A Kiss of Shadows

Content warnings for the series: rape, coercion, abuse, violence, gore

I've read all of Anita Blake so far (at this point, I have invested so much time, it's a point of honor to finish the series, no matter how weird and bereft of plot it gets), all of it in audiobook format.

This is definitely written by the same author. Our heroine is gorgeous but doesn't believe it (so the men in her life have to keep reminding her), has magic powers, wins fights with stronger creatures against all odds, knows about guns (though less than Anita), enjoys explaining gym etiquette, likes pain with her sex, and (SPOILER) ends up with magic sex powers, in a situation where she has to use them a lot (like... a LOT).

Both Anita and Merry fall into the trap of being "not like other girls" in a way that's REALLY insulting to women, though they mostly don't state it quite as plainly as that. Hamilton's into what she's into, and part of that is an investment in being into masculinized things (and the other part is being SUPER into blow jobs, like, whoa).

Merry at least doesn't start out as a moralizing jerk like Anita, but I kind of wonder where she's going to go--is it another downward spiral into monstrosity or something more novel? She starts out a lot further down the "sexy monster" path than Anita, so I'm really hoping for something different, with these books.

Either way, I read this one on a Kindle, not as an audiobook, and I still "hear" Merry as sounding just like Anita. It doesn't help that Hamilton reuses some of the same phrases over and over, and the characters' very binary understanding of gender is exactly the same.

The side characters of each series are somewhat more different than their respective heroines, so I don't mean to say this book is exactly like the Anita Blake books. Just, if you're into those (roughly books 3-9, maybe?), you'll probably be into this. It's very, very similar.

I know I'm basically reviewing the whole series in this one post, as much as I can do without spoiling anything.

By book 6, there's one character who has thoroughly failed to endear himself to me, so much so that when Merry talks about him, I roll my eyes. Like, you can watch my Kindle reading speed drop, because the eye-rolling takes so much time away from reading.

Actually, there are two characters that have basically no appeal for me. No depth. I don't see what Merry sees in them, and that seems like a failure of storytelling. (Maybe it's my failure to read, so I might go look at reviews for other books in the series, to see if I'm alone in this.)

There's another character that I keep hoping will be humanized (if that's the right term for fae), but so far, they are mostly just a monster, with only tiny peeks at other personality traits.

And maybe it's that I read them too close together, but Hamilton seems to need a continuity person. My memory for fiction that I read is notoriously bad, but even I noticed two instances where the characters had the EXACT SAME conversation in two different books, as if the first conversation hadn't happened at all. It's like Hamilton forgot she'd already resolved the issue. And these were fairly important plot-related conversations, not just ooey gooey "I love you" stuff.

Still, I've finished the books that have been published so far (as of February 2016), and I want to know where the series is going. Does our heroine stay mortal? Does she gain the throne? Do the evil characters meet their respective downfalls?

We'll see.