So the book starts out on Earth, which has been regressed back to the middle ages in terms of technology.  Humanity took to the stars eons ago and left their polluted home planet to rot with only those too poor to afford space travel left to make up the population and they somehow destroyed everything.  Occasionally the star-faring humans make a visit back to the old home planet to sneer at how not-superior the residents are, and they are treated as terrible wizards.

The main character of the story is one of these throwback Earth humans named Shebat. She is picked up by one of these wizards as he flees, his brother and fiance killed by a crowd for something or other. He is Marada Kerrion, son to one of the rulers of space, and promises to adopt her. Along the way she ends up actually being adopted by his father instead, making them siblings. They are also totally in love with each other despite a pretty major age difference.

When someone starts writing fan fiction at the tender age of 11 or 12, then generally do so by introducing a new character to their favorite book, comic, or TV show. This new character has a unique appearance, is beloved by all the canon characters who find themselves incapable of denying the new character’s demands, and they single-handedly save the day over and over again. Marissa Picard is generally the iconic figure representing this type of fan fiction. If the author keeps writing, they will eventually encounter enough feedback telling them that these type of wish fulfillment stories are really boring for other people to read. So they start writing about a new character with a unique appearance who is beloved by all the canon characters but terrible things are constantly happening to them. Shebat reads as this type of character.

You see, as she grows up she becomes strikingly lovely with traits not seen in the space-faring humans. She becomes a spaceship pilot which requires forming a telepathic link with the AI of a spaceship and naturally hers is more special and more intelligent than any other ship that has ever existed. She also develops the powers of the Dream Dancers for which this book is named. This means she can link telepathically with another person and show them visions. On top of all this specialness, the patriarch of the family has her genetics scanned and finds out that she is pretty much perfect at everything and that she is so attractive to anyone who shares his genetics that no one in his family will ever knowingly harm her or even go against her will.

To fulfill the other half of the fan fiction equation, everyone she knows is terrible at communicating with others and everyone is scheming to replace the patriarch when he dies. The brother she is so in love with, Marada, is married off to the daughter of a head of a rival faction and they are separated. Chaeron, the brother she spends the most time with, totally pervs on her when she is underage and ends up tricking her into marrying him later on. The guy who is teaching her to be a pilot ends up selling her to the Dream Dancers, who are illegal, and then steals her out into space, only to lose his mind when his spaceship goes crazy from having its memory banks wiped of all the illegal activities it has been involved in. On her wedding night she gets drunk and ends up sleeping with a third brother and his burly boyfriend, which makes her have flashbacks to her horrible Earth childhood. It’s just a parade of stupidity that would be almost entirely prevented if anyone in the future could remember to make a phone call instead of insisting on doing all communication face to face, giving people the chance to just barely miss each other.

Towards the end of the book, Shebat finds herself in the ass-end of space where people who have been exiled from the big space nation all live. Her brother, Marada, has just accidentally caused the suicides of his wife and her entire family because he ran off when his son was born because the baby didn’t cry, which means it was defective, and they thought he was going to bring an entire army to blow them all up for giving him a defective child. Shebat uses her Dream Dancer mojo to fix the child, the third brother gets blown out of a space ship and becomes some sort of flying mutant creature that likes to suck on starships, and her husband brother mopes about how she’ll never enjoy sex with him but is somewhat excited because their father died and he thinks he will get to inherit. Shebat’s reaction to all of this is to demand that Marada take her back to Earth and leave her alone there forever.

Of course, as soon as she is on Earth she remembers how badly the place sucks, so the book ends with her desperately seeking a way back into space because she is lonely without her space ship, which, by the way, is also in love with her.

Every time I see a book with a cover blurb that says something about being the new Dune cycle, I think to myself “I really shouldn’t read that.” Yet I do it anyway.

Elemental: Destiny's Embers

In my last review I drew a distinction between fun bad and facepalm bad.  Fun bad books may have terrible plots or characters but there’s a baseline level of competency that keeps the book readable.  Sentences may be simple, but they are still constructed in a way that generally makes sense and the writing itself fades to the background, leaving you focused on what the actual story is trying to tell you.  Elemental is not one of those books.

It’s actually kind of a shame that the writing is so bad.  The story itself, while about as generic as it gets, only has a couple of hysterically bad parts.  However, when faced with run-on sentences filled with redundancies like this:

Row after row of houses, and huts; street after small street, a maze through which Henrik and his men lead them, always in the direction of the gold that Calis had seen gleaming in the distance, gold now revealed as the paint, the ornamentation, the decoration gilding every building in Galor’s palace complex.

And sentence fragments like this:

He was dressed for dinner as well. A long velvet cloak. A white laced shirt. Boots of shiny black leather. His hair had been styled as well; it sat high and magnificent on his head.

It’s pretty difficult going. Those aren’t even the worst examples in the book, I picked those out by opening two different random pages. Run-on sentences and sentence fragments are far from being the only issues with the writing. The author loves him some god-damned punctuation, especially em dashes.

A moment’s embrace, a few words of good-bye, and then she— and Mirdoth— were gone, and it was just the two of them— Tandis and himself— remaining in the Hall.

That’s right, a sentence with three commas and four em dashes. Again, this isn’t even the worst representative of the problem, just something I found flipping through pages. I’d say that the average page has at least three em dashes, which is absolutely inexcusable. I’ve been mad at a lot of books in my time, but this is the first time I’ve punched a book because of its punctuation.

But even that doesn’t cover all the issues with the writing. Have you ever played a tabletop role playing game that rewards players for describing their actions by giving them a bonus to succeeding on actions that they describe, like Exalted? Have you ever played one of those with a min-maxer with little imagination but who wasn’t willing to let the bonus go, so they try to describe everything by making a laundry list of actions joined by an infernal parade of “and”s? Then you have a pretty good idea of what reading every action sequence in this book is like.

He yanked the sword out of the first one’s throat and swung it at a second, the nearest one to him, gouging it in the shoulder, and the thing screamed, and slashed at Calis’s blade ineffectually, and Calis slashed again, and caught the creature in the face, and blood gushed, and it screamed a second time, and stumbled, but that was all Calis saw.

Count ‘em and weep, folks.

Now generally when you introduce an important character to the audience for the first time, you want to give a strong impression of that character, be it through personality or physical traits. This is what we get when pretty, pretty Princess Angenica is first introduced.

She was wearing a long cloak. Underneath it, he saw, was a dress.

The dress is actually my favorite character in the book. A few short pages later she is accosted by bad guys and they have a conversation about the dress. Her thoughts reveal to us the backstory and political importance of the dress. After she is rescued from the bad guys by the clever orphan boy she has a crush on and a handsome knight, she flings herself into her father’s arms while sobbing and he stops to notice the dress before noticing the knife wound on her neck. That’s how badass the dress is. Later in the story other dresses get introduced. The author even makes the mistake of trying to make them more attractive than the dress.

Yes, she had been wearing dresses those last few months at the Keep, but this was different. This was a gown. This was silk or something.

Silk or something can never stand up to the awesomeness of the dress and shame on the author for trying to steal its spotlight.

