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Urban Fantasy/Paranormal Romance v. 3.0


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17 hours ago, Mandy said:

I love your Christmas obsession.  Whenever I see something Christmassy that is awesome, I think of you.  

Don't forget the third book is released on her blog as well, every Friday piece by piece.  I believe the first 7+ chapters are up there now :)

Yay! It's only 186 days to Christmas. Gotta get my skates on :)

I'm just about to finish the 2nd one so I'll head on over to read the 7 chapters today. Thanks for the tip.

N

 

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2 hours ago, Mandy said:

Unfortunately, it really doesn't seem to be.  Just the current plot where the single mom main character and her young daughter are kidnapped by a group of "good guy monsters" (seems like some Alphaholes and some straight up bad men) who want to use the mom for the special properties her blood has (the ritual to get said special properties involve laying down together in bed and sexually arouses the male.)  He thinks about raping her a lot, though it hasn't happened yet.  She's trying to cook for the men to ingratiate herself so they will let her daughter sleep in the same house as her and them. 

Like for real?  I swear this book feels like what might happen if only one of the Ilona Andrews authors wrote a book without the other's input to make it a shitload less creepy.

ETA: I don't like to leave things unfinished, but I don't think I can do it.  Moving on.

Yikes, that looks awful. I can't even begin to understand the mentality that thinks of kidnapping and abuse as romantic or sexy.  The Andrews' aren't entirely strangers to this trope, though.  Isn't that basically the premise to their Hidden Legacy series?  Still, that does look bad even from a genre perspective that is full of controlling and arguably abusive male love interests.

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6 hours ago, Mandy said:

No, it REALLY isn't.  At. All.

In Hidden Legacy, the main character is a woman named Nevada Baylor who runs her family's detective agency in a world where some people have magic genetic powers of various levels.and some who don't.  Those families who have several members with high-level magic abilities are called "houses" like nobility and they have power in the way that modern day corporations have, as well as having money because they use their abilities, etc.  Nevada investigates a crazy jerk who is also a high level magic user and who is protected by his house.  The love interest is also a high level magic user and he is looking into trying to find the same guy she is. They run into each other during their investigations and he snags her and questions her.  He doesn't hurt her and he returns her home safely.

I can admit that even the alphahole trope can get perilously close to "abusive douchebag" and at those times I'm grossed out, but Ilona Andrews usually does okay there.  I remember seeing her tell someone on her blog that the Alphas:Origins book was NOT like her others.  I'm sure there are people out there who enjoy it, but I don't.  I have to say though, if you're interested in world building and decent plot, she's the best I've found in the genre.  The worlds of Kate Daniels, the Innkeeper Chronicles AND Nevada Baylor are good stuff.

I had some spare time so I read through it. Several things

1. Its not part of Kate Daniels universe, I thought it was. Why she called it Alphas Origins is anybodys guess.

2. Its an extremely dark story, probably the darkest I have ever read from Andrews

3. This woman is basically in an impossible situation and does what she does for her daughter who is a hostage. There are very strong elements of Stockholm Syndrome here

4. There is actually no sex at all. There are situations that hint at it but there is no sex whatsoever in the story. 

5. I would characterize her captors on a spectrum ranging from psychotic to disturbed. There is no normal mentality here, so I realized afte some time that expecting normal interactions was a bit futile in the context of the world

6. Since this is a novella the worldbuilding is hurried an not really satisfactory though she does get one infodump in. 

7. The ending is very Deus Ex Machina and I didn't really like it.

8. I would dispute the Alphahole trope here. Two of her four captors are pretty near the psychotic sadist area. In any other Andrews novel they would be antagonists. The main male protagonist is a bit more complicated - if pushed I would say he is towards the darker spectrum of Alphaholes. 

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28 minutes ago, Mandy said:

Right.  You quoted my description of Hidden Legacy (Nevada Baylor) though, not Alphas: Origins (that was described in the post above).

It looks like we agree on the Alphas:Origins novella though - I didn't finish it, but I don't think I want to, and even less so with your input on it.  I guess they were trying something different.

ETA: Even if there is no sex in the book, they mention "hard c***s" etc. and the dude thinks about raping her, a lot.  Even though he doesn't do it, I think that negates his ability to be an alphahole.  It makes him a POS.

Oh right sorry about the wrong quote. I left that reply in a bit of a hurry. 

The odd thing about rape here is that the guy in question seems to have to constantly talk himself through not raping her. After the first bit he does not really seem to want to rape her, but rather he is extremely aware how easy it would be for him to rape her and thus has to talk himself through not raping her. - which is extremely messed up. Basically you could say that the characters as a whole don't seem to have much of a normal idea about sex. 

This Novella being an Ilona Andrew creation is quite disconcerting as the books usually have a different take on sex than the stock UF/PNR books. 

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4 hours ago, Mandy said:

@Chaldanya If you try the Hidden Legacy book, please let me know.  I have to know I'm not crazy for loving it.

I'll give it a whirl and let you know.

Currently giving something non-fiction a whirl. We'll see how long it lasts.

