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Book Review of Prey & Bloodlines (Infected #1 & 2), by Andrea Speed

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Prey/InfectedI bought a copy of Prey (Infected, #1), by Andrea Speed. Then I borrowed a copy of Bloodlines.

Description from Goodreads:
In a world where a werecat virus has changed society, Roan McKichan, a born infected and ex-cop, works as a private detective trying to solve crimes involving other infecteds.

The murder of a former cop draws Roan into an odd case where an unidentifiable species of cat appears to be showing an unusual level of intelligence. He juggles that with trying to find a missing teenage boy, who, unbeknownst to his parents, was “cat” obsessed. And when someone is brutally murdering infecteds, Eli Winters, leader of the Church of the Divine Transformation, hires Roan to find the killer before he closes in on Eli.

Working the crimes will lead Roan through a maze of hate, personal grudges, and mortal danger. With help from his tiger-strain infected partner, Paris Lehane, he does his best to survive in a world that hates and fears their kind… and occasionally worships them.

Review:
Very enjoyable Urban Fantasy (and it is UF—the romance is already established and there is no sex). I was thrown for a loop when the book ended at 48% though. Nothing in the synopsis states that the book is actually two novellas. (So the last ~50% is the second story.) And while each is very good, I do like to know what I’m getting into.

The main character, Roan was a wonderfully jaded and sarcastic P.I. I enjoyed his love for his boyfriend, Paris. Similarly, I liked Paris’ opposite personality but equally heart-felt love. They made a wonderful pair. It was fun to get to know Roan from his own perspective and then get to see him from Paris’ point of view too. It felt kind of like a gift to be given the small insights Roan refused to acknowledge about himself.

The cast as a whole was also pleasantly diverse. The police chief is a woman, there are side characters of multiple races and ethnicities, Paris is bisexual (and Canadian), there’s a lesbian and Roan is gay. There’s even a disabled character in a wheelchair. I really liked encountering a more representative slice of American life.

The whole ‘kitty culture’ was an interesting twist on the shifter genre. It was nice to see the darker side of it. There is nothing glamorous about being infected. The characters also encounter the darker side of life in a real sort of way that avoids feeling like any of it was appropriated for mere titillation. It felt very intelligent, for lack of a better way to describe it.

I did think the narrative was a little repetitive. There were just some things, like how good-looking Paris was, that readers are told over and over and over again. The descriptions of people were extremely heavy too. It often broke the flow of the book to stop and read a whole page on someone’s appearance. And I didn’t care for all the music references. Mostly because I’m apparently not cool enough to get the significance of a band choice, so they held no resonance for me. Despite that, I’m hoping to get my hands on book two, which would be story three. See how confusing that is?

BloodlinesDescription from Goodreads:

The newly married Roan is struggling to balance his work with his home life as he grows increasingly distracted by his husband Paris’s declining health. One case with strong emotions attached takes up most of his time: finding the murderer of a missing little rich girl. It’s a family with secrets so toxic they’d rather no one investigate, and there’s no shortage of suspects. But despite the dangers and obstructions involved, Roan won’t stop… until he loses something infinitely precious as well.

Review:

Oh, it’s been a looong time since a book reduced me to a blubbering mess. But this book had me in such tears that, unprompted, my four-year-old brought me a handkerchief with which to dry my eyes and blow my nose. I was emotionally destroyed. Truth be told, I read the book knowing that would be the result but it was worth it.

Contradictorily, when not drowning in sorrow I found a lot of humor in this book. It was a dry sarcastic sort of humor, just this side of British, really, one of my favorite types. There were a lot of chuckles.

I did think the murder mystery wrapped up with sudden ease and it was definitely second to the emotional drama going on in Roan and Paris’ life. (Though, it’s meant to be.) But as in the previous book, I loved the characters and the gritty realism of the world they all live in.

I’m hoping I can find someone to lend me the third book. I want to keep reading, but even though I know it’s a reasonable price, I can’t allow myself to spend $6.99 a book, especially when I know I’ll just want the next and the next and the next. I’d bankrupt myself.

Damaged Package

Book Review of Damaged Package, by S.A. McAuley

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Damaged PackageI bought an ecopy of S. A. McAuley‘s book, Damaged Packages.

Description from Goodreads:
Forced into early retirement from his career as a SWAT officer for the city of Detroit, James Deacon knew that when he failed it would be a fall of epic proportions. He’s been living life by the tips of his fingers for over twenty years, and his new gig organizing a group of misfit military types into a functioning team—including his reluctant ex-fiancée—won’t return him to stable ground anytime soon.

Trevor Barrow has been on the move for the last seven years—hitting the road when relationships became too real or too much work. He’s home now, working in the hazardous world of bike messengers in the Motor City, and the only one of his eight siblings who knows he’s returned is his sister Cat. It’s not as if reconnecting with them matters anyway, because it’s likely he’ll be gone again soon.

Both men are lugging some heavy baggage, but when they chance upon each other in a dive bar it’s hard to deny their flaws are more like symbiotic quirks. Trevor’s backpedaling instincts and Deacon’s dance-dance party past may just be intersecting at a time when things are about to get explosive in Detroit.

Review: 
Not bad, but nothing exceptional either. Deacon was incredibly sweet. There is something really emotionally resonating in seeing a man just want to make someone else happy. It pushes a lot of my happy buttons. I also liked that he was an older man. I liked that Trav wasn’t brainless. He was a smart guy. I appreciated that. The sex was pretty good too.