But I digress. This is the story of Elemental, a world that used to be filled with magic until some dudes from outside the world showed up and ruined everything for everyone. There used to be one single continent but now it is split into two that is joined together by a single rickety bridge that is made of magical wood. No, really. Now one continent is filled with nice white people, and the other continent is filled with monsters that were made from humans and the evil, horrible, olive-skinned people who sided with the mutants instead of the white folks, so they are called blood traitors. No, really. The whole book comes down to one Titan wanting to protect the white people from everyone else, and one Titan thinking that they should get the fuck out and let all the varieties of human and monster cohabitate.

No, really.

There’s even a point where one character, the lord of a white person keep built on the non-white people continent, has thoughts on how he would like to resolve the matter.

Build a fence, he thought. Build a fence, and keep them all inside it. And in the absence of a fence…
The ocean would do.

Yes, he wants to build a border fence to keep the dark people and mutants out, and if that doesn’t work, he wants to burn the magical bridge. These are the good guys. To be fair, we do end up meeting a village of very dark skinned people who aren’t evil, just simple and trapped in their valley. One of them offers to have sex with the orphan in the most awkward way possible, a moment that is mercifully interrupted by a giant monster attack.

So anyway, the story follows a couple of different people around. There’s the Clever Orphan and the Magical Princess who are off to find some sort of magical artifact that is a circlet that is also an orb. Along the way they pick up The Bad Guy’s Henchman Who Is Not Half As Clever As He Thinks He Is, a golem, and a Thief With A Heart Of Gold who has been cursed to be unnoticeable to everyone except the orphan because the orphan is, obviously, special.

There’s also the Handsome Knight Who Is Secretly A Titan and the Token Member Of The Minority With Special Powers whom he has raised since his mother, I swear I am not making this up, Queen Magesta, was killed. He was also trained by a rock-throwing guy named Uthirmancer, so he’s been surrounded by silly names all his life. There’s also the Lord of the Keep and his Magician who is Secretly Not A Good Guy, but also not allied with the people from the bad continent.

They generally just run around doing exactly what you would expect, passing the idiot ball back and forth as the plot dictates. Both the Clever Orphan with Special Powers and the Magical Princess end up with alternate love interests so they can both act like idiots and be jealous of each other. The Token Minority ends up meeting with the ancient and paranoid King Galor and becomes the heir to the country after swearing a blood oath to be loyal to him always. The Secret Titan Handsome Knight meets his brother on the field of battle and they have the talk about joining the races or protecting the white people and much stabbing goes on. The Clever Orphan uses his special powers to retrieve the McGuffin orb/circlet and the book ends with him and the Magical Princess flying away from the battle on dragon-back with nothing resolved.

I don’t know if that means that the game picks up at that point, because I have not played it. I’m praying that’s what it means, because if there was ever a book that didn’t need a sequel, this is it.

Now I was inclined to go kind of easy on this book for a while. The name on the cover is Bradley Wardell, who is not a writer. He’s a programmer who runs his own game company/publisher. I was prepared to direct the brunt of my ire at Del-Rey for publishing someone’s vanity project without editing it. Then I got to the Acknowledgments section at the back to find out that the book had a second writer who was also the editor, and that he actually is a writer by trade. And that Del-Rey had assigned a project manager. So there’s plenty of people to blame for 529 pages of random punctuation and sentences without verbs.

To make the obligatory Monty Python reference, this is not a book for reading. This is a book for laying down and avoiding. However, people are going to buy it because it has a code for DLC on the back flap. Innocent gamers are going to purchase this to get an additional campaign for the game and be assaulted by someone’s 8th grade creative writing assignment. That’s the real tragedy here. Someone think of the gamers.

His face twisted into an ugly sneer.  And then, without warning, he slapped her.  A backhanded blow much harder than the one she’d given him.  It spun her around and sent her hurtling to the ground.
She landed hard and felt the sleeve of her gown tear.
She stood up and ripped it the rest of the way off.
“You want a fight?” she said, and took a step toward Jacob.

Someone think of the dress.

Electra Galaxy's Mr. Interstellar Feller

Thank you to the anonymous benefactor who sent me this book.  This is a great example of the reason why I enjoy reading bad books.  I ripped through this one so fast because it was fun bad not facepalm bad.  It was an unintentional laugh every other page.  As one might guess from the title, this is a (very) light sci-fi romance novel.  A story of two space cops finding smugglers, love, and so much more in the middle of an all-male beauty pageant.  How can I fail to enjoy that?

A non-artist's version of what the love interest looks like.

The book is set on Earth, in an undefined point in the future.  Humans can travel between the stars and have encountered numerous species of aliens.  Earth has kind of a Special Snowflake quality — though we are new to the interstellar community, we have big brass balls to throw around in our negotiations with other races.  Not only do we all speak English, we refuse to use translation chips in our brains and insist that aliens that visit our planet all speak English too.  We also have a reputation for being dull, imperceptive, and intellectually lazy.  It’s not all bad for the Earthlings though, we are known as the only planet that will take in refugees from other species, and thanks to one Ms. Electra Galaxy we control interstellar pop culture.

So we start out meeting our heroine, Sagan Carter.  Now if the author meant to dedicate her fiesty, passionate character to Carl Sagan, that’s kind of cute.  It’s also kind of unfortunate.  She never uses her last name, so when a couple of pages pass without mention of how Sagan is a totally hot lady, my hold on the vision of her as a hot lady starts to slip and I start imagining her as Carl Sagan.  This reached a breaking point for me when the Jolly Green Giant over there started thinking about how much fun it would be to make babies with Sagan.

Anyway, Sagan is perfect.  She’s Barbie’s brunette friend, with violet eyes and a penchant for wearing skin-tight bodysuits.  She’s also incredibly smart, fast, cunning, and ruthless when the situation calls for it.  She is overflowing with passion for any and every subject and has a fiery temper.  Due to her Tragic Backstory she suffers from a deep hatred of liars and a conviction that everyone she loves will die and leave her all alone.

Her counterpart, from the planet of Oceanus, is Keirstrandst T’raskchrdtniq’, or as he decides to go by on Earth, Keir Trask.  His race has a common ancestor from ours, and we are told that they are exactly the same as us except for their skin color.  This is a damn, dirty lie.  Keir is over 7 feet tall and impossibly muscled, green with a blue star on his cheek and has black hair down to his waist.  We later find out that the enormous size of his genitals would make sex with a physiologically normal human woman impossible, and that his testicles are the size of tennis balls and hang in perfect symmetry, so I imagine he walks around in a buffalo stance all day.  Also, at full arousal he has a helicopter dong which is all kinds of what.

Oceanuns are apparently a very proud race and they especially dislike humans.  Keir has come to earth because he has tracked some people smuggling banned weapons and mind control jewels to our planet.  They entered the Mr. Interstellar Feller pageant because our puny Earth security was so lax for the event that they could easily get the weapons on land.  So he has to come and also pose as a contestant, along with his best friend who looks like an angel. Sagan is coming along as a representative of Earth and to pose as their manager.  Keir is Very Not Happy with his task and is afraid that his family will shun him for showing off his manflesh for screaming throngs of women.

So Sagan and Keir immediately hate each other and want to have furious sex as soon as they meet, right there in the spaceport.  They spend the next couple of days fighting over who knows more about their mission, with a little hate-smooching thrown in every once in a while.  As they begin to get to know one another they start to turn into Perry and Walter.  Everything one of them likes, the other likes too!  They’re both vegetarians, they both love old Earth cowboy movies, they both wet their pants over chocolate cheesecake!  Keir starts to realize that his rage when he first met Sagan really meant they were both meant to be together forever.

