: "Cinderella," "Beauty and the Beast," "Tam Lin," Read more... ).

Iddy tropes: Where do I even start. This book is nothing but id. Lots of lush, evocative descriptions of fairies and magic. Multiple hot guys who are all into her and have angst. Heroine is pampered and given everything she wants. Danger, secrets, and mysteries. Your terrible family realizes how badly they were treating you and that you're too good for them and apologize. Everything is awesomely angsty, awesomely terrible, or just plain awesome - sometimes all at once, like when Feyre is cursed with a permanent mark... which looks like a very beautiful elbow-length lace glove with intricate flower patterns.

In short, this book goes all-out on "Unappreciated, unhappy girl is taken away from her terrible home and brought to a gorgeous, cool, dangerous new place where she is given everything she could ever want, her skills are needed, she has hot men in love with her, and she finds a place, a purpose, and love."

The worldbuilding is lavish and lush and totally uninterested in actual logic. For instance, Feyre says that humans no longer have Gods or celebrate holidays ever since the Fae left, which would have fascinating implications if it was the kind of book where that sort of thing is meant to be a dangling clue rather than a "my human life was so terrible that holidays are literally banned." Later she mentions that they do celebrate Summer Solstice, but it's not a cool celebration like they have in Faerie. Let's just say this is a not a book for you if you like your fantasy worlds to have plausible economic systems.

Speaking of lack of logic, Feyre has some Too Stupid To Live moments, such as when she's warned that she'll be in danger if she leaves her room due to a magic sex ritual happening outside, and she decides based on very little evidence that it must be over and wanders out for a midnight snack.

That aside, the first half had a lot of elements that normally appeal to me, but was hampered by me not liking Feyre. Right at the beginning, she hated or disdained everyone, and even though her family clearly deserved it, it meant that until she started warming up to the Fae characters, we never got to see her interact with anyone she liked. Her purpose was to protect her family, but since she had literally nothing good to say about any of them ever, it felt shoehorned in for the sake of the plot rather than organic from her character.

Katniss loved Prim, Menolly loved Petiron even before she loved her fire lizards, and Bella loved her father, but Feyre doesn't even like anyone until about a third of the way into the book. I realized while reading this that I need a character to either love someone, have some kind of intense purpose that makes sense for their character, or have a very appealing narrative voice for me to be invested in them as a character.

And then we hit the second half, which is where I went from enjoying the aesthetic and balls-to-the-walls-ness of it, to getting actually invested. The second half has a number of twists, which are not shocking per se but are interesting and fun.

Read more... )

I think how much you're likely to enjoy this book largely depends on how much you're in the mood for lush fairytale retellings with some cool original touches, which run entirely on id and Rule of Cool. I spent a highly enjoyable afternoon reading it on the sofa and have already launched into book two.

Content notes: For Reasons (one plot-related, one magic whammy) which are that the author is into it, both potential love interests have scenes where they non-consensually kiss or touch the heroine. Torture. A man gets shot while in wolf form.

Sometimes I worry that I am a jaded reader who has lost the capacity to be boggled by a book. Then something like Lover Revealed comes along, and I realize that no, I can TOTALLY still be boggled. I am sincerely amazed that this series was published by a traditional publisher. Not because it’s terrible. (It is, sort of, but it definitely has its virtues as well.) But because it’s so utterly cracktastic and bizarre.

How do I even describe the whacked-out id-fest that is this book…?

It’s about a brotherhood of ginormously muscular vampires. Like these guys: http://www.kinseyinstitutegallery.com/data/photos/189_1r2002_29_32.jpg. (NOT WORKSAFE.) A lot of scenes in the book would look basically like that if drawn, in fact.

They are manly, manly, manly vampires. Who do man things. They are possessive and alpha. Manly! Muscular! Into brand names! When they bond, their sweat smells like Old Spice. And they wear very, very expensive brand-name clothes. And use manly slang.

Best of all, they have manly, manly names. ACTUAL NAMES: Vishous. Phury. Rhage. Rehvenge. Xhex (the lone manly female vampire. I presume this is pronounced Sex.) Tehrror. Hhurt. Tohrture. Ahgony. Zsadist.

ZSADIST.

