My Take In Brief: Not a romance, but not porn either. Just ok, this is the last in the series for this listener.
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.
And, sadly, this book has more of a comprehensible plot than the following ones… Like the more recent Anita Blake books, each book has more graphic sex, less plot, and covers less elapsed time. (I swear that one of the later Merry Gentry books only covers three hours…)
Thanks for the warning re: most disturbing form of torture. I only read the first 4 Anita Blake books and will NEVER get this one scene out of my head where a toddler was murdered and Anita is having a “who has more balls” contest with her policeman friends so she tosses the chubby, severed toddler hand at him.
::infinite shudders::
Duuuuude…you finished this one? I made it through three hours and decided I’d either have to turn it off or fling myself off a tall building. I turned it off.
The narration was so slow that the first sex scene lasted more than 30 minutes. That’s longer than most sex acts.
This is one of the few books that just doesn’t translate well to audio. It would’ve taken 3-4 hours to read the paperback. 15 hours of audio is just tooooooo long.
Kudos to you for sticking it out.
Oh, BTW, the first Anita Blake book kicks ass. It’s the only one I’ve read, but most people say 1-9 are great. My husband even read the series, and so did my boss (also male).
I’m not a fan of the Anita books, in part because their sexual ethos is quite different and in part because everyone is So Damn Whiny. I liked the more egalitarian framework that you noted in the Merry Gentry books; that kept me reading for several books despite some pretty awful clunkers in the writing.
Since you’re not going to continue the series, I’ll share one of my fave finds: a condensed version of Mistral’s Kiss (Merry book 5).
Smut’s the phrase I use for books of this sort,the middle ground btwn Erotica and Romance. My theory is if a Romance novel is dessert with substance; then smut is just more frosting then cake. As and example,I categorize The Black Dagger Brotherhood books as smut. I’m honestly only there for the sexual tension filled verbal parrying, the angtsy hunks and the kinky mating frenzy; sure to ensue. The chapters from the alphabet gang’s POV re: their hijinks/plotting and the most of the action scenes, bore me to tears, so I skim them. So I guess the the porn line, comes down to reader perspective .
This series is one of my favorite guilty pleasures (to read), in a fun para smut way. But I didn’t last 5 mins with this audio book. But that’s because IMO Laural Merlington was the worst possible narrator choice. She has a attractive voice, reminds me a bit of Judi Dench, but all wrong for this character and this series. With Audio books if the narrator is “off” it ruins the experience for me.
Chris wrote:
It felt like it kept turning at right angles. Like LKH did not know where she wanted to go until she sat down to write it.
@ Lusty Reader:
Er, thanks a lot for sharing!
JenB wrote:
OMG. I so appreciate your sharing my pain. Thank you.
RfP wrote:
Coffee? Meet keyboard. Poor Sholto.
Mistress wrote:
I agree. Sounds too mature. Needed more of an ingenue.
I did like the first three Anita Blake books. They were, to me, noir detective stories except for the fantasy element.
I’ve got to admit, I *love* this series. Yes, it’s not the best written. Yes, there are some huge plot holes. And yes, LKH could do with a serious editor.
But wow, I love these books like a fat girl loves cake.
Mostly because of Doyle. I know, he’s not even really a hero, and yet, I’m totally intrigued by him. Now, there are definitely parts that I look away from (any form of goblin sex), but the torture doesn’t really phase me, and the multiple sex partners thing doesn’t bother me at all. I won’t buy them in HC, but when they’re out in PB, I’m more than happy to plunk down the money for them (thus, enabling the skimming of LKH’s fatal flaw: too much exposition). Most of the time when I’m done with them I have a vague ucky feeling, which seems to go away when the next one comes out.
I don’t have a problem with porn, but I agree these books aren’t it. I don’t think they’re erotica either because while I will totally admit I read every new book, in hardback, she writes, I don’t think her sex scenes are particularly evocative or interesting.
I think they’re urban fantasy with romantic elements, but labels are confusing that way since she straddles a few genre boundaries.
Merry has more self reflection than Anita does, which I do like and I really enjoy it when LKH delves into the customs and culture of the Seelie and Unseelie courts and I wish she’d take up more page space with it.
I’ve heard that with the last book in this series, LKH did a very good job actually ending it, and tying all the loose ends together. I would never try audio for anything she wrote, however, as most do need some skimming.
However, the first three Anita Blake books are quite good, (though romance-free), and are the only ones I kept after the later ones lost all plot and reasonable character development in favor of really complex (and yes, whiny!) sexual escapades. (I sold the six in the middle I’d somehow picked up.)
I really recommend stopping at #3, rather than slogging all the way to #9, since then you have to suffer through what is, IMHO/YMMV etc, a really badly done excessive love-triangle thing. Which, from what blurbs I’ve seen on the later books, has worked its way up to a badly done excessive love-dodacahedron, but I could be exaggerating a bit.
eta: If you can get your hands on Nightseer, which is a fantasy LKH wrote before she started Anita Blake, I recall that as being pretty good, though I haven’t read it in years, so my memory could be a bit foggy.