So they have to keep their cover stories consistent, so Sagan takes both the boys to the Man Salon to get trimmed and waxed before the contest, which all culminates in her arousing Keir with hot wax before ripping the hair off his previously mentioned perfectly symmetrical balls.  Then they head home to pick the outfits they will be wearing the evening wear, pose-off, and swimsuit competitions.  The results can easily be described as “not much” except for the angel’s evening wear look which is, and I quote, “a somehow-very-masculine-looking brown halter top.”  I suspect the emphasis is on the somehow.

Blahdeeblah Keir easily wins evening wear and when they come back to their suite there’s a deadly desert viper waiting to kill them.  A desert viper… with a rattle.  That rattles. One might almost call it a rattler.  If one wanted to be more descriptive, one might call it a, I dunno, rattlesnake.  But it’s a desert viper.  Anyway, it corners Sagan, Keir uses a stunner on it but Sagan gets hit too.  She begs Keir not to kill it because while there is no anti-venom for its bite, the venom from the desert viper can be used to make a cure for Space Flu, which is what killed her parents.  Reluctantly he agrees to release it into the desert, and on the way the idiots who released the snake follow him.  They have a really dumb chase scene in hovercars, which ends in Keir tricking them into slamming their car into a boulder and dying.  He releases the snake and then cuddles Sagan all night because he’s sooooo sad about stunning her.

So now everyone knows who the bad guys are, they are some more aliens who come from a race that is known for being thieving, raping pirates.  Their leader, Burl, was related to one of the idiots in the hovercar, so he swears a blood oath to kill Keir and ritually removes a testicle to prove that he means business.  This gives the author the freedom to not have to write the villain of the piece as being intelligent since he no longer cares about the weapons or the gems or being stealthy; all he wants to do is publically humiliate and kill Keir Trask, and the dumb beauty pageant will serve as his field of battle.  This also leads to a lot of freaking hysterical lines about his balls.  “He could only pray to the Goddess that his one remaining testicle held true,” and, “He gently massaged his genitalia, hoping to make the swelling diminish,” were two that especially made me cackle with glee.

So derp derp derp, they have more dumb run-ins with Burl and his cronies as the pageant progresses and Burl becomes dumber and dumber as his wound grows septic.  Keir has to compete in a mock-advertising competition where the entrants have to make Pluto Pillow Mints seem delicious and sexy, but they taste like decayed flesh and swamp water.  Keir overcomes his disgust with the mints by making out with Sagan on camera because she’s so hot he can’t even register the taste of the mints, so he wins that competition too.

So all this time, Sagan has been clinging to her professionalism and her fear of losing loved ones to keep from sleeping with Keir.  Then he goes to a special private dinner with Electra Galaxy and stays overnight with her, making Sagan determined not to get involved.  Then the next night they have sex, she somehow is not ripped in two and finds out about his helicopter dong, and is totally in love.  Keir wins the pose-off contest and in a shocking turn of events, his angel buddy wins the swimsuit contest after Keir kisses the angel’s heart-shaped butt tattoo on stage.  Along the way they have made friends with two other of the contestants, a sharkman named Gilly and a redheaded logger named Clitus and YES I am too much of a twit to ever not find that funny.

Oh yeah, at some point it became clear that there was a leak in the human police department so they stopped giving them updates on the case. SPOILERS: The leak is her boss.  His name is Lement Snarl, kinda hard not to see that “twist” coming.

Anyway, Keir finally gives in to his “I MUST BE WITH HER FOREVER” feelings and decides that he’s going to seriously try to win this dumb pageant because one of the prizes awarded to the winner is getting to live on Earth for a year.  He thinks that would give him and Sagan enough time to bond and get past all the lies he has told her that then they could travel the stars together and be happy forever.  In the meantime, Sagan is plotting how to wrap up the whole case and then disappear.  As so often happens in this book, Sagan has the upper-hand and she manages to take down the pirates and her boss with some trickery and only a couple of illegal weapons.  It turns out that Electra Galaxy, Gilly, and Clitus are all also undercover cops, all working the same case, which started with the death of Sagan’s old boyfriend.

As they are all interrogating Snarl and Burl, Burl suddenly seizes Sagan and sprinkles some of the crushed mind control gem on her face.  The way the mind control gem works is that once inhaled, you will forever obey the voice you first hear afterwards. Now I made the assumption that the author was gonna go with the lame-ass Sword of Truth method: Keir would speak first and Sagan would already love him so much that the effect is negated. Instead, Burl tells her to pine for him for months and then commit suicide because she will never have him, thinking that would be the best way to torment Keir.  But Sagan closes her eyes and holds her breath, then kicks him in his septic crotch and throws herself into a fountain before she breathes, saving herself.

So after all that, she disappears.  Keir decides that the only way to get her back is to win the talent portion of the contest by singing a piece from an opera that he knows she loves instead of something from his home planet as he had originally planned.  Before going on stage he watches another competitor, an orange octopus, fart out some New Orleans blues. For real.  Anyway, he gets on stage but before he can open his mouth Sagan has already arrived, having made her decision without his dramatic overture.

He wins Mr. Interstellar Feller and assumes that he’ll have to quit being a space cop and won’t ever be able to go home because he will be so shamed in the eyes of his people.  Instead, Electra Galaxy informs him that he gets to have a year vacation and then he, his angel friend, Sagan, Gilly, and Clitus can all be space cops for the Oceanuns and be happy forever.  In celebration they blow up the weapons and mind control gems.  Keir and Sagan get married and as they are on the ship to Oceanus, Keir whispers terms of endearment in his native tongue to her.  He assumes she doesn’t know what they mean since humans are too stubborn to learn another language and human mouths (which are supposed to be identical to Oceanuns, remember) can’t make the right sounds, but then they rip off Rush Hour with the whole “You never told me you could speak Oceanun!”  “You never asked!” bit.

So Keir then tells her that he has one last lie he has to reveal, SURPRISE, he’s a prince.  Sagan gets all pissed about how she doesn’t want to wear a crown and blahdeeblah when he points out that he has 3 older brothers and 4 older sisters all in line before him, so it’s unlikely to happen.  Then he reveals that he’s been doing research and that they can have babies so he has had his birth control inoculation undone.  She is delighted and takes a final spin on the whirlypeen as the book draws to a close.

A bad book?  Definitely.  But a fun book.  If it weren’t for the fact that the author is a confirmed nutcase who got all her posts on Amazon deleted after she went ballistic about bad reviews for this book, it would be easy to envision her sipping a fruity cocktail and giggling in a light-hearted manner while working on this book.  I will say that I did like that both the main characters were competent, even if they were hyper-competent, and that despite Keir’s conflicting desires to have Sagan as she is and to tame her, she never undercut her heroine to boost her hero.

Magic's Pawn

Now normally I would consider a Mercedes Lackey novel to be low-hanging fruit. She knows her audience and she can tell them the same basic stories in slightly different settings as many time as she wants and know that they will be satisfied. And I know I will be amused and occasionally mildly disgusted. But hey, my husband brought this one home so I figured “Why not?” And when I realized that it was Mercedes Lackey trying to write a gay romance I knew it would be worth it.

