Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

The pace is fast, and the methods used to reveal the technical details of a world far, far into the future work without visible bumpy seams. There’s no info dumping. There’s clever uses of teacher/student dialogue to educate the reader, and there’s explication that makes sense in context. It seems like such an obvious rule: Don’t Dump Backstory on the Poor Reader. Backstory is heavy and I don’t have enough grocery bags in the house to carry it all. And yet so many stories set in worlds that require building lift up the dumptruck and let it all slide down in the first 15 pages. Barry? Oh no. Her dumptruck is lean, mean, and moves at the speed of light, dropping morsels of information that not only set up the universe in which the story is set, but entice the reader with clues to the characters’ strengths and skills. I can’t underscore how much I have learned to appreciate good world building since reading for this site has expanded my reading into fantasy, sci-fi, and future-set romances.

The story opens on Torrie Masters, only daughter among the heirs to Masters Shipping, on her maiden voyage as Captain of one of the fleet vessels. Her crew has abandoned ship on her orders, and she’s chosen to stay behind to try everything she can think of to stop the engine core from melting down. Meltdown = ship explodes into billions of itty bitty pieces, Torrie included. 

The ship’s control console goes dark, the computer’s mellifluous female voice is silent (after Torrie repeatedly threatens to turn the voice into a man’s due to the computer’s inability to multitask effectively), and Torrie is left in silence gazing at millions of stars, waiting for the ship to blow up - only it doesn’t.

A huge pirate ship blots out the stars in front of Torrie’s window, and assumes command of her ship remotely, allowing the pirates to board and take over control of her ship. Qaade, the pirate captain, comes aboard to take over the ship and search the cargo hold. Torrie, however, is not going down without a fight.

This is about the point where Sarah wanted to repeatedly smack herself for not giving space romances (say that with the echo pedal on- spaaaaaace roooooommmmaaaaaaaaaance!) more of a chance. Barry combines several sharp elements, such as a strong, smart, and clever heroine, a tortured, noble hero, and sets them in a blisteringly fast paced story that touches on ethics, slavery, corporate responsibility, and lawlessness serving up more effective justice than the law itself. Unmasked is written with facile interweaving of several different story threads such that each person’s narrative advances at the same time - there’s no division of chapter where this one is about the hero and heroine, and the next is about the heroine’s best friend and her secondary romance. Barry expertly maintains a whuppass pace while maintaining the story of each character, and never letting the reader lose interest or lose track of what’s happening to who, and how come.

As usual, a strong and ass-kicking heroine meeting a strong and ass-kicking hero makes for excellent romance, but in this case, the ass-kicking comes from different sides of the law, and therein lies a great deal of conflict. Torris is bound by her own moral code and sense of honor based on law, family loyalty, and professional behavior in light of her family’s company. Qaade is bound by his own sense of honor based on commitment to save the lives of slaves, ambition to build his cause without interference from the law, and solve his own personal mystery. Qaade considers the law and the slave traders equally his enemy.

Finding their way to a happily ever after therefore involves the possibility of compromising personal ethics. Torrie has to accept Qaade’s piracy and what that means to her company, and also the potential truth that her family’s corporation and the society in which she lives have been advancing slavery by unknowingly trafficking in memory-washing drugs. Further, she herself may be complicit by being quiet when other sectors legally allow people’s memories to be washed away so that the remaining person is an empty shell to be commanded and directed at will.

Qaade has to accept that it’s time for him to accept help and trust other people - even people who live within the law - to make a significant difference in reducing the trade of human slaves in his galaxy, and that he cannot continue his mission to eradicate slavery on his own.

Even with the complicated personal issues working between the protagonists, my enjoyment was derived from Barry’s plot, in that it dealt with a question I think about frequently: what is the most effective way to create a change when said change must be made? As I said in an earlier entry, sometimes change requires operating quietly from within the system you want to change, slowly working to shift the direction of progress so that people working along side you adopt your methods and work as a team to create a difference. Sometimes, you have to storm the castle from the outside and scare the crap out of people, forcing them to adopt a new way of action.

In this novel, the issue is slavery and human trafficking. Qaade is used to storming the castle: stealing ships, evading the law, and doing what he pleases as an outlaw to the police and an enemy to slave traders, knowing that his actions serve a greater good that only he and the slaves he frees can wholly understand. Torrie works within the law alongside friends in intergalactic law enforcement, and her family stands to lose a great deal if she chooses illegal methods in her efforts to help Qaade. Finding a balance between the two characters, their respective missions, and their moral codes makes for taut reading. Add to that a quick moving plot that involves ethical questions that don’t have simple answers, and ahoy, thar be compelling reading.

