Customer Reviews:
 Enough already December 4, 2008
This book is just awful.
I gave up reading Anita Blake a few years ago but I still enjoyed the MG series. Well now it has been turned into an absolute circus and I just feel that LKH has run out of steam. It is just way too descriptive, I'm fed up with the constant hair colours, eye colour, body disfigurements, endless, endless power and Merry has just turned into another Anita Blake, The Queen of Absolutely Everything! A self proclaimed goddess! not even rape by her uncle will faze her. Geez, I think she has actually superceded Anita Blake in the biggest Mary Sue of this genre.
LKH has lost it, this addition is poorly written and I will not be purchasing another one of her books. I can't even finish this one because there just isn't any challenge anymore. No element of mystery or anticipation just regurgitated nonsense.
 More magic battles and intrigue November 24, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I totally disagree with the first two reviewers. Yes the rape doesn't traumatize her as much as it would a normal person, but she is supposed to be a magical person descended from a love goddess who has unborn twins genetically derived from 6 of her lovers trying to stay alive long enough to rule the fey! - surely you cant quibble about reality at this point in the series...
If you like a fun fantasy with a sassy heroine, trying to deal with court intrigues, old feuds and the various lands of the sidhe all battling each other then this is a great series, and a good book. However you rea;;y do need to read them in order to keep track of who is who.
Non stop action November 14, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
So many things happen in such a short space of time that there is no chance to be bored with this book. Everyone is still trying to assassinate Merry and her men, there are lots of cliff hanger moments and plenty of blood, but very little sex in this one.
I agree with some other reviewers that the rape is glossed over, but I think this is more to do with so much happening and Merry has not yet remembered it than being ignored by Hamilton.
The book left me itching to know what will happen in Los Angeles, will she ever be queen, how will the men who have spent little or no time outside faerie adapt to the human world, how will magic spread to the humans... I could go on and on with questions. All good books leave you with wanting more, and this one certainly left me waiting impatiently for the next Merry book.
 poorly written. November 9, 2008
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
Laurell K Hamilton's books have been getting steadily worse for a long long time. I'm still reading in the hopes that she'll start to show some of what used to make her so enjoyable again. The early Anita Blake books were quite entertaining and when the Merry Gentry series started I really enjoyed the first few books too. Sadly things started to slide when the books lost all plot and descended into almost constant sex scenes that spanned the whole entire book. I enjoy sex in books but not to the exclusion of plot. This book can't be tarred with that reason for being bad however as the sex is kept to a minimum - well as minimum as LKH seems to be able to keep it these days anyway and there is a storyline of sorts.
To summarise the plot, the book starts directly after the events of A Lick of Frost (Meredith Gentry 6) with Merry in hospital after being raped by her Uncle Tarranis (Merry shows almost no signs of any trauma - very strange) then a plot to kill Merry's guards begins to unfurl and Merry calls up te wild hunt in revenge to go chassing after the plotters. And that's about it as far as plot goes, Merry reacting to all that the seelie and unseelie and the sluagh and the goblins can throw at her while gaining magical power ups from the Goddess. There is a plot, even if it's mostly the tying up of old threads and dealing with random people that get in her way.
The real problem I found was her repetitive and silly descriptions that read as if they had been lifted directly from one book to the next. On more than one occasion I laughed out loud they were so bad - it sort of spoils the mood of the story when the terrible prose distracts you from the plot. Everything is all sparkly and moonlight lit with detailed pointless descriptions of hair and clothes and rose petals raining from the sky.
I enjoyed the early Merry Gentry novels and I suppose that this book could have seen an end of the series as many of the loose ends from previous books have been tied off. Her father's killer has been unmasked and her enemies defeated for the most part. Unfortunately I don't think that this will be the case and more stories will be spun out with Merry doing more sparkly, magical, and wonderful things with new powers given conveniently by the Goddess just in time and with conversations that start in the middle of the action and just drag on and on to showcase Merry's wonderfullness. I think LKH need to take a break from writing for a while not churn out a Merry and an Anita book every year. She needs to go back and re-read all her books and rediscover her characters for herself and maybe things might improve. I'm still reading in hopes they do but i'm not sure how much longer I will be.
Swallowing tedium November 5, 2008
32 out of 37 found this review helpful
For her last few books, Laurell K. Hamilton has been toning down the sexual content in favor of what can be loosely termed "plot."
Well, turns out there are far worse things than endless sparkly-magical sex scenes. After the shattering cliffhanger ending of the previous book, the seventh Merry Gentry book "Swallowing Darkness" promptly goes on a road tour of Faerie instead of sticking to an actual central plot. It feels like Hamilton has gone as far as she can, and is flailing around instead of getting out of the water.
In the aftermath of being raped by her uncle, Merry is recovering in the hospital... and despite all the moping about how doctors "can't undo the damage," she gets over the rape by cuddling her favorite boytoy.
After ordering her various fey boytoys not to attack Taranis, she receives a visit from her feisty brownie grandma. Unfortunately there's a malign influence warping Gran's thoughts -- with disastrous and fatal results for three people close to Merry. Enraged, she and Sholto summon the Wild Hunt and set out to destroy the conspirators.
But it turns out that the conspiracy goes far further than Merry expected -- and that certain Golden Court sidhe are trying to weed out the stronger boytoys. And of course, divine magical favors just rain down on Merry whenever she sneezes. To keep her entire harem (half of whom I've forgotten) safe, Merry decides to take drastic steps in the human world... but only finds a new conflict with her cousin Cel.
Having knocked up her heroine -- which is supposedly the series' goal -- Laurell K. Hamilton seems to be at a loss for what to do to keep the series going ahead. So we end up with a bunch of vaguely connected crises, punctuated by interludes of Sparkly Magic From Goddess-Merry, magic horsies and lots of sparkly magic roses. It's a little like being alternately choked with flowers and clubbed with a rock.
"Swallowing Darkness" does manage an impressive amount of plot, including the resolution of couple half-forgotten subplots -- and a surprising twist during Merry's stay in the sluagh. Unfortunately most of the plot is just Hamilton slapping in new random problems whenever things get too peaceful. Whoops, somebody's suddenly dying! Eek, a traitor! Yikes, a royal challenge from out of nowhere!
Nor does Hamilton's writing help, since she seems to be bored with her own story when she isn't trying to channel Patricia McKillip's lush prose. Her incredibly stilted, rambling dialogue ("We ride." "To save your Storm Lord." "To save the future of faerie"), repetition (everybody seems to have "moonlight skin") and awkward descriptions ("Gold like the metal of a piece of jewelry") hamper the story even further.
And as with all Hamilton's fairy novels, we get hot pale supernatural men who all worship the heroine, dumb blinkered mortals, lightweight Wiccan theology, Christian-bashing, oral sex worship, and lots of nasty and/or crazy women who simply can't measure up to the heroine. Yes, even a sweet li'l old grandma, who is reviled for daring to hold a grudge against her mother's murderer.
But the book's biggest weakness is Merry Gentry herself. She floats through the book in a cloud of Convenient Magical Powers and occasionally pauses to cold-bloodedly kill people. Everybody is awed by her even if she kills them -- and she declares herself to be a goddess as well. It gets rather nauseating to have a heroine who is such a blatant self-insert.
"Swallowing Darkness" has some shreds of good plot in there, but they're surrounded by jack-in-the-box disasters and a main storyline that is being stretched way too far. And it's not over yet....
|
