A Kiss of Shadows

Rating:
Summary: A sensual and pleasurable read
Review: I for one loved this book and read it from cover to cover in just one night. Laurell Hamilton sure knows how to write a great book, and she writes well despite what many of the critics of this new series of books are saying!

Okay so it is a highly erotic book, absolutely, this isn't a book you'd give your Granny to read...hmmmmmm, strike that, I know a few Grannies who would LOVE this book but erotica is partly what makes this book the fantastic read it is, because we don't have a prim and proper heroine here, what we have is a part human, part fey creature who enjoys sex, enjoys being a P.I. and enjoys living life to the full.

Meredith Gentry is a great protagonist, on the run for the last three years from her Faerie Queen Aunt, the beautiful but vicious Queen Andais of the Unseelie Court, Meredith has lived secretly in the City of Angels, working as a P.I. for a firm that deals with cases that have "magical" quality about them.

The only child of Queen Andais's brother and his hybrid wife who chose the Seelie over her daughter, Meredith thinks she is without any magical power of her own other than very basic magic; she had not "come into her power" as others in the Unseelie Court had done and each dual she had to fight was dual that bought her closer to death so she fled, hiding among the mortals that she could mimic because of her own human ancestry.

However, Meredith's cover is about to be blown when a case she is involved in drags her back into her Aunt's fey sights, along with her hated cousin Cel the Queen's spoilt son who desires her death, and the protection of the Queen's bodyguards who have been denied sexual release for nearly a 1,000 years.

There is nothing sweet about the "magical" characters in this book, Goblins are sex obsessed and violent, faeries are vicious blood sucking miniature vampires, Brownies are good but without power, and Elves don't just have pointy ears look beautiful, they are vicious as the next person in either of the Court's they live.

The Seelie and Unseelie Court is complex and their links to each other can be described as Night and Day.

Among all of this you have the Slaugh, ones who can be called to do the bidding of the feared Queen Andais and it is Sholto, of the Slaugh who has been sent after Meredith and he is a creature that all fear, perhaps even the Queen herself.

The story is rich with nuance, complex and spelling binding (forgive the unintentional pun here) and Ms Hamilton manages to keep a good hand on each character so we know just who is who.

There are many wonderful scenes in this the first book about Meredith Gentry and my favourite is with Rowan, a Selkie (and Meredith's lover) who has lost his skin, and the only half seal half man to survive it, for the seal skin is part of the person and the creature of the sea and Rowan wears the burns on his back.

However Meredith is far more powerful that she gives herself credit for and the scene in which she "gives" Rowan back what was taken from him is actually quite beautifully written, and the story just gets better and better from then on.

I won't say this book is easy to read, the characters are many and complex, the world that has been created is grafted on to the real that we know, and the strangeness of the few mingles with the familiarity of named places and human vices that we are all so aware of.

All in all in all this is a hot, sexy read that is surprisingly intelligent, and fun to read too, a rare commodity today when pretension is the name of the game in the literary world at the moment.

Rating:
Summary: My tepid reaction....
Review: I half enjoyed, half disliked this book. I will continue the series, which I suppose means I liked it more than disliked it, but I have complaints about it.
As has already been mentioned here, the detective-mystery portion of this story was over with quite quickly. It seemed almost a precursor to the main meat of the story, that being Merry's return to the Fairy Court. I sort of failed to see the purpose of the detective agency at all, other than as an explanation for what Merry had been up to since fleeing years earlier, and perhaps as a set-up for the book's sequels. I don't know.
The sex in this book isn't very explicit, and is certainly interesting, but it very quickly became overdone for me. At a certain point of the book, I laughed to myself, thinking "Here we go again. EVERYONE WANTS IN THE SACK WITH MERRY." My laughter quickly changed to eye-rolling, as indeed, every male in the book seems to want her. Tiring.
While the character isn't particularly arrogant, I do dislike LKH's methods of having the character describe their "gorgeous beauty"; an example would be a line such as "My hair looked like luscious, gleaming black rubies, spread across the pillow" or something along those lines. I find that arrogant and irritating.
I have never liked LKH's choice of clothing descriptions. Merry's constant choice of wearing "thigh highs" sort of turned my stomach. I understand this is somewhat a "sexy" choice, but it also seems kind of outdated. One of the characters, Rhys I believe, is described as wearing an outfit with a circular opening in the front of his shirt to showcase his abs. Um, yuck! I won't even go into the use of cowboy boots, or jeans tucked into boots, royal-blue suit jackets, or shirts tucked in. It just seems so un-stylish, non-contemporary. Outdated. I had the same problem with the Anita Blake series in this aspect.
Merry has a constantly flirtatious relationship with her "harem", who appear as a lineup of anime-type guys; each with a different color of floor-length hair, each with a respective power (Barinthus, the blue-haired sea-god; Rhys, some former death-god; Galen, the green-haired 'softy' who's a good cuddler; etc). This was kind of interesting, but there is so little history given with these characters that they seem unimportant and interchangeable. With the character Galen, Merry reveals that they've always had a "cuddly" relationship. Nice, but boring. I would have liked more details on who each was, their powers and histories, not just the portrayal of them as a panting stable of testosterone.
Also I had trouble following the differences and court standings of the different races (brownies, goblins, etc)... there wasn't much description given here. I think more of a balance between descriptions of this sort, and descriptions of the "heated looks o' promise" between Merry and her "studs" should have been explored.
All this being said, I'm going to read the next book. It's a fun read for sure. But if you're expecting an intense, mysterious, fairy-lore-myth-meets-modern-day kind of story, get it from the library. It's interesting enough, but definitely focuses more on the sex than perhaps the description on the back lets on.


