These two are the first of a series by Christine Feehan, and are classified as "paranormal romance" if you want to look at genre labeling. To me, they just prove that I will read just about anything, no matter how trite. I bought five books in the series on the recommendation of a colleague, and for the first time I am questioning her taste.
The problem is, the premise of these books has great potential, but the author wastes a lot of it.
In Shadow Game, Feehan sets up the group of paranormals known as GhostWalkers. These are people with enhanced psychic abilities of various kinds, developed through clandestine experiments by Doctor Peter Whitney. Years earlier, he "acquired" throwaway female orphan children from foreign countries that had odd abilities, sequestered them, and trained them so their abilities would grow. Most of the children developed difficulties that he couldn't deal with, so he placed them with various caretakers. But he kept Lily as his adopted daughter, and trained her to follow in his footsteps as a scientist -- without telling her exactly what he was up to.
Skip forward to the present day, and Shadow Game discovers that Dr. Whitney now has a group of military men who volunteered to have their abilities enhanced also, and who were assigned to work as a team in covert operations. However, there is a traitor in the military command who wants to shut down the operation and is killing off some of the team. The others are imprisoned in a laboratory. One of them, Captain Ryland Miller, is attracted to Lily and she feels the same way about him. When her father is killed, she uses her money and position as the new head of the research facility to rescue the men. And she and Miller get it on. And get it on. And get it on.
Long on lovemaking and exploration of their mutual attraction, and very short on credible plot, Shadow Game is a shadow of what it could have been.
In Mind Game, the author's pattern emerges as one of the team members is assigned to track down one of the young girls, now grown to womanhood, who knows nothing about the GhostWalkers. Obviously, each book in the series is now going to be a pairing-off of a male team member with one of the lost young women from the group that Lily trained with. Plot advancement is scattered lightly -- very lightly -- amidst pages of erotic prose. I expect more of the same in the remaining books. (To be honest, I am now skipping the sex scenes to get to the passages that actually advance the story.)
Bottom line: Mindless Games
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Fledgling
Octavia Butler’s final novel is a variation of the vampire myth, but in this case the vampire kind are a distinct race. They cannot make humans into vampires, but instead live with humans in a symbiosis that makes them mutually interdependent.
Shori is a young vampire who has survived an attack that has killed her family and taken her memory. She wakes in pain, injured, blind, and in need of red meat to heal herself. She survives, begins to heal, but she has lost all memory of who and what she is, and has forgotten everything she knew about her family and her kind.
However, she is drawn to a young man who is human, and links him to her by feeding on his blood. The feeding forms a bond that is pleasurable for the human, and essential for the vampire.
Shori is driven to find out what happened to her that left her nearly dead, and when other vampires come looking for survivors of the attack, she connects with them to discover that they are the male line of her family. The compound where she found herself was the home of the female line of the vampire family to which she belongs, but now all the females are gone except for her.
She soon discovers that a war has broken out between two ancient vampire families, sparked by the experimental breeding plan her own family had begun to create vampires that could stay awake and walk in the sunlight. Shori is the one living survivor of these experiments. Other vampire families believe that she is a danger to them, or that she is “unnatural” in her abilities, and thus planned to destroy the new breed of vampire.
Shori learns of the traditions of the vampire society, and brings the killers of her family to trial in the vampire tradition, but finds her own motives questioned and herself as much on trial as those who killed her family.
Octavia Butler was one of the rare science fiction authors to deal with race in her work, and is startlingly innovative. Most of her work deals with rogue talents, genetic manipulation, and other ways in which her characters are “born different”. Relationships are highlighted – Butler’s methodology is to give a character a gift that is also a burden, then see how she or he deals with it, both internally and in interactions with other people.
I am sorry, also, that this may be the last book I will see from Butler – she obviously wrote Fledgling as the first of a series on the vampire kind and I would have enjoyed seeing where she was planning to go with it.
Bottom line: Sharply written, it gets into your blood.
Shori is a young vampire who has survived an attack that has killed her family and taken her memory. She wakes in pain, injured, blind, and in need of red meat to heal herself. She survives, begins to heal, but she has lost all memory of who and what she is, and has forgotten everything she knew about her family and her kind.
However, she is drawn to a young man who is human, and links him to her by feeding on his blood. The feeding forms a bond that is pleasurable for the human, and essential for the vampire.
Shori is driven to find out what happened to her that left her nearly dead, and when other vampires come looking for survivors of the attack, she connects with them to discover that they are the male line of her family. The compound where she found herself was the home of the female line of the vampire family to which she belongs, but now all the females are gone except for her.
She soon discovers that a war has broken out between two ancient vampire families, sparked by the experimental breeding plan her own family had begun to create vampires that could stay awake and walk in the sunlight. Shori is the one living survivor of these experiments. Other vampire families believe that she is a danger to them, or that she is “unnatural” in her abilities, and thus planned to destroy the new breed of vampire.
Shori learns of the traditions of the vampire society, and brings the killers of her family to trial in the vampire tradition, but finds her own motives questioned and herself as much on trial as those who killed her family.
Octavia Butler was one of the rare science fiction authors to deal with race in her work, and is startlingly innovative. Most of her work deals with rogue talents, genetic manipulation, and other ways in which her characters are “born different”. Relationships are highlighted – Butler’s methodology is to give a character a gift that is also a burden, then see how she or he deals with it, both internally and in interactions with other people.
I am sorry, also, that this may be the last book I will see from Butler – she obviously wrote Fledgling as the first of a series on the vampire kind and I would have enjoyed seeing where she was planning to go with it.
Bottom line: Sharply written, it gets into your blood.
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