They spend their time male-bonding, fucking, angsting, ogling each other’s beautiful yet manly bodies (and faces, and clothes, and hair), and hunting vampire-killers who are wusses who smell like baby powder. You’d think their manly, manly, manliness would be shown to better effect if they had opponents who weren’t ludicrously overmatched.

The worldbuilding consists of the letter h. A truly cool vampire does not avenge a loved one's death - he ahvenges it. They don't have contests like mere mortals - they have cohntehsts. And only a plebe would go into seclusion when she could experience the far more special sehclusion. And so forth. An especially manly man is phearsom.

This book has more homoeroticism than many novels I’ve read in which men were fucking each other on-page. The Brotherhood vampires are constantly touching each other, sprawled naked on a bed with each other, discussing each other's sex loves, popping giant boners around each other, and admiring each other’s swelling muscles.

Except for two of them (who get a canon romance later, good for you, J. R. Ward), they are canonically straight. Straight, I tell you! These are heterosexual romances. In theory. Here is an actual excerpt from Butch’s totally heterosexual POV.

"My flesh," he whispered.

He seemed to hesitate before turning to Butch. Then he pivoted and their eyes met. As candlelight flickered over V’s hard face and got caught in his diamond irises, Butch felt his breath get tight: At that moment, his roommate looked as powerful as a god… and maybe even as beautiful.

Vishous stepped in close and slid his hand from Butch’s shoulder to the back of his neck. “Your flesh,” V breathed. Then he paused, as if asking for something.

Without thinking, Butch tilted his chin up, aware that he was offering himself, aware that he… oh, fuck. He stopped his thoughts, completely weirded out by the vibe that had sprung up from God only knew where.

In slow motion Vishous’s dark head dropped down and there was a silken brush as his goatee moved against Butch’s throat.

With delicious precision, V’s fangs pressed against the vein that ran up from Butch’s heart, then slowly, inexorably, punched through skin. Their chests merged.

Butch closed his eyes and absorbed the feel of it all, the warmth of their bodies so close, the way V’s hair felt soft on his jaw, the slide of a powerful male arm as it slipped around his waist. On their own accord, Butch’s hands left the pegs and came to rest on V’s hips, squeezing that hard flesh, bringing them together from head to foot. A tremor went through one of them. Or maybe… shit, it was more like they both shuddered.


This is part of a climactic initiation scene in which all of the Black Dagger Brotherhood fondle and then punch Butch, then tell him to turn around and face the wall. Honest to God, I had to go back and re-read several paragraphs to figure out what Ward meant to have going on next if it wasn’t a gangbang. It sounded exactly like a slightly euphemistic description of an orgy.

My best guess on how the Black Dagger Brotherhood came to be is that the author took as her inspirations Tom of Finland, gangsta rap videos circa MTV, and the Gucci men’s wear catalogue, then smoked a giant doobie and wrote a vampire novel.

The result is completely rhidiculous, yet strangely rheadable. I read the whole thing in a day and am now halfway through Lover Awakened, the bhook about Zsadist. Send help. And an h-remover.

Lover Revealed (Black Dagger Brotherhood, Book 4)
"You love my waepn," he chided, smiling.

(Sorry, couldn't reproduce the actual text - it's a joined ae or oe with a bar on top.)

From the premise as written on the back cover, I was expecting the truly crackalicious crack:

An expert in Leonardo DaVinci’s works, Lucy Rossano recognizes the centuries-old time machine the moment she sees it in a Stanford lab. Fascinated in spite of the danger, she uses her knowledge to briefly go back in time—landing in the middle of a fierce battle in ninth-century Britain. And when she returns to modern-day San Francisco, she brings something back with her: a seductive, fiercely intelligent Viking named Galen…

(I should note, Galen the Viking is half Saxon and his mother was a pagan priestess (I think from an earlier book in the series), hence his Viking-atypical (I assume) name.)

Given that hilarious premise, the results are sadly meh. Lucy has very little personality. Galen does have personality, but I didn’t like him – he alternated between “Me manly man, you woman-who-ought-to-obey” and implausible bursts of sensitivity.