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I have finished the first Pax Arcana novel. I mostly really dig it! The plot's zippy, the world-building combines mysticism and practicality in a way that I like a lot even if it does sometimes feel a bit haphazard to me in this first one, and the prose just reads itself; it's very appealing. Most of all, though, and of course this is key for these urban fantasy things, I really like most of the characters -- the leads, for sure, but also a couple of their monster-hunting sidekick buddies. The humour's pretty all over the place, but I'd say more hits for me than doesn't by a pretty wide margin. There's more men competing over a woman than I'd like and I found some of those sections pretty uncomfortable, in part just because of the male posturing, but particularly since the hero's rival / the heroine's current boyfriend is so clearly and unambiguously the absolute worst that it occasionally makes the heroine look bad. I feel like the book makes the tastiest lemonade possible under the circumstances out of these plot lemons and ends up in a good place, and it certainly does an excellent job of portraying the heroine as a powerful person with her own agency the vast majority of the time without making it feel like a "see? she does stuff too!" figleaf -- she really is the catalysing force of the story in many ways. But there are moments of awkward. I will read more of these! Thanks for the solid recommendation, oh board!

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1 hour ago, Mandy said:

I agree about the first book love triangle thing making the female look bad.  She has some issues though, so I feel like it makes her more human.  She's not perfect, and she's aware of it, and she's trying to do better. I agree the humor is more hit than miss, and I don't actively hate anyone I'm not supposed to in that series :P

I didn't think that the love triangle made Sig look bad because I thought it was pretty clear that she knew the other guy  was becoming a toxic asshole and was only staying with him due to guilt and probably a healthy serving of emotional abuse.  And she wasn't really leading John on at all, which is the #1 thing I hate most about love triangles in fiction.

At any rate, it's a moot point by the end of the book, haha.

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The only reason I think the triangle plot sometimes makes Sig look bad, which to be clear I think it does only rarely, is, I suspect, down to the narrative's construction of the asshole rather than the characterization of Sig herself, in that we're never really shown any reason, however fleeting, for Sig -- or indeed any sane human -- to like this man, or more to the point to have liked him in the past. He is so bad. He is the worst. And he is the worst with astonishing consistency. And yes, we're given to understand that he is reaching new lows here, but ... I mean, ... wow. Like dude can't even be borderline civil. I wonder if just one or two good things about him might have made the whole thing feel more real. I entirely agree that we're told things about Sig's past and her own issues, which seem to me to be portrayed well and with nuanced respect, that make it clear why she stays around him, but I found it tough to gut-feel those things, because we don't really glimpse much of them in action; we're just told about them. Sig's great: flawed but self-aware, and treated wonderfully by the narrative. It's the asshole's characterization that stumbles, for me. It's a minor narrative-positioning / balancing complaint; I agree that for the most part the story's blissfully free of triangle bullshit.

 

And ... and this is so appealing, ... for the most part they talk their issues through like adults. That is just so cool.

 

But yes, it is moot by the end of the book! So wonderfully, beautifully moot... Onwards and upwards! I flipped to the excerpt for book 2 in the back and had to fight impulses to buy it immediately. I think these books are winners -- and, haunted by the cancelations of uf series past, hope plenty more people think so too.

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2 hours ago, Maester Llama said:

But yes, it is moot by the end of the book! So wonderfully, beautifully moot... Onwards and upwards! I flipped to the excerpt for book 2 in the back and had to fight impulses to buy it immediately. I think these books are winners -- and, haunted by the cancelations of uf series past, hope plenty more people think so too.

I found this document from a publisher's studio that said that the upcoming book 5, "Legend Has It", is the last book.  Which really sucks if its true.  But still, it wouldn't be like Generation V, which spent a (mediocre) book on kicking everything into a total paradigm shift and then abruptly got cancelled.

I just want more UF series with characters written and treated like Sig, damn it.

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6 hours ago, Mandy said:

I feel you.  I am currently without a series and I'm sad.

Have you ever read Zelazny's Amber series? I did promise  you a list of sf and fantasy with optimistic  endings so consider this the first installment. :D

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On 2016-06-20 at 11:06 PM, Mandy said:

ETA:

I'm reading Alphas: Origins now and I have a feeling this is... not my thing.  I'm not into ownership/hostage/rape fantasy crap, contrary to my quote in my sig block.

"Your mother is a slave.  Lucas owns her now."  This is said to a 5 year old.

.......

W.

T.

F.

What is this? 0.o Should I be worried about googling this?

Hold me Mandy, plz. :P

 

@Chaldanya How did you find Hidden Legacy btw? I felt I had to deaden my senses a bit to get through to the end. Also that dude? Is a total ass-hat. He's a class A "This is not romance, this is a dire need for a restraining order".

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Has anyone read E.E. Richardson’s Ritual Crime Unit series ? It sounds a bit different in that the main protagonist is in her 50's,which is pretty rare in UF.The series consists of two books published so far,Under the Skin (2013) and Disturbed Earth (2015) ,with the third book titled Spirit Animals coming out in July.