The only problem I had with the characters involved Qaade’s refusal to be flexible, even if bending would allow him the chance to be with Torrie. It fits entirely with the noble solitude of his character, but there were times that he treated Torrie shabbily to the point where he needed to grovel more than he did. However, even if I wanted to smack him upside his stubborn head, Torrie understood his character enough to forgive and move on, allowing them both to grow in ways that make for satisfying romance.

A lot of discussion lately has revolved around rules of romance, and what can or cannot, should or should not be done - and if there are rules, how to break them. This book, which won the 2006 BWAHA Award for Best Paranormal: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novel, follows some of the more essential rules of writing good romance. The characters should allow each other to evolve in such a way that, without the other, each one would be less than when the book started. There’s a satisfaction in seeing attraction and love heal, grow, and develop people into even better versions of themselves, and that satisfaction is certainly found in this book.

As I said, once I agreed to be entertained by the campy aspects, the more nitpicky plot points - why does Kyra let go of her worries, her homesickness, and her old life so easily? - were answered by a mental shrug on my part, mostly because I began to not only enjoy the utterly over-the-top sexuality and society of Tryston (or as I called it, Planet Nooki’e!) but consider the story on the whole as an exploration of female fantasies of sexual subjugation. There are some women who would get mighty turned on at the idea of being attentively cared for by multiple warriors who are not permitted penetration, or at the idea of a mate who is bound on a profound level to their sexual gratification and fulfillment, even if that mate was frequently heard to ask, “Who owns you? Who is your master? Whose cock do you wish to fill your moist channel? Who is the sole possessor of the remote control?” Ok, not that last one but you get the point. Even the over-possessive masterful sexx0r talk certainly could corner many fantasies for female readers, and I have to give Black credit for creating a vehicle in Kyra for discovering that domination can be sexually liberating. Kyra has to adjust to a very male-dominated culture, not just in language and habit but in dress - her official garb as Empress and High Queen is a see-through boob scarf and skirt and just about every warrior she encounters is expected socially to admire her openly with blatantly lustful expressions and comments on her “woman’s pelt” and “fire-berry nipples.”

Of course, within that subjugation of women is a bit of female control - a camp-inflated version of the All Controlling and Healing Vagina, if you will. Once a warrior finds his Sacred Mate, his appetite for bound slaves and kefahs (enchanted sand women whose purpose is bringing men and women to their peak. Repeatedly) just about disappears and he becomes manfully fixated on making his wee woman happy, sated, and solely his. By the time Kyra accepts her new position as mate, empress, and often-humped object of Tor’s sexual desire, she realizes that she wields some influence over Tor - though not enough influence to prevent a large misunderstanding & misadventure that constitutes the climax of the story. That said, if scenes that are not bondage-related but do involve verbal domination and female subjugation are not your thing, this will not likely sexually titillate or interest you.

What dropped this book in my ratings was the villain. Candy and I have often joked and grumbled that the easiest way to create a villain is to make him pure evil: Ugly. Mean. Greasy, even. And an abuser of animals. It’s usually the scene animal abuse that serves as the first clue to a villain. In this case, it’s not animal abuse but sexual abuse and murder of children. What jarred me to badly was that the villain and the conflict arrived very late in the story - at times I was wondering if there was going to BE a conflict or if the bulk of the story was Kyra’s adjusting to life on Planet Nooki’e - and when the villainy arrived, it was sweepingly awful and left me nauseated. The insurgent leader, Ty, decimates a sector, and when Tor and his brothers arrive, he finds the leader’s name scrawled in blood, and observes in detail young boys who were sodomized and left to die from their injuries, young women raped and strangled, and older women and men left in various states of massacre. It yanked me out of the campy “anything goes” attitude with which I’d been enjoying the book, and left me angry and sick. It seemed too easy a way to create a villain, even so late in the story. Ty himself doesn’t appear at all, except through holograms and in the aftermath of his evilness, and he’s not scary enough or enough of a threat to the protagonists. And the resolution that solves the problem of his insurrection happens off-stage, leaving only his actions to resonate in the reader’s mind, and not nearly enough retribution for their pain and fallout. After page following page of nonstop horny happy sex and voyeurism and lots of humping and oral sex in the bathing chambers, to be yanked out of the goofy over-the-top sexuality into child rape and murder seemed like a quick and shabby - and overly simple and unnecessary - way to create a villain, or emphasize his evilness.