Rating:
Summary: Fun and Sexy
Review: This is a fun book to read. It is definately for the adult mind. Very erotic. The writing was easy to read. This is book 1 in a series that currently contains three books. It is a series that you will enjoy reading.

Rating:
Summary: Anita Blake without the baggage
Review: Kiss of Shadows' Merry Gentry is reminiscent of Anita Blake--only she has no qualms about sleeping with all the gorgeous men in her life. I wonder if Hamilton finally got sick of writing Anita and just worked out her inner erotica. In any case...

This is definitely a good book if you don't mind gratuitous sex. It's even fun gratuitous sex (Merry has a harem!), but it defiantly doesn't need to be there. Hamilton's portrayal of the faerie court and all its weird politics is original and imaginative. I especially liked the sluagh and Sholto. Hamilton's Andias also takes a new spin on the "wicked stepmother" archetype by making Merry's aunt at once Machiavellian and still somewhat likeable.

Hamilton doesn't really do much in terms of the P.I. aspect of this novel except use it as a way to get Merry back to court, and that's fine since this novel is really about fey politics, not mystery.

Overall this was a good, fun book. It's nothing meaningful or inspired, but it is definitely a good quick read.


Rating:
Summary: Branching out
Review: Laurell K. Hamilton branches out from her bestselling Anita Blake novels with a new, fae-oriented series. She really shouldn't have bothered. While "Kiss of Shadows" starts off dark and intriguing, the plot rapidly degenerates into a NC-17 fantasy without much more than sweaty gyrations to recommend it.

Part-mortal Princess Meredith NicEssus -- undercover as Merry Gentry -- is a P.I. in Los Angeles, which apparently is swarming with fey and fey-wannabes. Keeping her identity a secret is vital, since she knows the dangers that would follow being uncovered. But while investigating a supernatural date-raper (and falling prey to him) Merry's identity leaks out.

Before you can say "bonk 'em all," she is given an ultimatum by her aunt, the queen of the Unseelie Court: she and her evil cousin Cel are both going to try to have a baby. The one who succeeds will be the next ruler -- the other is toast. Merry is assigned a harem of fae men, all of whom want her as much as she wants them. Physically, anyway.

Here's a warning: "Kiss of Shadows" has a lot of sex. A LOT of sex. A sufficient amount that, among other things, Merry hops in the happy sack with any guy lucky enough to meet her. Oh, and she has a male harem. Sound like an adult movie? Well, it pretty much is -- lots of excuses to have sex, including an enjoyable rape (did a woman really write this book?) and Merry nearly being molested by the entire L.A.P.D. And that's before it gets really raunchy.

For anyone hoping for more than soft-porn, the book is lacking. It starts off strong, with a battered woman and a magical want ad, and Merry going undercover to lure out the magic-sucking guy involved. But once she bonks her selkie boyfriend, the plot goes down the tubes. What is worse, the sex obscures the mysterious cultures and subcultures of the fey and sidhe -- Hamilton hints at interesting cultures, rituals and different races, but seems to lose interest in the idea.

Without a developed backdrop, the actual plot feels rushed and half-finished. Hamilton also could use a better editor, since her writing quickly becomes repetitive -- lots of hair, unusual eye color, strange powers. All the men are madly attractive, chiseled, and devoid of any individual personality. All the women are beautiful, usually dainty.

Merry isn't terribly interesting -- she starts off as a moderately entertaining P.I. with a barbed sense of humor. Then it just sort of fades away. Queen Andais is also moderately interesting, as the villain of the piece. Merry's harem guys have paint-by-numbers personalities, and after the initial introductions they just become a heap of interchangeable sexy bodies.

Buried somewhere in "Kiss of Shadows" is a really good novella, but it's choked by a poorly thought-out soft-porn movie. Hamilton had the right idea, but the execution is a painful "Kiss."

Rating:
Summary: Overdone
Review: Let me preface this with saying that I am a huge Laurell K Hamilton fan.

