"Soul Song" by Marjorie M Lui (21)

[alias_sqbr]

She's a fiddle player with Voodoo magic, he's a sex slave Merman(*). They fight crime!

I'm sure this was a perfectly good book but it wasn't my thing.

Specifically, it was two rather angsty "MY LIFE IS PAIN I AM SO ALONE" types who fall in love at first sight and the only thing that ever keeps them apart is external circumstances, while I prefer romances about fairly happy people who get to know each other over time and only realise they both care about each other near the end of the story(**). So I had to read this romance novel for the plot. Which was actually ok, as supernatural chase-and-mystery plots go, but as you'd expect was interspersed with lots of (to me) fairly unengaging soppiness and sex.

On the plus side, while I am in general not a big fan of any story which pairs lack of consent with a romantic/porny etc plot it was relatively unskeevy (though still dealt with M'Cal's slavery in a rather shallow hurt/comfort way). For a start the only prostitutes we meet are male and the female characters are varied and cool. (A step up from the other stuff I've been watching. And yes, I think I'll avoid stories about sex slaves for a bit :/)

(*)It says a lot about me that the "fiddle player" bit was one of the more off putting parts of the premise for me. I'm not a big fan of folk-music-magic plots for some reason.
(**)And the other Marjorie Lui book I read didn't fit this pattern either, since they were childhood sweethearts who'd been separated. Hmm.

Comments

[greteldragon.livejournal.com]

I am intrigued by this idea of only male sex slaves in a book. I can't actually think of anything I've read which has had that (that doesn't mean I haven't read any, just that I have the memory of a fish lately).

Oh wait. Fanfic doesn't count right?

[nico-wolfwood.livejournal.com]

IMHO fanfic totally doesn't count :P

[alias_sqbr]

No, fanfic TOTALLY doesn't count :)