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Book Review: The Flight of the Silver Vixen by Annalinde Matichei (series, #1)
Summary:
Somewhere in outer space is an alien race consisting entirely of females. It’s not that the men are missing; they never existed. This race is known as intermorph, and those like our own are schizomorph. A teenage hover bike gang steals a space craft and finds themselves on a troubled intermorph planet where they must band together and fight as warriors against demons, internal enemies, and a neighboring aggressive schizomorph race.
Review:
This book reads distinctly like what would happen if you gave a bunch of ten year old girls the ability to record their imaginary playtime into a book and try to sell it. Everything from the dialogue to the plot screams, “A bunch of ten year old girls who like being girls but still think boys have cooties wrote this one day playing in their back yard.”
The writing is really bad. Clear characterization is almost non-existent. I was still uncertain as to who exactly various people were at the end of the book. The dialogue reads as so fake that it makes you cringe. It’s full of made-up words and ways of speaking that aren’t explained at all until a glossary at the end of the book. For example, the intermorphs don’t swear, but they do exclaim “g’doinking” when upset. See what I mean about ten year old girls? If I was, for instance, a middle school English teacher, I could see some merit in the writing and would encourage the young person to continue. This, however, is not a middle school English class. This is supposed to be a well-written, well-realized, novel. It is not.
Then there is the whole entire concept in and of itself. A race of just women absolutely can be a creative way to explore gender and sexuality, and I’ve seen it done well by famous feminist scifi authors. This is not done well, however. The intermorphs are all either brunettes or blondes with the brunettes fulfilling the traditional male role, and the blondes fulfilling the traditional female role. Everything about how they interact is a carbon copy of a traditional patriarchy. Just because both genders have vaginas doesn’t make how the brunettes treat the blondes less offensive. I also was incredibly disturbed at how the female main characters talked about the male schizomorphs. They referred to them as “it” and as animals. Even beards on men were degraded and feared. It’s the first time I’ve seen a book somehow manage to be both misogynistic and misandrist. This in and of itself is enough to warrant one star from me, even if the writing was good. This is not a healthy way to perceive men, women, gender, or sexuality.
I absolutely cannot recommend a piece of bad writing full of unhealthy perceptions of gender and sexuality to anyone. My hope is that the author is still quite young and with time will grow to more mature opinions, as well as more mature writing.
1 out of 5 stars
Source: Kindle copy received from author in exchange for my honest review
Book Review: Tempest Rising by Nicole Peeler (series, #1)
Summary:
Jane True lives in a small coastal town in Maine and cares for her father, a stubborn fisherman who refuses to leave his hometown. This means Jane is stuck in a town where everyone pretty much thinks she’s crazy. Everyone except the lesbian couple who run the local bookstore where she works. Even Jane thinks there’s something off about herself what with swimming near the deadly whirlpool The Sow in the ocean in the middle of the night in the winter on a regular basis. But then a neighbor winds up dead, mysterious people show up, and Jane finds out she’s half-selkie, and nowhere near as crazy as she once thought.
Review:
First things first. I absolutely, completely, 100% love the character of Jane True. If she lived in my neighborhood, we’d definitely be the best of friends. She’s smart and loyal with a biting, classic yankee sense of humor. At the same time though, she’s human, flawed, and makes mistakes but not the sort of mistakes that would make you hate her. I also really related to her relationship with her father, as mine has the same debilitating heart disease that her father has. Seeing her see in him the same, strong, blue collar daddy who raised her and who now is struggling with an illness was really refreshing to see in a paranormal romance. It seems like dads tend to be absent in the genre in general, when let’s face it, a lot of women’s dads remain an integral part of their life, even when grown-up.
The storyline itself is fairly complex, and it was a delight to see modern rural New England in literature. The characters also take a random jaunt up to Quebec, which honestly we definitely do periodically. I’ve been to Canada more times than I’ve been to the American south for instance. The settings were fabulous and well-envisioned. Normally I would complain about Jane’s love interest, but it’s obvious to me that she’s going to outgrow him with time.
The one thing I actually didn’t like about the book was the sex scenes, which is kind of problematic for a paranormal romance since that’s kind of half the point. Jane insists her man uses a condom. Ok, fine, write that in there once and then we’ll assume that they have safe sex for the other encounters. The thing is though, Mr. Man Candy complains about having to use a condom every single time, and every single time asks her if they really have to….by dangling the wrapped condom in her face. This is not sexy behavior! This is reason to ditch a guy behavior. She said use it, that means use one until she says otherwise quit being a baby. And frankly, quit ruining my sexy reading by turning into an asshole right before the sexy times. The whole entire sex scene situation is problematic throughout the book, and just gets worse each time they do it. There’s one scene in particular when Jane is down on her hands and knees, and the dude is behind her, and he dangles the condom in her face. Like randomly he’s behind her, she’s getting excited, he’s touching happy places, then bam there’s a condom in her face. WTF. This is not how paranormal romance should work. I get it that we’re not supposed to 100% like the guy, and this is part of the way of showing us he’s an asshole, but still. I hope the whole sex scene situation improves in the next book.
Overall, the character is a rich, engaging, Mainiac with a biting sense of humor, and the world Peeler has created is diverse and engaging. Hopefully the boyfriend situation improves in the later books. Given how much I like the main character (which is rare in paranormal romance), I’ll definitely be reading the next entry. If she sounds engaging to you as well, and you like paranormal romance, you’ll most likely enjoy this book.
3.5 out of 5 stars
Source: Amazon
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This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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