Rating: 
Summary: Buyer beware!
Review: This is a romance novel disguised as a cyber-thriller. Not to put down romance novels as they are one of my guilty pleasures but if I see a book jacket picturing Fabio in a pirate costume getting jiggy with a bosomy woman I know what I am buying and how I am going to be spending my time. The hero and heroine were too beautiful to be believable and the plot too tidy. I felt as though the author owes me for the hours I spent reading this piece of fluff, thinking that I was going to learn about the morals of creating artificial intelligence, and along the route learn more about Islam. She could have spent more time there, she didn't -- my loss. For my next read I'll look for a historical romance (with or without Fabio on the cover) that doesn't pretend to be any more than it actually is.
Rating: 
Summary: Romantic adventure set in near future
Review: When a friend told me about this book I was amazed. Cyberculture? Ballet? Romance? A clash of Western and Islamic culture? Could one author possibly make all these diverse elements work?But in THE VEILED WEB, Catherine Asaro has managed to take these seemingly disparate elements and weave them into a story that is utterly engrossing. Lucia and Rashid are vibrant characters, who find love despite all the odds. Read it for the romance. Read it for the adventure. Or simply read it to see what the near future might be like. I know you will enjoy this story. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: A bad romance and a worse sci-fi novel
Review: Where do I begin on how bad this book was. The science fiction was trite, poorly researched and generally silly. The romance aspects of the book represent the worst the genre has to offer; a forced marriage to a hero, who in some ways is little better than a stalker, a very immature heroine, I could go on but why bother. Ms. Asaro did do her research on Islam which I appreciated but that fact alone wasn't enough to justify a book that I feel has no place in either genre.
Rating: 
Summary: A Failed Attempt at Romance, Adventure, Sci-fi
Review: While I have enjoyed most of Ms. Asaro's novels immensely, I felt that The Veiled Web attempted to bring together a number of genres, but succeeded at none. The romance (the primary genre of the novel) felt unbelievable, since Rashid was absent during most of the period during which the Lucia's romantic feelings allegedly developed. If anything, the heroine became enamored of the lifestyle, rather than the man himself. The attempt to bring action/adventure elements into the novel through the element of the kidnappers felt similarly half-hearted, since only the first and last attempts had any crumb of excitement, and the characters (particularly Lucia) barely reacted to the attempts. The science-fiction elements succeeded perhaps better than the romance or the adventure - but anyone interested in reading about the development of consciousness in artificial intelligence would be better advised to re-read Robert Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_.
Rating: 
Summary: Dr. Asaro did lots of research for this one.
Review: While reading the Veiled Web I was amazed at how many religious, cultural, and technical references are made by the novel's wide variety of characters. The story's pace (like all of her books) flows quickly, and her characters are enjoyable. Like the main character in Catch the Lightning, Lucia is a young innocent girl who becomes involved with an older mysterious foreigner. The book at times got overly sentimental and sweet for my taste at times, although I didn't mind since I got my share of haunted, brooding war veterans in her Skolian stories.
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