A Kiss of Shadows: Faerie Porn for Everyone!
Written: Jan 25 '05 (Updated Mar 13 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Intensely speculative premise, mildly interesting backstory and characters.
Cons: All this sex and the chick still can't get pregnant?
The Bottom Line: Tons of sex, minimal plot and lot of shock value--it's either porn or it's genius. Guess which one I'm voting for?
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| tjolims's Full Review: Laurell K. Hamilton - A Kiss of Shadows |
Let's talk about sex, baby
Let's talk about you and me
Let's talk about all the good things,
And the bad things
That can be...
~ Salt N Pepa, Let's Talk About Sex
So let's all pretend that faeries are real. Not only faeries, but trows, goblins, pixies, brownies, the whole fey and sidhe kit and kaboodle. All of these things are real, and completely integrated--and integral--to modern society. In Laurell K Hamilton's A Kiss of Shadows, first in her Fey series, all of the ancient and immortal magical beings of European lore are a protected and autonomous minority in the United States--owning businesses, homes, and a group of mounds in Illinois, all under the auspices of the Bureau of Human and Fey Affairs. With them, these creatures bring a whole slew of complicated politics and arcane magical cultures that make last year's presidential election look amiable and easily decipherable.
In the middle of all of this is young Meredith Gentry. A motley mortal blend of human, faerie and brownie heritage, this undercover P.I. is also, through a variety of circumstances, a close heir to both courts of faerie--the Seelie(pretty, snobby, and elitist) and the Unseelie(creepy crawlies, sadists, and non-blonds). Neither court accepts her--she's too Unseelie looking for her Seelie relatives, and lacks the Hands of Power that would enable her to survive the cutthroat cruelty of the Unseelie Court. Her royal relatives overwhelmingly want to kill her or ignore her, hence the "undercover" designation--when we first meet Meredith, she's hiding out. Through a series of increasingly bizarre circumstances, Meredith's cover is blown, she discovers one of her Hands of Power(and boy, is it a doozie) and is recalled to the Unseelie Court to receive some surprising news. She's been named coheir to the throne, and her immortal(and incredibly crazy) Aunt Andais, current Unseelie queen, is willing to step down and let mortal Meredith live out her span of years as queen in her stead--if she meets one condition. That condition is motherhood. If Meredith manages to provide an heir to the Unseelie kingdom before her homicidal cousin Cel does, she'll be queen. To help her along, she gets her pick of the heretofore celibate and obligatorily hot Queen's Guard to help her in her task--both by protecting her and trying to become the father of her child.
It's the faerie P.I. aspect of this book that really drew me in. With such a great speculative fiction premise, I was expecting duels, car chases, a mystery to solve, all set in the odd and magically centered world that Laurell K. Hamilton has constructed. I'm a fan of her Anita Blake:Vampire Hunter series(the first half of it, anyway) and was expecting great things from the Fey series in turn.
As with most things that I have high expectations of, there's good news and bad news.
The good news is that there are car chases, duels, and a mystery to solve. L.A. and Illinois are both wonderfully warped settings that fit the premise well, and Meredith is a sympathetic character; an outcast in a world where there aren't supposed to be any. Her struggle to accept finally being an important part of her royal family in the Unseelie court, and the resulting political machinations that she involves herself in, are interesting at times, thought-provoking at others, and overall an entertaining read.
The bad news?
All of the good news takes up about seven chapters of a thirty-seven chapter book.
The other thirty chapters? Might as well be called Meredith Gentry Has Lots of Sex, or Leads Up To It, with very little plot and annoying brief bits of character development interspersed throughout
It'd be one thing if the motherhood imperative became the focus of the plot, but that doesn't happen. Although Meredith claims to be descended from a bunch of fertility deities, not once does she ever consider the implications of motherhood. No baby names or gender predictions, no serious thoughts on raising a child, or for that matter holding a throne. Instead an inordinate amount of pages are spent discussing and rehashing Meredith's choice of bodyguard babydaddies. The bodyguard characters are interesting, to a point, but unfortunately, as soon as you get used to someone, he's whisked away and replaced with yet another enigmatically hot and/or freaky-looking guy that Meredith all of a sudden loves to pieces and must do right now. To add insult to injury, the initial mystery that Meredith is solving when she's recalled to the Court degenerates into a whole lot of completely unrelated sex and sexual situations, followed by graphic violence more often than not. This is the cycle that the entire book follows.
Oh, and don't forget--these are faerie, so of course they can't have normal sex. They have to have glowingly magical sex, which more often than not is far more strange than erotic and has me wondering just what on earth the author was trying to do with all of this. Green guys, guys with slithery tentacles, frozen guys, guys who turn into seals, guys with tusks, snake goblins--Meredith does them all, or at least considers it. Personal squick factor aside, this is not in the least bit erotic, and actually becomes tiresome. There's also some underlying themes of sexual sadism that I personally found very disturbing. I don't mind a raunchy sex scene here and there if it matters to the plot or the characters, but the majority of this book had me saying either "Yuck!" or "Oh, no, not again..." most of the time.
Worst of all, the interesting plot and intriguing backstory that begin the book with a bang disappear completely about ten chapters in, and aren't reallly resolved until the last chapter. Even then, it's not much of a resolution--kind of a footnote, along the lines of "And they all lived happily ever after, because that thing you thought was the plot actually got resolved back when our heroine was banging the octopus fairy in his hotel room. I'm not going to go into any detail of how, because it's time to introduce yet another supporting character that isn't going to get enough page time to matter. Stay tuned for the next book!"
A Kiss of Shadows has a great premise, really. Unfortunately, the follow through on that premise is really less than great, so I don't really recommend it. If you really want to get glimpses of this alternate faerie world, feel free to pick up this book--but don't expect to get any more than glimpses.
Recommended:
No
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tjolims
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Location: Denver, CO
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Weird twenty-something attempting to figure out place in world.
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