In particular, this book took me three tries to start, and with force I finish it. It was difficult to keep track of all of the characters. The 468 pages were devoted mostly to lengthy descriptions about each characters clothes or body features.

As a relatively recent reader of this genre, I found the whole Sidhe/Fey/Faere/Goblin/Brownie culture difficult to understand. Hamilton didn't provide enough information to help me separate each unique culture and then see their inter-relationships.

I hope that Hamilton rescues my waivering trust and salvages the storyline in A Caress of Twilight.

Rating:
Summary: She ain't called Princess of the Flesh for nothing!
Review: Ever since the Anita Blake series took a wrong turn down Tedious Alley, I've been purposely avoiding the Merry Gentry books because everything I've heard about them idicates that they have all the elements that makes later Anita Blake bad times three. Let's just say that while I didn't hate the book as much as I thought I would, I didn't exactly like it either. See, it's kind of like saying being hit by a truck isn't as painful as I thought it would be.
I can sum up the plot of this book in one sentence: Merry Gentry aka Princess Meredith NicEssus must have sex with many beautiful men and have a child before her cousin does to claim the Unseelie Court throne. Sounds more like the premise for an adult movie on CineMax than a plot from the author who was once known for twisting, fast paced plots. If Hamilton wants to write erotica that's perfectly fine, but the problem is her erotica is ridiculously set-up and lots of talk, little action. In short it's boring because of long-winded set-ups that usually end up being a tease and the act itself often will make you cringe or laugh.
Meredith is also called Princess of Flesh because of a horrific power in her hand that allows her to reduce people into a gory blob of flesh. I think it's also a pretty accurate moniker becuase this character doesn't have much to her character besides being a heartless ammoral sex-machine. Her conflicts are usually something of the long of how can she get out of having sex with this fey creature and have sex instead with her harem of perfect fey men. It doesn't exactly fill me with sympathy for this character especially when she's so callous that she doesn't care much for the people she does sleep with but absolutely positively refuses to do it with others because they aren't physically pefect.
Her harem of men don't show up until the second half of the book, so they aren't really developed that much beyond one note personalities. There is Galen, Merry's childhood friend whom she'd really like to bang. There is Doyle, the strong silent protective type. There is Rhys, the charismatic happy-go-lucky one. And there is Frost, the distant one. The one thing they have in common is they are all desperate for sex, some of them having been celibate for several hundred years.
If it seems like I've talked a little to much about the sexual content of this book, I'm sorry but there isn't much else to talk about. Seriously, the plot is just a bunch of often ridiculous events that usally culminate into Merry having sex. Merry has to go on a stakeout for a case her detective agency is working one: Merry gets raped by the suspect and loves every minute of it. Merry goes to police station: She drives the cops mad with lust and is nearly raped again by the entire presinct then goes home to boff a seal man. Merry is on the run from fey assasins: Merry takes time out to have sex with a guy whose got tentacles growing in strange places and is shocked when an assasin interupts them. The ridiculousness of the sex of toned down for the second half but then we go through pages and pages of tedious fey politics that ultimately lead to Merry doing her new harem. As much as I hate to say it, sex is about the only thing to this book and there isn't enough of it.
I'm almost tempted to give this book the lowest rating possible because this tedious dime store erotica spilled into Anita Blake series and completely ruined it, but A Kiss of Shadows isn't quite bottom of the barrel quality. And if Merry "Every Hot Guy Wants Me Bad" Gentry isn't totally LKH's Mary Sue Avatar I'll eat this book.

Rating:
Summary: Truly awful.
Review: If you're after soft porn for the mentally deficient, this is it.

It doesn't even make the grade as 'good', or 'fun' trash romance.

Unlike some actually erotic stories, this writer's self-indulgent, cliched, clumsy attempts in the *soft porn* genre (no, this is not a *fantasy* novel) fail dismally on every level.

I read this and the next in good faith, on recommendation. Wished I hadn't.

The only thing it has going for it is that it's essentially harmless.

0 Stars was not an option, so 1 will have to do.

Rating:
Summary: sexy and surreal
Review: I was turned on (so to speak) by a friend who loves Hamilton's work. I had to admit that Hamilton pulled me into her fantasy world almost immediately, and I never read any of the Anita Blake novels. A number of people have objected to the sex in this novel, but I found it quite well done. Writing sexual scenes is probably one of the scariest things a writer can do. Use one cliché, one over-charged word, and the whole thing becomes ludicrous. These descriptions are exciting without being over-the-top.

That said, I think she spends a little too much time on the sexual energy of the situations and darn little on the actual mystery at hand. I enjoyed the trip to the sidhe home court and the political machinations, but never really understood what happened with the case they left behind at the Gray Detective Agency.

I also read the second book in this series and felt that it had more story and a little more depth. Here's hoping the new series will continue to pick up in style and polish.