Enemy of Entropy
Review: Skin Trade
Skin Trade by Laurell K. Hamilton
My review
rating: 3 of 5 stars
I kept saying I was giving up on Hamilton’s books, then giving her just one more chance as each novel came out, hoping that at some point she’d give up the porn and write real novels again. With this volume, the effort is finally vindicated.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s definitely sex in Skin Trade. Sex with yet more new men, even! But it doesn’t start happening ’til well into the book, and when it does occur there’s a lot more justification for it than at some times in the past. It’s still explicit, and there are still likely to be more than two people in any given bed at a time, but if any of that squicked you, you wouldn’t be reading any of her work.
The book nearly earned four stars, but there were a few plot holes that bothered me too much to forget them.
The Girl Is Better! And More Reading
That’s a relief. I was getting quite worried. She spent most of the weekend sleeping or looking like a zombie, eating only what Sam could coax into her, and using heating pads. I’m starting to think that we should accept the offer to refer her to a pain management doctor, if only to have something she can take during a flare.
So I read the latest Anita Blake novel, Blood Noir. I’m not sure why I continue to read these. Honestly, Hamilton is a decent writer. I enjoy her prose. She just needs to go back to plot school! Or maybe work with a co-writer who is strong on plot, but not relationships or descriptions?
There was no plot at all for the first few hundred pages of the book. When something involving a previous “big bad” did happen, it was nothing but an inconvenience, and over within an hour of Anita finding out about it. Whoopee. There was a crisis and danger, of course, but I found them anticlimactic after the villains Anita has vanquished in the past.
There was, of course, lots of sex. This one could have been called, “Anita gets a fuck buddy.”
Oh well. On to Sunshine by Robin McKinley. Someone recommended it to me years ago, and I happened to see McKinley’s name somewhere and remembered it. I don’t think that I’ve read any of her novels before. Short stories, maybe.
Review: Bump in the Night by J.D. Robb, et al.
This paranormal romance anthology contains four novellas. I’d never heard of three of the authors, but I haven’t really looked to see what else they’ve written, either.1 They may be well-known to romance fans. I fell into reading J.D. Robb’s books because of the science fiction/mystery angle, and didn’t initially know that J.D. Robb is a pseudonym for well-known romance author Nora Roberts.2 Her romances may be great, but I’m not interested in them. I’m actually getting pretty damned tired of the paranormal romance thing, but since anybody who writes them seems to be able to get a book contract, I doubt they’ll stop flooding the market any time soon. I try to stick to the ones that have more plot than romance, but sometimes it’s hard to tell where a book will fall. Laurell Hamilton, for instance, began writing really good dark fantasy books that got a little sexy, and now she’s writing romance novels that happen to have vampires and werecritters in them.3
It’s often said that we read fiction to get more of something that’s missing in our lives. I’m gifted with a partner who is one of the most romantic, loving people in this world, and, to be blunt, we have a great, um, private life, which may explain why I don’t find romances or erotica much of a draw. I don’t have many mysteries or much out-and-out adventure in my life (thankfully!), so I enjoy reading about them in fictional characters’ lives — especially if they take place in settings completely unlike my own world.
Anyway, on to the review.
The book opens with “Haunted in Death” by J.D. Robb, which her readers will immediately recognize as an Eve Dallas story4 Robb/Roberts is a pro, and the story is a decent read. But! Is it just me, or are the Eve-Roarke fights and reconciliations getting more and more boring? They’re always about the same thing!
“Poppy’s Coin” by Mary Blayney was my favorite of this anthology. Yes, it was obvious from the couple’s first encounter how the relationship would go, but that’s the way it is with the entire romance genre, isn’t it? I might actually look for more of Blayney’s work at some point. After looking at her web site, I don’t think I’ll be reading any of her novels. I learned that there’s another anthology featuring these same four authors, Dead of Night, and that the publisher has contracted them for a third volume, as yet unnamed. Blayney’s piece in the second collection seems to be connected with “Poppy’s Coin,” so I’ll probably take a look at it. Unfortunately, having read this one story and the descriptions of her novels, it seems that she’s stuck in something of a rut. I can’t say more without giving spoilers for this story, so I’ll leave it to you to visit her site if you want to know more.
Ruth Ryan Langan’s “The Passenger” was okay, I guess. Maybe. Something about the male protagonist set my teeth on edge right away, and I would have kicked his oh-so-self-assured butt out of my abode as soon as he referred to himself by his famous moniker. Then again, I’d also tell the female lead to put on her big girl panties and get on her with life, as she comes across as way too emo for my tastes. Langan needs to remember to “show, not tell.” I might have given her a bit of a pass in a short story, but this is a novella. She had plenty of word-count in which to show us something positive about her characters, instead of labeling them.
I nearly stopped reading the book when I got to “Mellow Lemon Yellow” by Mary Kay McComas. I was totally disinterested in reading about another whiny chick, right after Langan’s story. I didn’t feel any connection at all. I finished out of sheer doggedness, and will probably forget the story and the author very quickly. I can hope, anyway.
