Hill, Joey W. - The Vampire's Claim

I blame this on Dear Author! They had previously written up some of Joey Hill's other books and mentioned that she does dominant women and submissive men, which is a huge chnage from so much published in romance.

The Vampire's Claim is set in the same world as the Dear Author reviewed books that intrigued me, The Vampire Queen's Servant and Mark of the Vampire Queen. It's set in 1950s Australia, when Lady Daniela (Danny) is trying to win back her territory from an evil vampire guy. She meets Devlin, an angsty guy, and ends up marking him as her servant (this takes several stages). Together, they fight crime they have a lot of explicit sex!

To begin with, I have zero knowledge of Australian vocabulary, so when I say it sounded very forced to me, I am basing this on nothing whatsoever. Dev is a quarter aboriginal Australian, although he has red hair and green eyes. I felt the use of his ancestry was extremely problematic; Hill refers mostly to his Scottish and Irish ancestry when she's talking about him and only notes his aboriginal ancestry when she goes on about how great he is at navigating the wilds of Australia and walkabout and what an awesome hunter he is blah blah blah. Also, she dresses the Japanese character Chiyoko in Japanese clothing... cheongsam. ?!?! I thought this might be a mistake, but Hill later refers to another character wearing Japanese-inspired clothes described as having a mandarin collar and frog closures. Hint: if something is "mandarin," it is NOT Japanese.

That said, I didn't actually get too mad at the book just because some of the writing was not so great. It is definitely not on the level of burping penises or spinning like a top while having sex, but a good deal of it is over the top, and I could have used with much less description of Danny's spun-gold hair and brilliant blue eyes.

Even so, the book is interesting. I like very much that Danny is the master in the relationship and Dev is the servant; there's a bit of non-consensual stuff going on that I'm not quite good with, but it is different in that it's a woman having the power to do something non-consensual to a man. I like that Danny's physical power is never downplayed, and that she is clearly dangerous and scary. On the other hand, I wasn't too caught up in the worldbuilding, and several of the sex scenes felt perfunctory, particularly the ones that include Lady Lyssa, the main character of the other vampire books.

So I'm not quite sure what to think! The book is extremely, extremely flawed, but on the other hand, it's also tackling things that I don't get to see very much in romance at all, which I like.

Kibuishi, Kazu - Amulet: The Stonekeeper

After her father dies in a car accident, Emily, her mom, and her younger brother Navin move to their great-grandfather's house in a quiet neighborhood. The house itself is creaky and needs a lot of work, and while they're cleaning, Emily discovers an amulet. Soon, her mom is kidnapped by a tentacly monster thing, and she and Navin head to the world underneath the house to rescue their mother.

I read this about a month ago, and sadly, I do not remember much of what happens. yeloson already noted how Emily is the one leaping into action and jumping into things, while her little brother is the more cautious one, which is a nice change from assigning the female characters the more practical yet unengaged with plot action bits. While Kibuishi does complicate the role of the amulet and how strangely insistent it is on some things, I felt like I left the world wanting more, be it plot or characterization or themes or anything.

Instead, the series so far feels like a kind of cool but still fairly standard character-discovers-magic-world-is-savior type book. Still, it'll be interesting to see if Kibuishi does anything more with it in the second volume.