Monday, March 1, 2010

Book Review: Divine Misdemeanors [2009]

I continued to read Laurell K. Hamilton's Merry Gentry series after abandoning the Anita Blake series several years ago, because it tended to have more plot and less sex (or at least more plot-based sex), and I liked the characters. I guess I still like the characters, but Divine Misdemeanors felt pretty much like a placeholder book after the climactic events of Swallowing Darkness. Merry is back in the human world, pregnant with twins (by six fathers), having turned down rulership of the Unseelie Court "for love." Strange magical events continue to happen, particularly when she has intercourse with one of her many, many lovers: different fey are brought back to their old powers, troops in the Middle East are miraculously saved, etc. In the meantime, the book also maintains a tissue-thin plot about a serial killer of demi-fey that gets wrapped up in the blink of an eye. Here is the takeaway for the next book, which I may or may not read: Merry must aid in bringing faerie and its magic to the human world.

Grade: C+

Random Thoughts:

This may be the shortest review I've ever written, but I just don't have that much to say. It took me a long time to even get through this book in the first place.

I found myself being taken out of the story repeatedly by the prose style, of all things, which was very workmanlike and not, well, pretty. If I were endowed with a great deal of time, I would count all the times the word "thick" was used in conjunction with male anatomy.


Dead Mother: I don't think so.
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1 comment:

Kristi said...

While I agree the "plot" was wrapped up way too quickly for the length of the book, for me it went back to the first couple of books of the series where the mystery WAS the point of the story (although the Gentry series started with oodles of sex too, unlike Blake). Unfortunately, sex sells, and that is where the stories have turned.