If you’re a completist, as I am, and you read the In Death books, you’ll want to read this volume. If I collected the novels5, I’d buy this one used if at all possible. As it is, I’m glad I checked it out of the library instead of investing any money in it.
1 Well, I hadn’t done so before I began writing this review. I looked up their web sites to link to them, obviously.
2 Well-known to romance fans, anyway. I hadn’t heard of her before reading the Robb books. Come to think of it, the first thing I read by Robb was another anthology, Out of This World, which I picked up because of the Anita Blake novella in it. That was before I realized that all such novellas are really the first chunk of Hamilton’s next novel, and if I read them it spoils some of the pleasure I’d otherwise find in that novel.
3 I consider the Anita Blake books to be her first novels. That horrid Nightseer thing is just a bad transcription of somebody’s roleplaying campaign. If I were Hamilton, I would have acquired and destroyed every copy in existence, then prayed that the world would forget about it.
4 They’re all entitled “(something) in Death.”
5 I don’t, as I don’t anticipate ever wanting to re-read them.
Review: A Lick of Frost, Laurell K. Hamilton
I honestly didn’t think Laurell K. Hamilton had it in her, but A Lick of Frost moved me to tears in spots. She managed real romance. I don’t even like reading romances, and I really hate crying, but I couldn’t help it. I even found a quote to keep.
I don’t want to give out any spoilers, especially since it’s quite new, but this novel could reasonably be seen as the end to the Merry Gentry series. I believe Hamilton will write at least one more book, to tie up some details and bring the series to seven volumes. All of the volumes have been fairly slender, and Hamilton is a guaranteed cash cow, so who knows how many books there will actually be? I could, however, stop reading now.
This series is not one to start if, like me, you don’t like waiting for another book in order to know “what happens next.” Generally, I try to wait until a series is finished before I begin to read it, in case it isn’t ever finished. I detest cliffhangers, most especially, and Hamilton has indulged in several.
Unlike most, the Merry Gentry series is good enough that I keep reading despite my personal preference. I’ve never lost track of any important details between books, which is also striking. I’d actually like to have copies of this series to keep, as I might re-read them. In contrast, I stopped buying the Anita Blake books years ago, although I would consider picking up used paperbacks to accompany those I already own just because Katie has expressed interest in them.
Sam is totally disinterested in just about anything having to do with vampires, werewolves, or anything else that is too similar to World of Darkness. I think it’s a reaction to having been so immersed in research and development when he worked for White Wolf, but I’ll leave him to explain it if we wishes. He does tend to scoff at anything too far off the “canon,” as it were.
Since he was involved in Changeling (his favorite), I would have thought the same applied to urban fantasy concerning faery. That’s true, usually, but he’s been drawn into the Merry Gentry books once or twice, and that’s saying something (if only for the quality of some sex scenes).
I know that one reason the Blake series has gotten so tiresome is that sex has taken them over, but Hamilton’s attempts to make the sex part of the plot fall flat. An even bigger one is Anita’s angst over the species and numbers of her loves and sex partners. While she occasionally mentions her religious upbringing as justification, as an animator (one who raises zombies) she left the safety of the Catholic church behind years ago. One could argue that its theology left reality behind, but in any case, her life is permeated by and depends on magic that is bound up in religion, but her overt religious beliefs no longer match her reality or how she’s truly living.
I don’t even like to include the books in that short list of those that truly deal with polyamory, due to the fact that Anita has been so guilt-ridden and unhappy (until the last book or two), while continuing to follow her crotch (okay, the magic, if you believe Hamilton, but seriously…).
Meredith Gentry never has that problem. It is unfortunate that Hamilton has to reach into an imaginary culture to depict people who are comfortable with their sexuality, including multiple sexual partners, but at least she has done so. There is still an annoying “I must pick only one!” theme, but it is made clear that Merry is being forced into such a choice by relatively recent Sidhe custom — not her heart or her conscience. She repeatedly stresses, in her interactions with humans, that she has absolutely no shame about her lifestyle, and that the Sidhe have very different ideas about such things than humans do.
I especially appreciate the repeated theme of accepting diversity and appreciating beauty in everyone. “Everyone” never goes to far as to including, for instance, fat people, but there don’t seem to be any of those in fairy. Her lovers are all terribly beautiful, even the half-Goblin and half-Sluagh, but she expressly does not reject those who are scarred or “different” because of their heritage or experiences. There is overmuch attention to description of appearances for my tastes, especially details of every character’s clothing, but that seems to be all too common in anything with any focus on relationships these days (or I’m just noticing it more — was it always there?)
While there’s still a lot of sex, the reasons for the abundance of sex and variety of partners has been integrated into the Gentry plot from square one. Despite that, it doesn’t feel like the sex scenes take over the books. Anyone with the least bit of prudery should still stay away from the series completely, of course, but that’s made clear on the covers and in the excerpts on the book flaps. Nobody who has ever picked up a Laurell K. Hamilton book in the last five years, at least, has any excuse for claiming naÃveté if he finds the content too racy!