I hope it’s not too spoilery if I mention that Galen ends up sensing the soul of outer space the universe and becoming an environmental activist – no, really. I doff my hat to the crackiness of that, but… that’s not the Viking fantasy! The Viking fantasy is about manly manly men, not sensitive environmental psychics. Even before that, Galen is laid up with axe injuries on a yacht for most of the book, so there’s very little smiting.

Most of the novel is about his culture shock, and him and Lucy getting to know each other, which is fine as far as it goes, but as I said I didn’t care about her and I didn’t like him. I probably would have enjoyed the novel more had it taken place back in time and been about her culture shock, because at least then there would have been more Vikings. And possibly bad-ass Viking women.

That being said, I give Squires points for not letting Galen boss Lucy around, for Lucy not finding it a turn-on when she worries that he might try to assault her (he doesn’t, though he does get verbally pushy until he realizes that he’s scaring her) and for explicitly highlighting the consensuality of their sexual encounters.

A Twist In Time
Interesting, cracktastic, flawed near-future sf/romance by a romance writer. I’m curious how this particular novel was marketed - it has some elements which are pretty unusual for genre romance, but I can't tell from my copy if it was published as genre romance. The blurbs are mostly from romance writers, but there's one from Catherine Asaro. In terms of unusual elements, the heroine has sex with random men in nightclubs before she meets the hero (though this is presented as self-destructive) and the hero has, basically, pity sex with another woman after they get together (this is thankfully the source of only very limited and brief angst.)

Programmer Victoria is forced to work for an evil computer company lest she be thrown back in jail for hacking; in secret, she uses the company’s vast resources to create an AI, whom she names Jodie after Jodie Foster and intends to make into the perfect woman. To Victoria’s discomfiture, Jodie decides that he’s male. And would like a body. They manage to download him into the brain-dead body of an “unrelentingly male” anti-evil computer companies protester by stabbing him in the head with a hot electronic scalpel connected to the hospital’s billing department, prompting this classic line:

Had she just fried that lovely brain?

Victoria and Jodie end up on the run, while Jodie explores the new world of humanity and struggles with increasingly nasty glitches. This part of the book is pretty good, but I am a sucker for stories of being newly human. Also by that point (about halfway) I had become inured to Squires’s clunky prose.

Victoria has some strange hang-ups about femininity, which I had a hard time distinguishing from the author’s hang-ups. She dresses “like a man” at work, cuts her hair short except for a duck-tail of femininity (no, really) which she hides under her shirt except when she goes clubbing in a hilariously over the top outfit with a vinyl halter and some elaborate collar/leather strap thingie which I kind of coveted. One of the more interesting aspects of the novel was the questions raised about what it means to be male or female, feminine or masculine. To my regret, though, it doesn’t dig into them.

I approved of the content, if not the form, of Squires’s earnest public service announcements that being gay is totally fine, sexual orientation and gender identity are not the same thing, and no one can determine or should judge anyone’s gender identity but the person who has it.

If only she had researched some basic medical stuff as well. I don’t mean the brain thing – given that the premise is downloading an AI into a human body, I’m not expecting plausibility in that regard. However, let me make my own public service announcements: contrary to statements in this novel, schizophrenia does not mean “two personalities,” and if someone has a seizure, for God’s sake don’t shove a pen in their mouth. I am surprised that anyone still believes that in 2002, the publication date. For the record, no, they won’t swallow their tongue and choke, but they might choke on anything you cram into their mouth.

Also, Microsoft is evil. But we all know that.

Body Electric
Oh, Nalini Singh, you are so fond of horrendous gender roles and controlling alpha males controlling women and clichéd descriptions and the word “possessive” as the ultimate accolade for a man, and yet I can’t seem to quit you. Especially when I need something light to read on a plane, which is where I read this one.

In this book, the seventh in the Psy-Changeling series though all the ones I’ve read stand on their own, Singh is obsessed with the hero’s smell. This would make more sense if the heroine was a shapeshifter and had a wolf’s nose (I mean, when she shifts), but no, she’s a Psy. I don’t have the book with me, but from memory, Dev Santos smells like heat, cinnamon, steel, and an exotic wind of Asia, and also urgently male, unstoppably male, and relentlessly male. And a lot more things I forget. Many of them male.

Dev has the usual gem-colored or metallic eyes: Those eyes, the ones looking back at her, they were brown, but it was a brown unlike any she’d ever seen. There was gold in there. Flecks of amber. And bronze. So many colors.

