Oh dear gods this book is awful. I mean, really awful.
Now I’ve read a lot of awful books lately – usually because
they’ve had some social justice fails that are inexcusable like the House
of Night series and the Shifters
series. So very inexcusable
This is not the case with this book (don’t get me wrong,
it’s not exactly stellar on that front), this is terrible because it reads like
it was written by a 10 year old. It has that level of complexity
This has been the problem with this series for a while now, I’ve complained before about the utter simplicity of the world setting, especially as they’ve expanded too many alien creatures and worlds. I’ve also complained at the utterly simplistic lack of conflict in the conflict with such terribly un-nuanced abilities like being able to “smell” evil (and, of course, the evil being so very very very evil and lacking in nuance or development that you can just kill them). This is the tone of this book. The evil is evil and you just have to kill it (it has no reason to be evil. It’s just evil). It has no subtlety, no difficulty in identification. It’s just evil.
This book takes this whole child-like simplicity and
takes it tenfold further.
Firstly there’s Lissa, Supreme Queen of Mary
Sues. Oh dear gods she is. And this Sue-ishness is the core of why
everything in this book is simple to the point of boring. There are no
challenges, none at all. There can’t be. Lissa has super powers, powers that
completely eclipse everyone and everything. We open this book with a desperate
struggle where the forces of good (and their amazing super powers) are being
completely overwhelmed until Lissa arrives and destroys nearly the entire army
by herself. There are creatures that are literally destroying entire planets
which Lissa completely wipes out in her free time between dinner dates. And the
closing scenes of this book involve Lissa pulling off completely unexplained
god-like feats with no damn explanation at all. She just ZAP decides the bad
guys can no longer have their powers – and lo, entire species across the galaxy
are fundamentally changed in terms of magic, physical abilities and lifespan.
Where she gets these powers? I don’t know. And it doesn’t
even matter – it’s just a ridiculous over the top tool. Even if you could justify
your protagonist having these powers, it’d still be a bad idea because it
destroys any kind of tension in the plot. Sure we generally expect the
protagonist to win, and the genre is full of protagonists who have awesome
powers who we know will win in the end – but when Anita
Blake pulls another load of super powers from her vagina, there’s at least an
attempt to present the conflict as an actual conflict with the suggestion that
Anita COULD lose, that there’s an actual fight
Not in this book. Lissa shows up. The enemy dies. There’s
no conflict here. Lissa shows up. Super powers happen. Enemy dies. This isn’t
conflict – stepping on an ant has more conflict than this. And it’s boring
Well, of course she’ll have interpersonal conflicts,
right? Nope. She is Queen of Sues. Everyone loves her. Everyone. I’m not
kidding here. Not one person doesn’t adore her. Half the cast wants to marry
her, the other half wants to be her parents or family. They love her. All of
them. Unreservedly, without the tiniest shred of criticism or seeing any flaws
or issues with her. She is universally adored from the very second when people
meet her. And it’s boring. You can’t have a story that looks at character
relationships or development when everyone starts as fawning fanboys. She even
gets a 21 gun salute from the President even though no-one can publicly explain
what she’s actually done. Can you imagine that meeting? “We need a 21 gun
salute for this lady with no last name or legal identity for doing stuff I can’t
talk about!”
But there’s more gross simplicity: the world building.
This is something, again, I’ve complained about before – with Lissa happily
jetting about alien worlds and finding them… not even remotely alien. Again,
Lissa would find more culture shock and difficulty navigating if she went to
modern day China or Argentina or Norway. These alien worlds simply have no
alien elements. These alien beings are largely just human with shiny powers
This is compounded this book with time travel which,
again, pretty much fails to imagine how Earth would change 300 years in the
future. And it shows how little thought has gone into it – Lissa buys a map for
crying out loud! Sure it’s an electronic map but the fact it appears on a
screen doesn’t change that maps are nearly extinct now! People have “tiny
communication devices” like mobile phones – but even a brief look at trends
would see our mobile phones have been getting bigger because we expect them to
do way way way more things than communicate. It’s just so lazy! It’s just
lacking anything resembling imagination or development. Look at the way the
world has changed in the last 300 years! It’s mind boggling so little will
change
So what about the plot?