So our special snowflake protagonist is Vanyel. He’s a lord’s son, heir to the lordship, and of course he and his dad hate each other. His dad is a muscle-bound, conservative jerkwad who likes to dress up like a peasant in his spare time. I wouldn’t be surprised that he had a ranch out somewhere where he could clear brush. Vanyel is delicate and beautiful with long black hair and silver eyes. Instead of letting the armsmaster beat the crap out of him day after day trying to teach him to Fight Like A Man, he would much rather play his lute and be admired. But only from a distance, because though his father has forced whores upon him time and time again, he is not ready for the touch of a lady.

Anyway, Vanyel does some reading about swordfighting style that is more suited to his willowy grace and practices in secret. When Dumbfuck McSwordy catches Vanyel practicing it with his brother, he breaks Vanyel’s arm. This makes his father furious with Vanyel. Also, the Only Person Who Has Ever Loved Him For Who He Is, his sister, leaves so he feels Ever So Alone while he recovers. Eventually, Vanyel’s dad sends him to go live with his aunt, who is a Herald-Mage. At first Vanyel thinks she will be even worse than his father, but it turns out Auntie Savil is TOTES AWESOME. And her student is the most beautiful boy that Vanyel has ever seen.

So it turns out that Vanyel’s dad forbade anyone from even implying that it might be possible for two dudes to do it together. And he didn’t have enough imagination to come up with the idea on his own despite having been totally gay for forever. But he finds out that this student, Tylendel, is totally gay too! Only, since this is a fantasy novel we can’t call them gay. They are (jesus, flipping though the book to try to find the damned made-up word reminds me how every other word is italicized) both shay’a'chern, which is “gay” in “stupid birdperson language.”

Also, since Tylendel is a mage, he has a telepathic horse. Dur, it’s Mercedes Lackey, can’t have that without telepathic horsies.

So Vanyel spends a chapter or two pining for beautiful, wonderful Tylendel while running around and acting like a snot to everyone to cover up the deep pain he feels over his father never loving him. He starts having dreams about a land of ice that makes it easy to cover up how he feels, but has the nasty side effect of covering him in water and making him super cold. Finally he realizes that the ice dreams are going to kill him, so he has sex with Tylendel and they are lifebound and their relationship is soooooo awesome they never fight or anything. Amusingly enough, the scenes where Vanyel and Tylendel are going to get it on fade to black way before she would fade to black on a hetero scene. I would almost credit this as Lackey acknowledging that she would not be able to write a m/m sex scene competently, but she still tries with the hetero ones so there goes that theory.

So of course there has to be a problem, and it comes up in the form of Tylendel’s twin brother. The twin is not a mage, but the heir to some other chunk of land somewhere that is in dispute. Herald-Mages are supposed to remain objective in all conflicts, but Tylendel has magical twin mojo with his brother that makes it impossible. So when the brother is assassinated, Tylendel goes crazy. Savil and the other mages decide that Vanyel will give him healing sex and everything will be ok, when Vanyel decides instead to feed into Tylendel’s obsession and help him plot his revenge.

Tylendel ends up using Vanyel’s latent but unawakened magic to open a Gate to port himself into a holiday celebration being held by his enemies, then uses his own magic to summon some baby dragons to eat everyone. This makes Tylendel’s magic horsey call him a dick, sever their connection, and then die nobly while trying to kill the dragons. The other Herald-Mages show up and are pissed at Vanyel, who is slowly being killed by the Gate, because they like Tylendel better than him and don’t want to be mad at Tylendel for what he has done. They clean up the mess, but when they go home and try to turn off the Gate, the energies backlash through Vanyel. Tylendel commits suicide, and as Vanyel is thinking of doing the same because of the agony he is in, he finds a magic horsey voice in his head!

The next like 150 pages are an enormous slog. Vanyel is sick both in body and in mind. It turns out the backlash awakened every single Mage gift in him except for Healing, but because of the way they were blasted open they are both extremely powerful and hurt a hell of a lot. He tries suicide, the pony stops him, he gets a fever, they heal it, blah blah blah. Finally Savil decides that Vanyel will die if he doesn’t get uber elite training from some gay birdmen, so she teleports them there.

There Vanyel is healed in like 2 pages, which is actually frustrating after the last couple of chapters because it makes it really stand out as padding the story to meet a page count. One of the gay birdmen used to be a normal guy and he gets along well with Vanyel and helps Vanyel get over this weird idea that he cursed Tylendel by having sex with him. Note: Vanyel had never even thought of gay sex before Tylendel so he didn’t have long to internalize the idea of it being a curse, Tylendel was gay as the day is long way before Vanyel got there, and it really feels like that plot development came out of nowhere. The other gay birdman, who is more alien and less compassionate, starts training Vanyel on how to use his powers. But Vanyel has Daddy Issues! Daddy never praised him, and now this mean birdman isn’t praising him enough!

So Vanyel runs away in the snow without any supplies because he’s an idiotic dingus. Naturally the Last 3 Chapters Crap Need Some Conflict villain appears to summon some dragons to eat some farmers. Vanyel doesn’t act until an old man gets himself killed trying to save his daughter, at which point Vanyel nukes the dragon from orbit. He thinks that the farmers are going to kill him for not saving them faster, and is so overwhelmed when they feed him and thank him that he decides to dedicate his life to saving people. The birdmen and Savil follow his magic energies and are pleased to see his very sudden character development.

So they decide they need to hunt down this new villain. They leave Vanyel with a different set of farmers and say “DON’T WORRY THERE IS NO WAY HE’LL COME HERE.” So he does, and he is beautiful and gay and makes out with Vanyel. Vanyel starts to really get into it but then he remembers his dead lover and sheds a tear because this is just physical attraction and not love. Did I mention that this is taking place in front of all the farmers while the villain is threatening to force a man to disembowel his wife? This dude has some awesome seduction skills, that or else the earlier romantic scenes faded to black before the weird stuff got under way.

Anyway, Vanyel and the other wizard have a dumb wizard fight that culminates in Vanyel using his Special Snowflake abilities to use the energy of the earth to nuke the wizard with his eyes. This is too much energy for Vanyel to endure so he starts to die and is thinking “‘Lendel, I’m coming!” when magic horsey and gay birdman are like “NOT ON MY WATCH” and pull his soul back. Vanyel is sad, but rededicated to helping people in need.

This book is just one of many Lackey has written in this setting, and I am sure that if you start at the beginning it probably makes sense to spend an entire novel preparing a single character to be at the point where he can have adventures. It still sucks for the reader who, like me, is coming in with this as the first and likely last book they will read. There’s 1/3rd of a character arc here and it doesn’t end on something that feels climatic enough to leave the reader satisfied. Her dedicated reader’s reaction to that feeling of incompleteness would be to get the next book, but mine is to whine in my blog.

Shadow's Daughter

I experienced a lot of flux in my enthusiasm level for this book. It starts out hitting hard on one of my pet peeves: made-up words. So many made-up words that the glossary at the end of the book is 8 pages long. So at first I hated it. Then I kinda started to dig the book when the parents of the protagonist didn’t immediately die and I made it past the halfway mark without her ever being sexually assaulted. By the end, I was back to really, really not enjoying it and I was annoyed that my expectations based on the first half of the book were dashed on the rocks of predictable plotting and a rushed ending.

This is one of those stories of a protagonist whose hard luck life just keeps getting harder and harder. In this case, the protagonist is Megan, a little girl who belongs to a race of people who all have latent magical powers. She lives in a city ruled by a more or less evil overlord, and is cared for by her loving Mama and Papa, who both work as weavers. Her Papa is in line to become the next head of the weaver’s guild when his rival takes advantage of a riot to maim him so that he can’t weave anymore. Both parents are cast out of the guild and they have to move into the slums.

