Friday 28 August 2015

Visions of Heat / Nalini Singh


***Wanda's Summer Festival of Reading Fluff***

Used to cold silence, Faith NightStar is suddenly being tormented by dark visions of blood and murder. A bad sign for anyone, but worse for Faith, an F-Psy with the highly sought after ability to predict the future. Then the visions show her something even more dangerous - aching need...exquisite pleasure. But so powerful is her sight, so fragile the state of her mind, that the very emotions she yearns to embrace could be the end of her.

Changeling Vaughn D'Angelo can take the form of either man or jaguar, but it is his animal side that is overwhelmingly drawn to Faith. The jaguar's instinct is to claim this woman it finds so utterly fascinating and the man has no argument. But while Vaughn craves sensation and hungers to pleasure Faith in every way, desire is a danger that could snap the last threads of her sanity. And there are Psy who need Faith's sight for their own purposes. They must keep her silenced - and keep her from Vaughn.



Book two in the Psy-Changeling series. I could basically copy and paste my review for book one. This is exactly the same plot, just renaming the main characters.

Pluses:
+ very sex-positive depiction
+ Singh gives those of us who are less interested in the sex scenes a little bit of plot to play with
+ Psy are not always portrayed as cold-hearted, manipulative parents

Minuses:
-Very much a repeat of book one’s plot, except this time we know that Faith can leave the Psy-Net without danger
-Reading about large cats in “packs” and having “alphas” is just silly
 -Once again, I am stymied by this whole wanting to be completely dependent on a man thing

Now, I get that we as women want to choose men who respect us, want us, and want to spend time with us and have hot sex with us. But do we really want men who always think they know better than we do? Do we want to be shackled to them by our psychological needs? Do we want their whole family group telling us what to be doing all the damn time? It’s like these female main characters are emotionally frozen in the little girl stage of development, all fixated on being rescued by Prince Charming (who is gorgeous and capable of having hot cat sex with us, of course, but respects us in the morning). What happens 10 years down the road, when everybody has reached brain maturity and found out that they resent the limitations of these relationships? And they are tied together by some “mate bond” that they now can’t escape from?

I can’t help it. I’m old. I think about these things.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t think the books are good. Singh is a good writer and she obviously provides exactly what her audience is looking for.
 

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