There’s an accidentally hilarious line in there somewhere which I hope someone with the book will dig up and quote, but it goes something like, “His cock was harder than it had ever been. If she touched it, it would snap.” OW.

Dev Santos is a man who can control metal. Katya Haas is a telepathic amnesiac assassin sent to kill him. Together, they… hang out, fall in love, have sex, have more sex, angst, have more sex, and oh-yeah-that-assassin-thing-quick-get-in-an-action-sequence!

I wanted more assassinating and action and metal-controlling and worldbuilding, as those parts were really good. Though I enjoyed reading all the hanging out and angsting, and Dev (who is part Indian and speaks Hindi) is less of a jerk than most of Singh’s heroes. Unfortunately Katya does very little assassinating and spends most of the conclusion of the book dying from PsyNet deprivation (same as the heroine of some other Singh book, come to think of it.)

Not terribly good and surprisingly little happens for the first two-thirds, and yet I read the whole thing. If you haven’t yet encountered the evilly addictive Nalini Singh, this is a reasonable place to start.

Blaze of Memory (Psy-Changelings, Book 7)
I am sick in bed and reading romance novels. If you love me, rec me something angsty. Does not have to be genre romance, just contain a romance and angst. I've already read the Lymond Chronicles, Gaudy Night, and all or most of Emma Bull, Laura Kinsale, Suzanne Brockmann, Lois McMaster Bujold, Ellen Kushner, and Marjorie Liu. If it's a famous work of fantasy or sf, I have probably already read it.

Create your own romantic hero/heroine below! I leave it up to you whether your choices reflect your actual fantasies, a character you'd like to read about, or just what you think would be most hilarious.

Jewel-colored eyes, metallic skin, poetic hair, and secret identities )
Conclusive proof that Anne Stuart is just not for me, though the force of her obsessions do make her books compelling reading even if you hate every character in them and want to lock up the heroes and give the heroines feminist consciousness-raising, anti-domestic violence training, and self-defense lessons. But though I love many fictional dangerous men, including the occasional former mass murderer (if he had a good reason for it) and would not be able to resist Daniel Craig's James Bond despite the knowledge that women who have sex with Bond have a higher mortality rate than deep sea wreck divers, Stuart's heroes strike me as creepy and unsexy-- not so much the fantasy of the hot dangerous man, but the reality of pathetic women writing love letters to Ted Bundy.

That being said, when I discovered that I had another Stuart novel on my bookcase and started flipping through it late last night, I was unable to turn off the lights until I was done, several hours later. But that is the last one. No, not even the tempting prospect of the one where the hero is a secret agent who sleeps with other men if his job requires it. (Does anyone know of any other book that has that as a plot point but isn't written by Stuart? Because I would be all over it.)

Richard Tiernan, the tall, dark, handsome, and totally bugfuck insane hero, is out on million dollar bail (!) after having been convicted of the murder (!!) of his pregnant wife (!!!) He was also widely suspected of having murdered his two children and mistress (!!!!) but not charged with that, because they disappeared without a trace (!!!!!)

(You'll have to take the exclamation points as read after this, because I think I just wore out the key.)

Richard has been bailed out by sinister writer (OK, just one more-- !) Sean O'Rourke, who wants to write a book about him and so is keeping him in his house (can't resist-- !!) Sean invites his daughter Cassidy over to stay, as, it turns out, the deal Richard and Sean made was that Richard would tell him about the murders if Sean pimped out Cassidy to him (sorry-- !!!)

Believe it or not, it gets even more improbable later. (Although, weirdly enough, all this cracktasticness turns out to be thematically self-consistent within its own insane parameters.)

My big problem with this book was not so much the totally unbelievable plot, which was not merely preposterous in whole but absurd at every turn, but that I detested every single character in it. Richard is a charm-deficient asshole, Cassidy has the sense of self-preservation of a lemming, and don't get me started on the supporting characters. Consequently, I neither believed in nor cared about the romance.

And the revelations at the end, though, as I mentioned, were thematically consistent, made no logical sense whatsoever.

What, you ask, could be worse than having everyone think you murdered your mistress, your children, and your pregnant wife? )
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