In the slums we learn more about this world, which is supposed to be our own 3000 years in the future after some sort of apocalypse, I think. Homosexuality is a-ok, group marriages are normal, you can’t work unless you belong to a guild, and only the rich actually get to stand trial— everyone else accused of breaking the law goes directly to the dungeons. Megan’s mom manages to get herself apprenticed to a jeweler who secretly works for the Thieves And Merchants Guild. Her husband gets apprenticed to the Storytellers Guild and with Megan running around with a street gang and stealing bits of glass and metal to sell, they manage to make ends meet. They have intermittent run-ins with her aunt, who is an abusive drunk, and her cousin, who is the target of the aunt’s abuse.

Eventually Megan reaches the ripe old age of 9 and they are fearing that it might be too late to get her apprenticed. Luckily the Thieves and Merchants guild is there, making lots of promises that they’ll definitely train her to be the latter rather than the former. Megan excels more at stealing stuff than running a pretend company, but she does well at both. Then Megan’s dad gets imprisoned during a random sweep of the street he works on. Since there is no way to challenge an arrest if you aren’t a noble, Megan and her mom are left with no choice but to try to bribe the head guard. They borrow a bunch of money and Megan’s mom sleeps with the guard, but the next day her dad is publicly executed by rats as part of the evil overlord’s wedding celebration. There was no execution by rats at my wedding. Megan is understandably not happy about the guard leading her mom on, so she rounds up the street gang to capture and maim him.

Megan finally hits 12 and— let the awkwardness begin. She’s been wanting to marry two guys from her street gang for a while now, and has one of her fellow apprentices in mind as a wife too. The guy she favors more, Serkai, is an apprentice guard. Surprisingly, the book doesn’t actually rub in the whole “their love is doomed!” bit at all and seems to trust that the reader is smart enough to see the problem with Megan’s plans. But their relationship is kinda cute in that awkward first love sorta way, and they go on a couple of dates. Suddenly, explicit sexual activity! Between 12 year olds! Thank you, book, I hate it when a novel makes me feel like a pervert.

Anyway, Megan’s mom becomes a drug addict and dies, forcing Megan to move in with her abusive aunt. There’s many scenes of the aunt getting drunk and being awful that are kind of a slog. Then the aunt gets fed up with Megan and sells her to a un-guilded ship captain. At first Megan thinks that she’s just going to be trained as a crew member but no, the captain is an old pervert who rapes children. This is where I lost my patience with the book.

Yes, sexual assault happens to a shockingly high number of women. Yes, it’s an awful thing. That doesn’t mean that every time you write a story in which awful things happen to women, rape’s gotta be in there. Megan’s had a pretty hard life already, being taken away from a promising career and sold into slavery is bad enough. Having her get raped over and over again isn’t necessary. The passage where she’s bleeding down to her knees felt less like the author telling a story and more like the author phoning in the angst. I really hated it.

Megan spends 3 years on the ship and despite being a sex slave she ends up running it in all but name due to the awesome training she got from her guild. Eventually she gets pregnant, which makes her body just adult enough that the captain no longer finds her attractive. After trying every herbal concoction she and the ship’s medic can think of the abort the fetus, she carries to term. Her uterus is too badly scarred from giving birth so young, so the son she gives birth to is the only child she will ever have, so she decides to ignore his parentage and love him. But you know by now that it can’t possibly last, and sure enough, the baby is sold into slavery.

This finally prompts Megan to murder the son of a bitch captain and stage a mutiny, which ends up with her in charge of the ship. She fails to catch up with the person who bought her baby, so instead she heads back to Evil Overlord City and rejoins her guild in hopes of being able to use their resources and expertise to get her son back. They promote her to a journeyman merchant based on how well she did trading while she was a slave and tell her to go rescue her cousin. And that’s where it ends.

The book really just became an unbearable slog at the end. Part of this is due to being a mother with a baby the age of Megan’s son, but not all of it. The scenes on the boat manage the awkward dance between being hard to force yourself to read and feeling extremely rushed. It was really a crappy way to cap off what had been a mildly entertaining little fantasy book.

Flight to Thlassa Mey

I hate this book.  That statement is too simple to really contain the depth of irritation I felt while ever so slowly slogging through the mockery that passes for dialog in Flight to Thlassa Mey.  I read a lot of bad books but rarely do I feel this level of contempt for one of them.  Even the most phoned-in me-too version of Rand Al’don’tsueme’s epic adventures at least has something that feels like the author took pride in it.  Maybe it’s a secondary character, or some interesting detail in the setting, or just some clever wordplay.  Flight to Thlassa Mey has nothing endearing.  It’s a book so bad that I couldn’t bring myself to stop my 11 month old daughter from gleefully tearing off the covers.

Now if I go into the plot of the book now, you’ll read it to yourself and think “Oh, that’s pretty by the numbers but it doesn’t sound so bad,” so let me show you what is so bad about this book. Just before this dialog the protagonist, Palamon, has just scared off a guard who is now fleeing on horseback. Palamon’s companions are worried that the guard will report their position and send more pursuers after them. This is the actual dialog Palamon uses to reassure them.

“As for the last, he’ll not appear before a rigid officer, at least until his undergarment’s changed. So greatly did we fright him that I fear his late digested supper shares his seat. He fairly reeked in bidding us farewell.”

Yeah, go ahead and read that again, I typed it up just as it appears in the book. That’s what I was struggling with.

So Palamon is a 40 year old disgraced Knight of Pallas (as in Pallas Athena of course) who has an awesome mustache. This tidbit gets brought up over and over again. He is recruited by two women whose names I can’t be bothered to remember to help them escape an evil overload and an evil wizard who want to capture one of them because she’s a pretty pretty princess blah blah blah. There’s also a young buck rival for the princess’s attention with the group. They spend 300 pages with NARROW ESCAPES and DERRING-DO and BETRAYAL and HEARTBREAK all of which you have read in other, far less insipid books before. Palamon and the princess fall in love, but their love cannot be because Palamon disgraced himself by getting a maiden pregnant when Athena requires that her knights remain virgins for forever. So they look at each other with burning lust and recite dialog that has killed the part of me that enjoys life. Here, have another example.

“It shall not be, my darling – that you are. In this brief moment, you have taught me love, a gift that brings me joy and dark despair. For all of that, we shall remain apart, for what I am and what is past are one; my past is what I am; it will not change. I also cannot be restructured at a whim. So what has passed between us, though it is a beautiful reflection of what might have been, had we not been ourselves, must now be put aside. Our love is like the Gorgon; to look upon it is death.”

Oh, if only it was. Skip more action sequences and the romantic rival is badly injured and close to death. The woman who is not a princess begs Palamon to use his divine healing abilities to heal the guy. Palamon points out that he is disgraced, but she won’t relent, so he offers up the whiniest rhyming prayer ever and Athena answers. Then Palamon starts weeping like a baby and admits that he never done did that maiden, she had been raped by her dad and didn’t want to have her baby killed for being the product of incest. The princess, upon realizing that her forbidden boyfriend is actually a 40 year old virgin, is utterly delighted because now they can be married.

