Tuesday 28 July 2015

Slave to Sensation / Nalini Singh

3 out of 5 stars
****Wanda'a Summer Festival of Reading Fluff****

This is just an observation: this is much more “romancy” than I would usually choose. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—it’s just outside my reading tastes. Every once in a while, I have to test those boundaries, to make sure I’m not missing anything.

This reminded me strongly of the Harlequin Romances that my grandmother used to pass along to me when I was in high school. If I wanted to be kind, I could reference Romeo & Juliet (as in the whole star-crossed-lovers thing), although the main characters are members of not just different families, but seemingly different subspecies. It probably would have been catnip to me at age 16 or 17. Now that I’m in my 50’s, there’s absolutely no man out there that I would be willingly tied to the way Sascha and Lucas end up being bound together. (I now prefer the Shakespearian ending where everybody dies.)

The setting is interesting and I would love to know how it was that the Changelings got their start. The three subspecies of humans (Psy, Changelings & humans) were vaguely reminiscent of Wells’ The Time Machine, where the time traveler goes into the future and is confronted by the Eloi and the Morlocks who are presumably descendants of different strata of Victorian human society. Having a bit of biological training, I was dismayed by the use of pack dynamics when referring to those changelings with big-cat alter-egos. Cats aren’t pack animals, but then humans can’t change into jaguars either, so why am I quibbling?

There is a mystery involved (a serial killer who apparently belongs to the ultra-rational Psy subspecies), but it’s not very mysterious. I guessed who it was almost as soon as this subplot was introduced. And it was a subplot—the romance is the main point, with the mystery merely being a way to throw Sascha and Lucas together more frequently.

Not bad, not my usual fare, but well enough done for its genre.

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