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Brook, Meljean - Demon Moon
Thu, Sep. 30th, 2010 03:41 pmSavitri Murray found out about Guardians and demons and all that fun stuff in Demon Angel, and she also met irresistibly handsome and vain vampire Colin Ames-Beaumont. Plot ensues, some of it involving demons and nosferatu and vampires and Chaos and almost all of it completely incomprehensible. And I even have my plot brain back! So for once, I don't think it's just me, especially since I just reread Demon Angel, and the major twist in the end is kind of cheated.
Savi herself I liked a lot: she's really awesome and inventive in just the first chapter and continues to know who she is and what she wants throughout the book. I also loved that she was a mixed-race character who was raised by the desi side of the family; there's pain around her white relatives, but the book isn't about the tragedy of being mixed race. I felt a little conflicted about her characterization as a computer nerd and geek. On the one hand, there's the whole Asian nerd thing. On the other hand, she's so cool! She has Sailor Moon posters! And is an awesomesauce hacker! And grad school dropout! To me, she didn't feel like the Asian nerd stereotype and more like a fictionalized and awesome-ized version of people like me on DW, but YMMV. I wish that Meljean Brook hadn't brought in arranged marriages, even though she did it in a way saying, "Arranged marriages are not that big of a deal, get over it," because in the end, it had to not work out to make the central romance work, which undercut the message a bit. When we were in Savi's POV, it felt like her being desi was simply a part of her, not something that made her different, which is very rare in romances.
Unfortunately, any time the POV is Colin's, Savi smells like cinnamon and mango and has caramel skin and chocolate eyes. I also felt it was an extremely bad choice on Brook's part to make Colin a former British aristocrat who clearly lived through the colonization of India. Brook doesn't refer to this at all, and it was the elephant in the room for me. Also, at one point, Savi questions Colin's relatives' acceptance of her and her grandmother because her white grandparents rejected her, and Colin is all insulted she would think that. Me, I just wanted to shake him and say anyone in his family could be a racist asshat, and for that matter, given that he probably profited off of the colonization of India, he really was in no position to say. And I wanted to smack him any time he spoke Hindi.
Finally, the plot makes no sense! Brook gets much better at it later; she's never stellar at characterization or coherent plot, but she has enough cool bits to make up for it. On the other hand, things in this book just make no sense whatsoever. The conflicts between Savi and Colin don't feel very real, particularly because Brook holds off a little too long on a backstory reveal so we don't understand why there is tension between the two, and the final big "why we can't be together" reason is solved in a way that made me roll my eyes. Also, the dynamics of bloodlust and vampirism get much more interesting later on in the series, although I like that Brook uses vampire sexiness as a negative feature instead of the way it's usually used in paranormals.
That said, I kind of still love the Guardian series because it is so cracktastic and has the good sort of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink type of plotting, and because Brook has some really awesome female characters. Her characterization isn't always the best, but her heroines are almost always more interesting and more tortured than her heroes, to whom she tries to give angst but largely fails.
Savi herself I liked a lot: she's really awesome and inventive in just the first chapter and continues to know who she is and what she wants throughout the book. I also loved that she was a mixed-race character who was raised by the desi side of the family; there's pain around her white relatives, but the book isn't about the tragedy of being mixed race. I felt a little conflicted about her characterization as a computer nerd and geek. On the one hand, there's the whole Asian nerd thing. On the other hand, she's so cool! She has Sailor Moon posters! And is an awesomesauce hacker! And grad school dropout! To me, she didn't feel like the Asian nerd stereotype and more like a fictionalized and awesome-ized version of people like me on DW, but YMMV. I wish that Meljean Brook hadn't brought in arranged marriages, even though she did it in a way saying, "Arranged marriages are not that big of a deal, get over it," because in the end, it had to not work out to make the central romance work, which undercut the message a bit. When we were in Savi's POV, it felt like her being desi was simply a part of her, not something that made her different, which is very rare in romances.
Unfortunately, any time the POV is Colin's, Savi smells like cinnamon and mango and has caramel skin and chocolate eyes. I also felt it was an extremely bad choice on Brook's part to make Colin a former British aristocrat who clearly lived through the colonization of India. Brook doesn't refer to this at all, and it was the elephant in the room for me. Also, at one point, Savi questions Colin's relatives' acceptance of her and her grandmother because her white grandparents rejected her, and Colin is all insulted she would think that. Me, I just wanted to shake him and say anyone in his family could be a racist asshat, and for that matter, given that he probably profited off of the colonization of India, he really was in no position to say. And I wanted to smack him any time he spoke Hindi.
Finally, the plot makes no sense! Brook gets much better at it later; she's never stellar at characterization or coherent plot, but she has enough cool bits to make up for it. On the other hand, things in this book just make no sense whatsoever. The conflicts between Savi and Colin don't feel very real, particularly because Brook holds off a little too long on a backstory reveal so we don't understand why there is tension between the two, and the final big "why we can't be together" reason is solved in a way that made me roll my eyes. Also, the dynamics of bloodlust and vampirism get much more interesting later on in the series, although I like that Brook uses vampire sexiness as a negative feature instead of the way it's usually used in paranormals.
That said, I kind of still love the Guardian series because it is so cracktastic and has the good sort of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink type of plotting, and because Brook has some really awesome female characters. Her characterization isn't always the best, but her heroines are almost always more interesting and more tortured than her heroes, to whom she tries to give angst but largely fails.