They finally arrive in the princess’s kingdom and Palamon asks for her hand in marriage, but the romantic rival challenges him to combat. The book at this point is all “Yeah, this is kinda sexist, the whole ’sure she doesn’t want to marry me but I’m going to win her through combat anyway’ but I’m doing it anyway so shut up.” Palamon pulls out a narrow victory and everyone is all happy. But then they are told a story about how all the princess’s older siblings were kidnapped by the evil wizard, and one of them was born right around the time Palamon was, and his favorite toy was broken when they found it and it just so happens to perfectly match the only belonging that was found on Palamon as a child when he was left on the doorstep to Athena’s temple. Palamon is horrified that he’s been making out with his sister this entire time, so he runs away.

As he is running, Athena herself steps out into the road to stop him. She’s all “Hey, yeah, that totally sucks about your sister, but hey, I never abandoned you! Plus I am totally cool with you losing your virginity now. No, all my other knights have to keep their junk to themselves, but you can totally get that other woman you were traveling with pregnant. She’s smart and she’s your age, so your relationship would totally be less creepy.” Only, you know, worse than that. And then he sees that yes, the other woman had been following him, and decides he’d be ok with sticking it in her, and returns to court to be a prince.

And just to cap things off, here’s Palamon’s horrific prayer to Athena.

“With a deep sigh, Palamon at last clasped his hands above Ursid. He was in thought for a moment, then he began. “Oh mighty Pallas, I have not the right to ask this blessing; still I must implore. Please hear me out while I say this much more: I beg consideration for this knight, so mangled in an honorable fight. He shall soon disembark from his life’s shore without thy aid. His wounds are grevious sore. I now pray in his name and not from spite.” Fascinated, Aelia and Berengeria watched while Palamon prayed. They both noted his fingers; he had clenched them so tightly that his knuckles had become as white as ivory. “I humbly beg thee, grant Ursid this boon: close up his many cuts from swordblades thin. Heal up his flesh, bind up his bloody wounds, bless with your breath the breath that he draws in. Give back his life or else it passes soon. Let him not die in payment of my sin.”

There are multiple sequels to this book. I now carry a lighter just in case.

Vazkor, Son of Vazkor

Vazkor, Son of Vazkor.  I’ve taken much delight in just saying the title of the book.  Not so much saying it as announcing it.  “Oh hey, what have you been up to?  I’ve been reading Vazkor, Son of Vazkor!” with an appropriately grand gesture.  It’s unfortunate that I haven’t been taking nearly as much pleasure in actually reading it.  Luckily it was a short read.  A short, very purple read.  With a whole lot of rape.

I knew I was going to really hate this book on page 8.  I quote:

“He had sons by other women, but Tathra he prized.  I have seen him stand and look at some plundered bangle he meant to hang on her, and his cock would push out his leggings from just that.  I could have killed him then, the red pig grunting for my mother’s white flesh.”

Maybe it’s a lady thing, but I don’t have much patience for boner induced angst.

Anyway, this is the story of Tuvek, who later goes by Vazkor (son of) and then Mordrak for a couple of pages.  He’s born in a barbarian tribe, his mother a beautiful woman stolen from her original tribe and his assumed father the chief of this one. His father beats him for not looking much like him and for being so strong and awesome.  There is nothing that Tuvek is bad at.  At age 13 he’s so great at rape that it makes the girls want more, he’s the best hunter in the tribe, and he’s a fearsome warrior that can take on 4 fully grown and battled hardened fighters at a time.  He also heals pretty much overnight from any wound, which causes him some trouble with the village shaman.  Still, he thrives and manages to rape himself up 3 wives who bear him tons of sons.

Then the city folk attack with their cannons and their horses and pretty much humiliate the barbarians.  They take some as slaves and leave the rest, including Tuvek.  He asks his father’s permission to take some warriors to go free their tribesmen, but his father just laughs at him for hiding.  So Tuvek sets out on his own.  Using a combination of murder and stealth he makes his way into the city folk’s camp and finds a pit filled with slaves from all sorts of tribes, including his own.  He frees them and just as they are about to make a break for it, they are discovered.  His head suddenly filled with the city language, he stands up and announces himself as Vazkor and demands that the city folk kneel in obedience before him.  The older ones do, and the tribesmen rise up and slaughter them all.

As they set about to plunder, Vazkor stumbles on a tent that has 3 suicided generals and 1 city woman.  She’s hot so he totally rapes her and then takes her to be his slave.  They all make their way home and Vazkor is celebrated as a hero.  He wants to marry his new slave, who is named Demizdor, but he knows that right now she will just hate him.  So he has an awesome plan:  He’ll give her as a slave to his wives who already hate her and let them abuse her, so then she’ll want him.  It works, of course, and so they get happily married and he tosses out the wife who abused her the most.

Tuvek’s mother becomes pregnant again and this causes problems, the biggest being both her and the child dying, which leads to the revelation that she’s not his real mother; he’s the son of an albino woman who ran off after giving birth.  When Tuvek goes to confront his father over it, he knows he will kill him.  But instead of sticking a knife in his guts like a good barbarian, instead he suddenly shoots white lasers out of his eyes at him, and then passes out. When he wakes up Demizdor is being repeatedly raped and they are getting ready to kill him.  Instead, the city folk arrive again, looking for Demizdor.  They take her and at her insistence they take Tuvek too.  First he thinks his wife loves him, but really, she just knows that he looks exactly like an old evil overlord and that they can get a lot of money letting people that overlord abused torture Tuvek.

One of the guys in on the plan has a different plan and steals Tuvek, now being called Vazkor, and makes him a highly-regarded slave.  He spends his days breaking horses and being hated by Demizdor, and his nights learning music and poetry and trying to get slave girls pregnant.  See, his new owner wants to breed a race of slaves that have Vazkor’s super healing abilities, but this fails because city women are too pampered and indolent so they are all infertile.  Eventually Demizdor conspires to have Vazkor killed by a poisoned, maddened horse but he uses his latent sorcery to heal the horse and then stabs Demi’s new boyfriend in the guts.  Naturally he is scheduled to be tortured to death, but Demizdor breaks him free, gives him a horse, and swears her eternal love and hate.  Then she goes back to her room and hangs herself.

As Vazkor runs from his pursuers, as well as murdering them whenever possible, he stumbles across a tribe of peaceful vegetarians and decides to hang out with them for a while. A woman named Hwenit claims that he is a demon that she summoned and names him Mordrak. She’s out summoning demons, you see, because she wants to marry her half-brother and he has this crazy idea that maybe siblings shouldn’t have sex. Surprisingly, Vazkor takes the brothers side in all this. While he is with them, he hears more about how good and kind and wise his mother was, which naturally makes him swear a blood oath to the shade of his father that he will kill her once he finds her. Once the hunt catches up with him, they almost kill Hwenit, which makes him realize that she ought to have sex with her brother, so he uses his power to save her life. As Hwenit and her brother are getting it on, Vazkor decides that he needs to take his hunt for his mother over the sea and sets off to find a boat.

Now apparently this book is the second in a series, the first following the travels of Uastis, but it’s written to be able to be read as a stand-alone book. The first half comes off as very “Hey look guys, I can do Conan too!” with the rest devolving into its own silliness. What really bugged me was how forced the sexism was. As you look over my recap, you’ll see that there’s a whole lot of rape. What I left out is how much there is devoted to how silly, stupid, vile, mean, petty, and generally icky women are. And Tanith Lee is a woman. It comes across as someone who decided that her setting needed to be sexist and thought that meant that everyone had to constantly be talking and thinking about how horrible women are. That is one form of sexism, but it’s not the most persuasive to present when you’re doing world building, and it just came off as forced and ultimately silly.