What plot? For the first half of the book Lissa decides
to play servant because, despite all her super powers she decides she doesn’t
know what else to do other than cook for people. Why does every book in this series
have Lissa passive aggressively cooking for people?
And the rest is one giant introduction. Ye gods so many
characters. There are more characters in this book than in Anita’s Little
Huge Black Book and it took Anita a bazillion books to develop this cast, not 5
– and most of them were introduced in this book
Can we begin to count them?
Wlodek, Merril, Griffin, Gavin, Radomir, Tony, Franklin,
Graham, Dragon, Crane, Drake, Drew, Adam, Pheligar, Roff, Toff, Giff, Jayd,
Will, Russell, Brock, Stephan, Charles, Kifirin, Brenten, Flavio, Rhett,
Glendes, Shadow Grey (yes, really), Dalroy, Weldon, Belen, Harvel, Mike,
Justin, Jeff, Shane, Tomas, Connegar, Barrigar, Graegar, Joshua, Mack, Kerry,
Steve, Gilfraith, Erland Morphis, Garde, Trevor, Baxter, Dmitri, Montrose,
Rolfe, Oluwa, Gabron, Karzac…
Kiarra, Glinda, Grace, Devin, Amarra,
Kyler, Cleo, Berndatte, Conner, Feather, Christi, Susila…
This isn’t even all of them. No, really, there’s more. I
have no damn clue who most of these people are. I lost interest in which
particular fawning fan-caricature each one was long before the end of the book.
What is interesting is many of these characters are in
multiple partner relationships, especially one woman with multiple men. In
theory the idea of a society where multiple partners, especially women with
multiple partners (since all too often multiple partners are seen as a male
thing – with the patriarch having several wives) is common and accepted would
be a good thing. But, cynic as I am, I had to consider both the previous books
and the common Urban Fantasy trope – the one woman among a sea of men. See that
huge ridiculous list of names? I’ve split it in two. Guess which list is male
characters and which is female?
This is really common in the genre and this series in
particular can have books with dozens of male characters and one or two female
characters at most. So, when we have women with multiple male partners (and nearly
always women) it seems progressive – but it’s also another way to have all
these men partnered off in nice heterosexual relationships while still keeping
the number of female characters to a minimum. We have one family unit with 2
women and their 11 male partners – and while we can say “you go girl” and cheer
them for loving freely and as they wish, we also have to realise this means we
have 11 male characters there – and only 2 female.
One thing that has improved is at least Lissa has held on
to her anger at how terribly she’s been treated for the first time in five
books. About time! It’s just a shame that it took so long and she still ends up
all happy with them in the end. And we get there through ridiculous simplicity
again – like Gavin the uber jealous lover? Has his jealousy magically removed.
Convenient, isn’t it?
We do have some POC – but again I ask you to look back at
that freaking list. Very very few of those characters are POC. Dragon, Crane
and Dragon’s sons Drake and Drew are all Asian (Dragon and Crane are
shapeshifting Asian martial artists with dramatic tattoos. Yes, really). We have
a couple of minor characters in the vampire council – but the majority of these
characters are White. Or blue aliens.
We have some gay characters. The minor gay characters who
were servants and best-friend-supporters in the last book have been
reincarnated to be… minor supporters and best friends in the present. Her GBFs
have been rendered immortal – and they’ve acquired NEW GAY SERVANTS. What are
all chefs and housekeepers gay now? Gay servitude is a terrible trope that this
series loves to perpetuate.
Returning to plot – the ending is ridiculously simple. From
deciding to kill hundreds of people because they’re “evil”, to decimating races
(because EVIL) to enslaving entire species (because evil!) to then deciding to
just relocate entire alien populations to a planet because that won’t cause any
problems at all. Oh and this world has one half permanently half in darkness
and the other half in permanent daylight. And this is a good thing.
I refuse to believe that the author lacks knowledge,
intelligence and creativity to this degree – this book was just phoned in. It
has to have been.
