A little caveat here: I have a problem when reading books in my favorite genres. This also applies to watching movies. For example, I hated the movie Never Let Me Go, a dystopian alternate reality mess that featured lifeless characters (or maybe it was just the acting) and tried to be all profound. Bleagh. If my dystopias don't feature some HOPE of a utopia (or just less awfulness), I'm not gonna love them. THAT'S the problem: if the worlds an author creates don't gibe with my ideas of how the worlds should work, I can't get into the book. And that's unfortunate for me, because I just read two such books.
I'll start with Shadowfever by Karen Moning. Up until last year (or maybe the year before...it gets confusing), I'd never really heard about the vampire sex books. Or fairy sex books. Or werewolf sex books. Or the anythingthatdoesn'treallyexistonthisplane sex books. Turns out that there's a whole subgenre of books floating around the speculative fiction universe which features hot action between the sheets with various fanged, winged, furry, magic-wielding creatures. Who knew?
It miffs people who love these books (and there are a lot of them) when I condense it down to this, but in my mind, this is what Moning (and the other authors) do best: write good sex. It's hard to capture that connection, in my opinion, and plenty of romance novelists can write about swelling body parts, but not every one can make your pulse race. Moning does. The sexual attraction between her characters is strong and provocative and titillating. Yay, the sex!
However, everything else bugs the crap out of me. This book, which is the fifth in the series, is confusing, convoluted, and could have stood to be about a hundred pages shorter. The goal for the author, I think, was to wrap up the main character's story. Mackayla Lane went to Dublin in the first book to solve her sister's murder, only to find herself plopped down in the middle of a Faerie war. This is a HUGE simplification, but at the end of the day, that's what it turns out to be. The series trots along at a fairly fast clip, with hot sex and derelictions from the Faerie canon that made my teeth curl in different and uncomplimentary ways. Mac is a Southern girl, so I feel for her, but she's drawn so shallowly that when she has to be a badass who loves the dirty sex (have I mentioned the sex?) instead of a beach baby who inexplicably seems to have no love life, that transformation has to be outlined in EVERY NOVEL. Including this one, which given the awful mess that Mac's gone through, seems odd. But it keeps being hammered in, mainly by describing Mac's clothes. Apparently, her inner torment is revealed by her predilection to wear a thong and put her hair in a high ponytail. AT THE SAME TIME. That's deep, y'all.
Anywho, all the secrets about Mac and her lover/tormenter/favorite beast Barrons and those crazy Faerie sex folks were supposed to be revealed in this book, and I guess they were. But to be honest, I had to keep skipping giant chunks of book because...I was bored. And confused. And pretty sure that whatever got revealed to Mac was going to be unrevealed in a few pages because it...kept...happening. She'd figure out who she was and then a few chapters later, it would all fall apart. She and Barrons would get straightened out and then he'd get pissed off again, for reasons I never really understood. Mac's identity, when it was all said and done, never was really clear to me, and to be honest, most of this book felt like a set up for another series. With hot sex. And sexual tension. Occasionally with fangs and/or wings.
I can't NOT recommend this series, because--as I think I've said--Moning writes good sex and up until this book, has told a fun story that you can sink into IF you're willing to shunt aside the entire codex of Faerie lore. This would be a good series to read during the summer--just make sure you DON'T drink a pina colada while reading the last one. It would be too confusing.
Moving on to The Peach Keeper. As you may recall, I love Sarah Addison Allen's previous book Garden Spells. It is a book friend. And I really, really, really like The Sugar Queen. This one...eh. Okay, here's the deal: I LOVE magical realism. I WRITE magical realism. So when I read magical realism, I want it to be good. No, I want it to be great. I want the magic to be natural and startling at the same time. I want the realism to be, you know, real. And Allen USUALLY does this well, but, to my regret, this book fell flat for me. This was, I think, for two reasons: a rushed feeling and either stale or underdeveloped characters.
The characters first: we have the rich, good girl who longs to break free. We have the poor girl from the once-rich family who was smart but couldn't get her stuff together. (The rich girl has an overbearing, gossipy mother and a blank father. The poor girl lacks a mom, but has a peach of a dad.) (Aside: the title makes no sense. None. It drives me crazy when that happens.) There's the rich dude who finally escaped the trappings of his former life. There's the bad guy, who is your standard charlatan/charmer who might be the devil, but who's to say? Two old ladies: one feisty, one with dementia. A quirky secondary character with a heart of gold. The ONE character who is interestingly different is also a dentist (which slays me, for some reason) and the weirdness that Allen hints might be Fey or magic or SOMETHING turns out to just be plain old weirdness mixed with a touch of sexual confusion.
The pace and plot were also just...aggravating. Some things are introduced but never fully developed: the peaches from the title SHOULD be pivotal, but wind up being only a vague influence. The charlatan was clearly a magical being, but this was never really explored and was, in fact, basically ignored. And not in a "Well, we live in a realistically magical town, so shit happens" way, but in a "As an author, I'm just not going to explore this" way. We kept getting hints that the aforementioned sexually confused character (or maybe ambiguous--hard to say) was really important to the whole charlatan's history angle, but then that part just sort of faded away. The flocks of black and yellow birds? Never explained. When the lovers all get settled, the story dwindles to a "and then everybody was cozy and looked wryly at each other" thing, which I HATE in a story. When a beloved character from another book shows up, her appearance was a lot less "yay!" than I thought it would be, mainly because it felt like yet another throwaway moment.
And I think that's what really bugs me here: this story didn't feel crafted, to me. It felt thrown together for fans, but not truly realized. The bones of a good story were there, but they were covered up by layers of fluffy smells and noises and characters that seemed MEANT to move the story, but wound up being unnecessary or feeble. The magical realism touches were forced or unexplained or, worse, felt like Alice Hoffman with a Southern accent. So, with regret, I really can't recommend this story. If you want to check Allen out, please go find Garden Spells or The Sugar Queen, both of which feature strong characters, clear stories, and magical elements that make sense or are vital.
Snirf. Here's hoping that I can find something good to read between now and July, when Maggie Stiefvater's Forever comes out.
5 comments:
yep, waiting on Forever, too.
have you read The Road by Cormac McCarthy? not magical realism by any means, but end-of-the-worldish with a dash of hope. the writing totally got me.
I ADORE The Road, although it killed me in fifteen different ways. It's just so...perfect and awful and beautiful. I tried to read more McCarthy, though, and hated it. Weird.
I thought the same thing about the Peach Keeper. It read like a made for TV movie about a cute little town and its quirky inhabitants- something like Northern Exposure or Gilmore Girls. It could have been so much better- for some of the reasons that you mentioned. I feel like Addison Allen is a less talented version of Alice Hoffman. We shouldn't be too hard on her, though, because she's young and has only written 3 books. I'll give her next book a chance.
Oh, I agree, Melissa. I really liked her first two books. This one just felt a little forced to me.
you can call me Missy ;-).
I had to sign in w/ my google account, cuz.
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