And now, the sentence in a rape scene that made me laugh most: “The gate between her thighs was golden as her hair, and the road beyond the gate was made for kings.”

The Quantum Rose

This is one of those stories about a buncha Mayans being abducted by aliens, genetically manipulated and given super far future tech and left on a new planet, exploring space and doing their own genetic manipulations to populate lots of planets while starting an empire run by a family of super telepaths, then losing everything with all the worlds regressing to Iron Age tech until Earth catches up with the space Mayans and everyone starts traveling the stars searching for lost weird humans again.  Ok, really it’s a story about one space Mayan falling in love with one abusive guy and one alcoholic guy and the author pretends it has something to do with quantum physics.

Meet Kamoje. She’s a far descendant of space Mayans.  She has grown up on one of the planets that has not been rediscovered by spacefarers and so it has Iron Age tech for the most part.  Her family has been genetically engineered to be the perfect slaves.  She is tiny since her family skips adolescence and goes directly to adulthood, and she has empathy.  Not “I’m so sorry your dog died” empathy but “OH GODS I FEEL YOUR PAIN FOR REALS” empathy.  They are also programmed to be resilient to both mental and physical abuse and they come with the Stockholm Syndrome, inability to learn complicated subjects,  and heightened sexual response already installed!  Yet somehow Kamoje and her family are the governing family of a province.

Now meet Jax.  Jax is half slave stock, and half slave-owner stock.  This makes him the archetypal abusive boyfriend.  One moment he’s sweet and tender, the next moment he’s whipping Kamoje with a riding crop.  He is also the governor of a different province, and Kamoje was promised to him as a very young girl.  On their planet they call a marriage between two governors a “corporate merger” and the rule is that if a man offers the woman a dowery she has to either offer him better to make him go away or accept it.  Kamoje has accepted Jax’s dowery even though he hits her because while she could beat his offer, it would cause her people to suffer and she couldn’t live with herself if she did that.

And the last player in our cast is Vyrl.  YES HE IS QUITE VIRILE THANK YOU FOR NOTICING THE AUTHOR’S CLEVERNESS. He comes from a different planet and is a member of the telepathic empire, whose telepathy has been broken by trauma.  To cope with his trauma he drinks.  He’s 70 years old but looks younger thanks to nanobots, and he has 40 great-grandchildren.  He spies Kamoje frolicing nude in a lake and decides that instead of raping her on the spot, he will misunderstand local tradition and send in a huge dowery that no one can match since he has access to future tech and the resources of 3 trillion space-faring humans. Kamoje has no choice but to marry him.

Just as she is discovering that her space alki is good natured and willing to help her jill off if their lovemaking doesn’t satisfy her, Jax kidnaps her.  Then he starves her, beats her, rapes her, massages her temples and gives her gifts.  You know, abusive boyfriend crap.  He declares her previous marriage null and signs a new one for her.  For a while she decides to go along with this since she is afraid Jax will hurt her people if she tries to free herself.  Eventually the space police get involved, who end up finding that Vyrl is the legitimate husband and that Jax is a horrible person.

So there’s three factions in space.  There’s the people of Earth, there’s the slave-owning Traders, and there’s the other space mayans who aren’t total dicks.  Now there’s a lot of far-future tech that no one has remembered how to use yet, since it takes one of those telepathic empire folks to work it.  So all the factions are trying to find sites that has some of that tech and then capture members of the telepaths.  This is delicate since apparently they still have formal titles and people regard them as royalty even though they recently caused a huge war that made everyone hate them.  So no one can be too abusive, though we find out that the Earth faction made twins have sex so they could have barely-functioning inbred kids.

Most of the remaining members of the empire live on this one planet that the Earth faction has control over even though they signed some treaty god knows when saying they’d bugger off.  So they plan to slip Vyrl and Kamoje, who is necessary since her slave empathy lets his broken telepathy work, on to the planet and then make Earth make themselves look like dicks on TV.  They do this by turning Vyrl into Space Ghandi and trying to recruit every single person on the planet to go have a big party in this big plain.  Beknownst but not considered by the telepaths is that everyone on this planet is genetically engineered to be either a 1 or a 0 in the binary code of a biological computer.  So the more people gather, the more Earth gets pissed off, and the more some sleeping technology under the world starts whispering to Kamoje since it can’t talk to Vyrl.

Earth ends up abducting Kamoje and trying to threaten Vyrl with her, and Kamoje overcomes her slave programming so she can be mad at the Earth commander instead of trying to make him feel better.  They end up giving back Kamoje when it turns out she is pregnant and abducting her is going to be a bigger PR problem than it is worth.  When they are giving the big speech about how they won and the planet is free, Kamoje feels the technology again and tells it to wake up.  So it sings a pretty song for the whole planet and puts on a light show that only the telepaths can see.

Later, Kamoje meets Jax once more.  He makes a half-hearted attempt to win her back, then agrees he will drop his culture tampering charges against Vyrl if she will drop the rape charges against him.  And then they all live happily ever after.

There’s an afterword to this book that explains how the primary relationships in this book between Jax, Kamoje, and Vyrl are inspired by quantum physics and molecular behavior.  This explanation is utterly unnecessary because it could also be explained by any love triangle ever.  The fact that Jax’s behavior has to be explained by conflicting genetics is bizarre since it occurs in our normal human environment, ditto Kamoje.

I’ll admit that I found the setting interesting as well as ridiculous.  For instance, Vyrl’s home planet is the sole planet orbiting a dual-star system, with two moons. Everyone has two thumbs and two fingers on each hand except Vyrl because you don’t want the romantic lead to be too weird.  Their plants all reproduce by blowing colorful bubbles full of glittery pollen and everyone is described as being constantly covered in glitter.  This detail amused me on multiple levels.  I was picturing a Lisa Frank-inspired landscape where shirtless men rub plant semen on their bare chests and ask women if they dazzle them.

I will leave this recap with the worst sentence in the book.  “If he became any more masculine, she would have to take him up to their bedroom right now.”

The Unicorn Dancer

Usually books about unicorns require that the female characters be virgins.  They also decide that the best way to bring about tension about the female/unicorn relationship is to threaten her with rape constantly.  Except there was this one book I read many years ago about a teenage boy virgin who was a post-apocalyptic samurai with a unicorn best friend and he chooses banging his girlfriend over his unicorn pal who walks away sadly into the sunset, but I digress.  This book is refreshing in that while the unicorn prefers the company of women, he looks for traits other than an intact hymen when selecting who he will allow to ride him.

The Unicorn Dancer is pretty much adolescent teen girl wish fulfillment combined with a “EFF YOU SECONDARY CHARACTERS” attitude.  The main character is Alorie, a pretty pretty princess who at first comes across as naive.  Then one of her suitors kills her entire country minus herself at a party and shit gets real.  She mostly rescues herself but is helped by a handsome man named Rowan, who belongs to a group of outcasts named Rovers.  This marks him as the romantic interest and other than a bit of torture his fate is mostly safe.  Basically the plot is that there’s an Evil Overlord that has been Sealed for Centuries and Alorie is the Prophesied Defender of the People who will put him down for good.

