Oof, I have mixed feelings about Demon Forged, because I think it's actually more successful as urban fantasy and plot than as a romance novel! I didn't really buy Irena, and the sex scenes felt really off to me.
Totally with you on the annoyance of the dead lesbian =(. I also wish there were more POC... there are some on the side, and one of them is getting a novella (Radha I think?), but I keep feeling like the POC characters get sidelined. I like Savi a lot from Demon Moon (#2), but I HATE her love interest and felt anything from his POV was super exoticizing and squicky.
I also didn't notice that about the heroines, so thanks for pointing that out! I think for me, a lot of her female character torture works because it's in the romance genre and I feel the heroines almost never get angst in the genre? I also like that it's more a past trauma, not like the filmed-in-detail assaults you see on TV a lot. But! YMMV! I don't recall Charlie being raped, though it may have happened when she's turned into a vampire. Alice definitely is in her backstory, but my feeling reading the book was that her main dilemma was the deal with the demon, not rape backstory.
I think Brook generally doesn't do that well with the rape backstory as well; it didn't piss me off in this book, but I also felt it was one of the flattest parts of the story, and ditto with Alice's sexual trauma in Demon Bound (#4). I dunno though... would be interested in what you think if you decide to read more!
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Mon, Oct. 24th, 2011 10:20 pm (UTC)Oof, I have mixed feelings about Demon Forged, because I think it's actually more successful as urban fantasy and plot than as a romance novel! I didn't really buy Irena, and the sex scenes felt really off to me.
Totally with you on the annoyance of the dead lesbian =(. I also wish there were more POC... there are some on the side, and one of them is getting a novella (Radha I think?), but I keep feeling like the POC characters get sidelined. I like Savi a lot from Demon Moon (#2), but I HATE her love interest and felt anything from his POV was super exoticizing and squicky.
I also didn't notice that about the heroines, so thanks for pointing that out! I think for me, a lot of her female character torture works because it's in the romance genre and I feel the heroines almost never get angst in the genre? I also like that it's more a past trauma, not like the filmed-in-detail assaults you see on TV a lot. But! YMMV! I don't recall Charlie being raped, though it may have happened when she's turned into a vampire. Alice definitely is in her backstory, but my feeling reading the book was that her main dilemma was the deal with the demon, not rape backstory.
I think Brook generally doesn't do that well with the rape backstory as well; it didn't piss me off in this book, but I also felt it was one of the flattest parts of the story, and ditto with Alice's sexual trauma in Demon Bound (#4). I dunno though... would be interested in what you think if you decide to read more!