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19 minutes ago, Mandy said:

Depends on how concerned you are about your Google history haha

Really?  Dude in Hidden Legacy didn't quite come across that way to me, but something about the Alphaholes Ilona Andrews writes usually don't trigger my desire to murder :P 

 

Haha not really unless it has to do with furries. :P

To be fair about Hidden Legacy, he does kidnap the heroine and kinda sorta tortures her so there is that. Which to me is quite a dick move really. :P

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16 minutes ago, Mandy said:

He didn't kidnap her because he liked her though.  It wasn't in a creepy "I like you, I want to dominate you" kind of creepy thing at least.  He wanted to question her and get answers as to who she was working for because she was investigating the same thing he was.  And she did end up kind of beating him magically when she shouldn't have been able to do so... and they did end up being on the same side... yeah ok sdo maybe I'm glossing over that small part.  At least he didn't call her his slave and think about raping her *dies, ded*

:rofl:

I am uncertain whether it was better on account of him not being a rapist, but fair enough.

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Desperately trying to get through Written in Red by anne bishop.  Seems like a book about the postal service more than anything.  The concept of all powerful 'Others' that have hindered human progress is neat, but the lack of movement int he plot, and the mary sueness (everyone seems to like her, even the others who see us 'monkeys' as nothing other than food) of the main character makes for a shitty novel. 

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I forget whether I mentioned this book in this thread and I don't think I did; apologies if this is repetition: I finished Mishell Baker's Borderline a little while ago and I thought it was pretty good. It's about an organization set up to police the borders between Earth and the world of the fae, with most of the people who work for this organization -- including the protagonist, who has borderline personality disorder -- being in some way mentally non-normative in a way that makes them well-suited for this work even as the rest of society trusts them less. It's set in Hollywood and deeply steeped in the culture of the film industry. The protagonist is well-crafted, with a distinctive voice, snappy and spikey and sometimes self-destructive in ways that can be frustrating but always feel real, and ultimately kind of likeable in her way, I think. It's a really interesting spin on uf, often such a physical genre, to follow a character whose both neurologically and physically [she uses a wheelchair] challenged in ways this genre's leads usually aren't. The plot moves briskly once it gets its feet under it, the world gets a lot of cool mileage out of its one central conceit, and the secondary cast comes into its own later on even though at first it feels a little sparse. There's only the first book right now, but it does sound like it's going to be a series; the sequel's scheduled for next March.

 

I'd also recommend giving Daniel Jose Older's Bone Street Rumba books a try. Ghost / undead based uf set in Brooklyn. First book's decent, with a somewhat loose and shaggy plot and pace. Second book really sings, building on the series' strengths and minimizing its weaknesses. The voice and humour is really great, and the series is developing one of the strongest ensemble cast benches I've seen recently in this kind of stuff.

 

Neither of these are that heavy on the romance elements -- though Older's Bone Street Rumba does certainly contain a romance and it's important.

 

Oh, Legend Has It is gonna be the last Pax book? That's too bad. Still, yeah, better that this is known going in, to avoid a Generation V type situation -- I'm still majorly grumpy about that.

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4 hours ago, Mandy said:

My standards are falling here. SOMEONE GIVE ME A BOOK REC, STAT!

The Nightmare Stacks was pretty decent.  A little dumb for the sake of being dark, and the main character of this one isn't the best, but I had fun reading it.

It's the latest book in a long series, however.

Not urban fantasy, but I enjoyed Jon Skovron's Hope and Red.  Street gangs meet pirates meet ninjas and some pretty fun action pulp.

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Yeah, I kind of switched off a little bit for the romance in Hidden Legacy.  It reminded me a bit of the Rachel/Trent romance which took 12 or 13 books in The Hollows series.  But everyone knows my feelings on that so I'm just gonna leave that alone.

I saw someone mention Nalini Singh on here and I had the books knocking around so I've given both of the series a whirl.  And whooo-boy are the rapey.  Let's tackle The Guild Hunter series first.  Super God like Archangel meets ordinary(ish) woman and the power imbalance is huge, HUGE. But someone how they fall in love and at the end of the book 

Spoiler

he turns her into an angel - the first time this has happened EVAH!  So now she's doubly super special

The plots are provided so that Ms Singh can write soporific sex scenes that left me about as aroused as being hit round the face by a wet haddock.  Suffice it to say, I can't even hate read it and gave up half way through book 3.

I then tried the Psy-Changeling series.  This was marginally better. The world makes more sense and actually is quite intriguing but oh please god can we STOP calling men and women males and females it grates on my something fierce.  And the sex scenes are once again just poor. All soft feminine this and hard male that. bleurgh! The first one was ok.  The second one was very very rapey.  The dude in the second one just blows by the boundaries set up by the woman and that's supposed to be sexy and something to love???. So I chucked that one out 40 pages in. I'm on the 3rd which is marginally better and not as rapey but I suppose we will see.

It appears to me that Ms Singh is still writing romance straight out of the 80s.

Fuck it, I'm going back to my non-fiction.

 

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