Time passes with the Rovers and Alorie begins to show that she is not as naive as first presented, she is observant and has a good head for politics.  She also makes friends with a dwarf and an elf, who hate each other in that stereotypical “I read the Lord of the Rings too!” kinda way, but the elf is over the top fabulous and has antenna and I am inclined to look kindly on anything that ridicules elves.  She also collects a ragtag band of misfits including the Big Dumb Brave Guy and the Mystic Bitchy Woman and some others who didn’t have strong enough personality traits.  Now they have two choices, they can do what the Kindly Old Wizard has told them to do and go seek the unicorns, or they can go to this wall of infinite evil and have Alorie read the prophesy and then withdraw the Sword That Caused an Eon of Sorrow because that is always a great idea.  Just to make sure that they’ll make the wrong choice, the Evil Overlord poses as the Kindly Old Wizard and tells Alorie to forget what he said about the unicorns and just go get the evil sword.

Along the way our ragtag band of misfits starts dropping like flies and also they are haunted by an evil black unicorn when, silly rabbit, unicorns are white.  When they pull the sword, everyone who is left alive is given a role in the prophesy that only they could understand.  This means that Mystic Bitchy Woman has a heart-to-heart bonding moment with Alorie and them immediately commits suicide so she can use her gift as an oracle to answer any questions they might have about their upcoming quest.  They ask her the wrong question and she actually sighs, says they asked the wrong stupid question, and then wastes her time answering it anyway. She dies before they get any useful information and she later comes back as a zombie to no real effect whatsoever.

Finally they reforge the evil sword and go into battle against the Forces of Darkness.  Big Dumb Brave Guy heads directly for the Evil Overlord and the sword is immediately shattered, along with the morale of their army. That’s when Alorie finally has the brilliant idea of finally looking for the unicorns.  She makes her way into the conveniently-located-right-beside-the-battlefield Unicorn Forest and enters a glade.  There she undergoes a dangerous dance with a white unicorn, grabs its horn and flips over its head to sit on his back.  The description here really gets close to the line when it comes to implying that sexytimes are imminent, but instead the unicorn tells her to use his horn as the blade for the evil sword and then it won’t be evil anymore and she’ll be able to use it to kill or to heal.  So then the unicorn’s horn falls off and he turns into a puddle of jelly and dies.  The book ends with Alorie triumphantly wading into battle with her new hornsword, healing a secondary character on her way in.

Pretty standard stuff, right?  Well, kinda.  There’s some odd stuff going on with race in this book.  At the beginning we are told a bit about the cosmology of this world, and how the world has the 7 True Races that were present when the world was made, and 3 Hidden Races who don’t talk to anyone, and some Made Races that wizards made.  The 7 True Races start out as you would expect with elves and dwarfs and whatnot, but then you get Black Humans, White Humans, Red Humans, and Yellow Humans.  Yeah, the book treats me and my neighbor as being as different as a dwarf and an elf.  Weird. One of the made races are called Mutts and are pretty much dog furries who have been bred to be docile, harmless slaves.  This doesn’t bother any of the main characters.  But they are bothered when they run into a group of Mutts who are capable of violence, even though these Mutts are on their side. Again, very weird and the book doesn’t act like we’re supposed to find it weird at all.

There’s apparently a sequel to this book, which I guess goes into the actual killing of the Evil Overlord, the restoration of the Rovers, the return of the High King (who is totally going to be Rowan, I mean, duh) and Alorie’s restoration of her country (where everyone is dead) but I don’t think the story needed it.  It promised dancing with unicorns and it delivered on that promise.  Done.

Dragon's Tongue

I finished reading this book two days ago.   I’ve been procrastinating when it comes to writing about it because there’s not a whole lot I can do to make it funny.  It’s a pretty standard fantasy romp that has been executed well.  I found little about the story itself objectionable.  The writing occasionally tries to be more clever than the author is capable of but it never gets painfully self indulgent.  But just when I think there’s nothing to say about Dragon’s Tongue, I remember the introduction.

You see, Laura J. Underwood may have written a perfectly passable fantasy adventure novel complete with a wizard school, bardic songs, an overcomplicated cosmology, polyamory, and a demon.  That doesn’t mean that David B. Coe wrote a decent introduction for it.  You see, David comes across as a Nice Guy.  The whole introduction drips with the pathetic adoration and self-loathing that defines nerd lust.  Why, he’d rather you buy her book than his own.  She’s the funniest person he’s ever known with wit and acid and my gosh, she’s just real keen.  He emphasizes over and over again how she is his friend and how honored he is to be her friend, such that you can almost hear the tail end of the nasal whine in your mind.

Maybe I am wrong.  Maybe he doesn’t make sure not to wash his hands after hanging out with her so that later when he touches himself he can pretend he’s transferring her essence to his Staff of Power. But he’s a man who is paid to express ideas and concepts via the written word and that is certainly what he is conveying.

As for the Demon’s Tongue itself, it is the first of a trilogy.  All fantasy has to come in trilogy form these days, sometimes in a trilogy of trilogies, or as I am fond of calling it, The Jordan Pack.  The main point of view character is Alaric, a young mageborn guy who has been training as a bard and isn’t sure he wants to master magic.  He quickly finds himself apprenticed to Fenelon, who is every good-looking rakish supermage you’ve ever read about.  He has a far too patient girlfriend Etienne, and she has a hot young apprentice named Shona.  Rounding out our cast is Vagner the music-lovin’ demon.  Together they fight evil in the name of truth and light.  Yes, even the demon, who by the end of the book discovers that feelings lurk in his dark demon heart and that with Alaric on his side he can overcome his evil nature.

As trite as it all sounds, the book isn’t completely predictable.  Shona is set up to be Alaric’s love interest.  She has no real weaknesses other than a fear of bees that doesn’t actually make any impact on any scene in the book.  She is beautiful, intelligent, skilled, courageous, sexually-forward, and all around just a wee bit too perfect.  So when the Big Bad throws a Death Bolt at Alaric, you know that she is going to jump between them and take the hit.  And she does.  In most novels, this would result in her delivering a sad speech about how sad she is that she didn’t get to bear our hero many fine sons before her death, and the hero hulking up and using the pain of his loss to destroy evil forever.  Instead she crumples and Alaric goes unconscious from the strain of losing his gal after the last couple of weeks of hardship.   Still, he saves the day in a round-about way.  And Shona kicks her way out of the fridge and is still living so at least Alaric can’t spend the next two novels angsting about her.

I touched on it in the last paragraph, but I would say that one of the biggest faults of the book is that the female characters aren’t flawed enough.  Let me revise that, the female characters’ biggest flaws are that they are attracted to the male characters who have normal flaws. Fenelon is hasty, loses his temper, tricksy when it’s unnecessary, and can be a huge pain in the ass in addition to being almost supernaturally charming and talented.  Etienne has one moment of meanness when she keeps dissing Alaric for checking out her tits, which I have a hard time counting as a flaw, and she sleeps with Fenelon for some reason.  That’s about it.  Alaric is terrified of dark places and can be frivolous.  Shona…. likes Alaric?  As I said before, she really has no flaws beyond that.  It makes the female characters feel shallow.  To be fair, they are just supporting characters in the story, but it feels like opportunities were missed to make them feel more like real people.

But like I said at the beginning, I liked the book.  The dialog is fun, none of the descriptions are overwrought, and Vagner is a fun point of view character.  I’ll look for the rest of the series.