But the book is full of clichés. Full of them. It’s all pretty predictable, and everything after about 75% is 100% predictable. Worst of all it has the dreaded, ‘he didn’t know what but something made this man/situation/feeling/etc different.’ NO. That is NEVER enough to explain someone’s uncharacteristic feelings about someone or something. NEVER. It’s as bad as, if not worse than, insta-love. Which to be fair, this isn’t quite (pretty close though).

Plus, a lot of it just didn’t hold together very well. For example, The initial event in which Deacon was supposed to have come to Hank’s attention didn’t appear to be one in which a SWAT team would have been needed. Pretty sure the normal police could have handled that. Then, for the whole book it’s hinted that Deacon was working for Hank to investigate corporate espionage, but it felt a bit over the top that he hires ex SWAT and soldiers for this. Then suddenly at the end, we’re dealing with terrorists instead. But only for about 10 pages, it was all resolved in an instant. Then there’s the fact that Deacon’s ex just happens to work there too. Everything just barely hangs together. It does, if you don’t look too closely at it, but just barely.

Lastly, a personal irritant, as someone who worked in Child Abuse & Neglect investigations for several years: if by some manner Trav did become emancipated form his mother at 16, which it takes a lot to do, all her other children should have been removed as well. Think on it. The court is willing to declare, and thereby be accountable if something happens to him, that his mother is so unfit her 16 year old is better off caring for himself. Would they then leave several other children ranging from infant to 9 years old in her drug-addled care? I think not.

The writing, however is fine and though the plot is shaky a lot of the men relating to one another is touching in it’s own occasionally sappy way. The book is a solid, middle of he road read.

Venus and Adonis

Book Review of Venus and Adonis, by Publius

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Venus and AdonisI played a bit of a game this afternoon. I was ready to start a new book and, as I’ve given most of my month to NaNoWriMo, my review requests have gotten little attention. So, I wanted to read a request.

I gave my kindle to my seven-year-old with the instructions to pick her favorite picture from the list. (They were book covers, obviously.) She chose ‘the rose.’ Yes, that’s obviously an anemone, but you try arguing with a seven-year-old.

The author, Publius sent me a copy of Venus and Adonis in exchange for a review.

Description from Goodreads:
The myth of Venus and Adonis is one of the great erotic love stories of world literature. Venus, the goddess of love, falls in love with the handsome young human, Adonis. She plies him with all of her charms but he resists. She kisses him, pushes him onto the grass and climbs on top of him, and makes love to him.

And swift at once the grass and him she pressed.
Then sweetly smiling, with a raptured mind,
On his loved bosom she her head reclined,
And thus began; but mindful still of bliss,
Sealed the soft accents with a softer kiss.

But Adonis says he is too young and that all he is interested in is hunting. Can you imagine a modern man refusing the goddess of love? The love scenes in this myth (that Shakespeare also covered) were as explicit as anything written up to that time.

Adonis goes off to hunt. Venus warns him to stay away from dangerous wild animals like wolves and boars that won’t care about his beauty. But Adonis hunts a wild boar anyway. He spears the boar, but badly. The boar pulls the spear out. It runs the fleeing Adonis down and gores him.

Venus senses the danger and rushes to her lover. She finds Adonis dead. Venus is heartbroken. She sprinkles nectar on Adonis’s pooled blood, and magically appears the red anemone, the “wind flower,” because its petals scatter in the wind.

This Venus and Adonis is a prose poem that tells the story of Randy Maynard, a “blond Adonis” who takes a job with a big bank in San Francisco in 1978. The story follows Randy’s separation from his true love, his seduction by a large corporation and a number of women and includes erotic scenes that are up to today’s standards. As in the original, love and death commingle in fifty shades of grey. The recreation of Seventies office life with a cast of acid-etched characters is reminiscent of Mad Men and provides added levels of intrigue and entertainment.

Review:
I have had this book on my request list for ages. I’ve put off reading it, largely because I didn’t understand what it was supposed to be about. Here’s the problem, I’ve read it now and I still don’t know what it’s supposed to be about. I can tell you what happens, but that’s not the same thing. I just don’t get it. I have no idea what the point or plot of this story actually is. None.

Having now read it, I at least understand what the blurb means. But I don’t see it in the work at all. Maybe I don’t understand banking well enough. Maybe I don’t understand 70s office politics well enough. Maybe I don’t know my mythology well enough. Who knows, but the story’s correlation to the Venus and Adonis myth is pretty weak, if there at all beyond the author’s declaration. I suppose the writer can say it’s based on anything he/she likes. Who has the authority to argue?

Further, the book is presented as erotic. But there are two brief sex scenes. One in which ‘He felt his trouser snake uncoil.’ and another in which ‘With a flurry of her hands like butterflies around his swollen Maypole till his fountain spurted a pool of rich white semen on his belly.’ (That’s how it’s written, BTW. Is that a fragment? It feels like a fragment sentence.) Trouser snake? Maypole? For real? IDK, maybe the author is trying to recreate 1970 language. I hope so.

The writing itself is fine. It’s a little flat, but I got the impression the main character is just skirting this side of clinical depression, so that may be atmospheric and purposeful. I did like the characters, but they had no depth what so ever. Similarly, the limited outlining of family history and a past relationship was nowhere near enough to give this book enough meat to feel satisfying. So, basically I’m ending this book as confused as I started it. It reads well (and it’s short), so if you’re curious give it a try.