Moreover, I didn’t understand the reason for the contrast between sexually explicit exploration of female domination and the use of sex as a tool of violent domination over children. I get it - sexual domination isn’t always good or always bad but has a place within consensual activities - but no need to hit me over the head with it.

Further, because the villain makes his awful appearance 3/4 of the way through the story, the conflict presented by his insurrection seems an afterthought and not at all a required development to the protagonists’ story. His removal and the resolution of his story line do equally little to change anything or advance any depth to the relationship between the protagonists, and the experience of that particular turn to the novel’s plot left me far less pleased with the overall experience of having read it.

Yet my disappointment will not stop me from finding the sequels and reading them as well. Credit goes to Black for creating secondary characters who are multi-dimensional and interesting enough in their individual motivations and personalities that I want to find out what happens to them and to revisit Kyra and Tor as their siblings’ stories continue.

When I started reading Demon Angel, several things struck me.  First of all, it was clear right from the start and Hugh and Lilith were both protagonists with tremendous strength and hubris.  That Hugh’s ego and sense of pride were tied to his idealism and his dedication to truth did not make it any less powerful or complex than Lilith’s paradoxical loyalty to duplicity and cultivating weakness in her human prey.  Early on Brook introduces the phrase there can be no light without darkness, which, while hardly a new revelation, still resonates meaningfully throughout the novel, because Brook is not set on keeping yin on one side of the equation and yang on the other.  Instead, Hugh, who is in the business of salvation, and Lilith, who is in the business of destruction, are forever in the process of examining and renegotiating their roles, not only in relation to each other, but also in their larger significance to the cosmic interplay of good and evil, light and dark, kindness and cruelty.  At one level, Demon Angel is the story of two characters who cannot escape their essential nature but are both mistaken in regard to who they think they are.  And through their relationship, not only do they truly discover each other, but they also play out the unsettled relationship between sacrifice and salvation, both human and immortal.  Brook uses the bond between Hugh and Lilith – which essentially proceeds as a series of ever more intimate and dangerous bargains – to demonstrate the novel’s insistence that appearances can be deceiving. 

I realize that all of this probably sounds like some humorless theological seminar, but that’s one of the wonderful turnabouts in Demon Angel.  While it’s not a book filled with epic revelations, it’s by and large an incredibly inventive, lusty, adventurous, and compelling Romance, with two characters whose fates are – in both the most literal and cosmic sense – intertwined, and their love both human and spiritual.  Not, to be sure, in the traditional sense of an inspirational novel, but more in the sense that these two characters have a strong presence beyond the physical, and the levels on which their bond grows extend from the profane to the sacred and back again.

There are already a number of very detailed reviews of this book on various reader blogs (check out Bam and DearAuthor, for example), and much of the plot of the novel is revealed in these reviews, so I will skip the in depth synopsis (plus it’s freaking hard to do this novel justice by writing a linear plot summary – even if I were capable of such a thing, which I am obviously not).  Generally speaking, the first hundred pages and eight hundred years or so of the novel are an exhilarating whirlwind of bargains and battles and repressed lust, with the young knight Hugh going from human to Guardian to human again, and the demon halfling Lilith going from full to less empowered demon as her father, Lucifer, becomes increasingly disappointed with Lilith’s growing conscience and affection for Hugh.  This part of the novel centers around the conflict between Hugh’s inclination to teach and serve honorably on earth and in Caelum and Lilith’s contrary mandate to exploit human weakness and recruit more lost souls for Lucifer.  That Hugh and Lilith are immediately attracted to each other isn’t just because opposites attract, but because they aren’t exactly opposites deep down. 

