My Take In Brief: Not a romance, but not porn either. Just ok, this is the last in the series for this listener.


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Word on the Web:

AAR, B+

Fantasy Book Reviews, 3 out of 10

SF Site, mixed

Trashotron.com, mixed

Where’s My Plan, mixed (review of audio version)

Audible.com, 3.65 stars after 113 reviews

(Audible readers do not like audible sex!)

Narrator, Laural Merlington is terrific. She also narrates Sharon Shinn books. Scroll down on her page and click on the sample of her performing To See You Again to get a good sense of how Merry Gentry sounds in audio.

Fun factoid: This is the first book I have reviewed with its own Wikipedia entry. It was published in 2001.

Racy Romance Review:

1. Is it porn? This seems to be the question that obsesses nonromance readers. I have very little experience with porn, my most recent being the hotel TV in Sweden a few years ago where my husband and I went to pick up our car. Porn was the only channel that seemed to work, and the narrative went something like this: Girl naked in middle of pool, looks at camera, rubs her nipples, and says ‘I hate the desert. It’s not wet [breathy and pregnant with meaning] in the desert.’ Man appears from stage left and begins having sex with her. The end. In contrast, KOS is a novel about a mixed blood faery princess who has been living undercover as a P.I. in Los Angeles. She returns to court and has to survive various attempts on her life until the next installment (there are now 6).  KOS has setting, plot, characters, etc. It is no where near porn, although it is pretty explicit at points. Clearly I have been reading too much edgy romance, because I actually didn’t think there was that much sex in this book.

2. Is it a romance? No. Despite the fact that nonromance reviewers call it a romance, there is no romance whatsoever in this book. Merry has friendly feeling towards some men, and sex with two of them. She is not looking for love and doesn’t find it, at least not in this first installment.

3. The main character. I liked Merry Gentry, but I felt distant from her. I didn’t know what motivated her. She ran away from court, because it was dangerous, but did she want to go back? Why? Would she miss the life she had created in L.A.? Why? A perfect example is when her Selkie lover dons his sealskin and leaves her to go back to the ocean. After three years together her response is essentially, “Ah, well.”  Merry was buffeted by events. Yes, she reacted to those events with admirable strength, good judgment, kindness, and resilence, but she was still passive with respect to the overarching trajectory of her own life.

4. The plot. There really wasn’t one. Yes, things happened, but there was no overarching narrative, just a series of events. Characters appear and disappear at random. We are told some of them are quite important to Merry, but we have to take the author’s word on that, because she treats everyone with the same degree of concern and intimacy.

5. The writing. I liked it in some ways, quite straightforward and spare. And I thought Hamilton did a great job creating an alternate world where faeries and human mix, in addition to creating a unique set of complex creatures and interesting relations among them. But on audio, the constant detailed descriptions were very problematic. More than once I wanted to bang my head against the steering wheel of the aforementioned Swedish car. I kept checking my iPod to make sure it was set on FASTEST playback, and I admit to doing some skimming. Consider this description, by Merry, of her own hair:

My hair was a deep rich red in the reflections of the mirrors. A color more red than auburn, a color that had black highlights instead of the usual brown that most redheads had. It was as if someone had taken dark red rubies and spun them out into hair. It was a very popular color this year. Blood auburn it was called in the high court of the fey royalty. Faeroe Red, Sidhe Scarlet, if you went to a good salon. It was actually my natural color. Until it became popular this year and they finally got the shade right, I’d had to hide my true color. I’d gone for black, because it looked more natural than human red with my skin tone. A lot of people getting the dye job made the mistake of thinking that Sidhe Scarlet compliments a natural redhead’s coloring. It doesn’t. It’s the only true red color I know of that matches a pale, pure white skin tone. It’s the red hair for someone who looks great in black, true reds, royal blues.

Now imagine someone s l o w l y  r e a d i n g that to you. See what I mean?

6. The gender politics and sexual ethics. The feminist analyst in me quite approved of Kiss of Shadows. Gender distinctions seemed minimal, and being sexed male or female did not seem to unfairly hamper anyone’s life prospects. And the sexual ethic was nonexistent. In other words, sex was not separated out from other activities for special consideration or scrutiny. General moral rules (consent, fairness, respect, etc) governed sexual relations as they did any other type of relation. I think it takes quite an imagination to create a world like that, and it’s no accident that the world of Kiss of Shadows contains both unusual gender roles and this kind of sexual ethic, since they go hand in hand. I enjoyed this feature of the book very much.

Will I read on? I doubt it. I have to admit that despite some very cereative acts of sex and violence, and one magical weapon (Merry’s Hand of Flesh) that is in the top 5 most disturbing forms of torture I have ever encountered in fiction, I was pretty bored a lot of the time. This is what happens when I’m not invested in the characters. At the recent PCA conference, several fellow attendees suggested I try LKH’s Anita Blake series, at least the first few. So that’s what I plan to do.

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