Hugh’s first exchange with Lilith occurs when Hugh stumbles upon her sexually dominating a half-naked and blindfolded seneschal of his lady’s castle, a man known for his vanity, pride, and cruelty, and this scene immediately marks Lilith as temptation in the most dangerous of ways.  The world-weary Lilith is attracted to the boy-knight Hugh in spite of herself, and it is not long before she finds various ways to tease and provoke him, sometimes in the guise of the Lady Isabel, who is no more than a child herself, married to an older and exceedingly jealous baron, and clearly infatuated with the gallant and handsome Hugh.  Hugh engages with Lilith in almost every way—debating, bargaining, teasing, lusting. Soon it becomes clear that neither is what they appear to be on the surface:  Lilith is not a ruthless tool of Lucifer and Hugh is not an almost-saint.  For example, Lilith defies her hellish service by giving Hugh to his heavenly (literally) mentor Michael to be made into a Guardian (not exactly an angel, but a divine protector of humans, nonetheless) when he is mortally stabbed after mistaking Lady Isabel for a disguised Lilith and almost raping her out of anger and lust.  After Hugh’s transformation, Guardian and halfling demon continue to spar and to lust, while Lilith becomes wearier of tormenting her victims and Hugh becomes less able to rationalize and accept the violence he sees in the more modern world.  The closer together they seem to come, though, the more the tension between them increases, culminating in a clash in which Hugh stabs and buries Lilith, his sense of despair and loss driving him to fall to earth and resume life as human, fully believing Lilith is dead and released from service to Lucifer.

The second section of the novel takes place in current day (well, a few months from now, actually) San Francisco, where one of the gates to Hell stands just below the Golden Gate Bridge (a convenient place to catch all the suicides).  Hugh has become a disconsolate university professor and a cult hero for a version he wrote of Lilith’s story, which his adoptive “sister,” Savitri (the heroine of Brook’s next novel), surreptitiously discovers, wretchedly translates, and publishes as a gift for Hugh.  The books circulate to others, though, even spawning a game called DemonSlayer, which Hugh’s students like to play, pissing off the megalomaniacal Lucifer because it stars Lilith instead of himself.  Hugh is unfulfilled but steady in his life, until his students start disappearing, nosferatu are unexpectedly prevalent and active in the city, and Lilith surprises him with the fact that she is both alive and an agent for the FBI, which has joined the SFPD in trying to solve the disappearance/murders of Hugh’s students (for which, of course, he is the prime suspect).  This part of the novel puts Lilith and Hugh finally in the position to banter and bargain like old times, to consummate their long flirtation, and to join forces against the nosferatu and a variety of ambitious demons (many of whom work as civil servants!).  Hugh also has the teeny tiny goal of saving Lilith from Lucifer, who “saved” Lilith after Hugh stabbed her, only to torture her and then send her back to earth with the express order to kill Hugh by way of convincing him to submit to an insane ritual that will further empower Lucifer, punish Lilith for caring about Hugh, and destroy Hugh once and for all.  The more human Lilith becomes, of course, the more difficult it is for her to imagine losing Hugh, and the more vulnerable Hugh finds Lilith, the more convinced he is that he will sacrifice himself to save her.  Lilith is a woman who has always been wary of kindness, and Hugh feels incredibly guilty about the moments of cruelty he has indulged in over time.  Would Hugh’s sacrifice be kindness or cruelty to Lilith, and which would she prefer?  Would Lilith’s sacrifice (by defying her father’s authority) be kindness or cruelty to Hugh when she would be lost to him forever?  For these characters, and in the world of the novel, it is sometimes difficult to discern the difference, let alone to decide what would be more just.

It is in this second section of the book that much of the mythology is fleshed out, most of the mysteries explained, and the lion’s share of the novel’s complexity occurs.  It is also the most problematic in terms of evaluating the novel’s success, because some of the book’s ambition turns back on itself.

It was fascinating and entrancing to watch Hugh and Lilith dance their dance across time and various earthly and unearthly forms of existence.  The first section of the novel creates an almost palpable sexual and emotional tension between Hugh and Lilith, with all the tendrils of their complicated mutual attraction nicely drawn:

. . . “Shall we bargain?’

A low, tortured groan escaped him, rumbling against her chest.  “God, no.”

She laughed but persevered.  “I’ll keep you warm.”

“And I will owe you doubly?  A lie and . . . a kindness?”

Rocking against his arousal with a wicked smile, she said, “’Tis not a kindness I offer you, but pleasure.  Or temptation.  Or pain, depending on how you take it.”

“To me, it would be comfort and warmth only,” . . . “What would bring comfort to a woman such as you?  What would be kind?”

She stilled.  Felt her mask of amusement slip.  He must have seen her – desperation?  Regret? She dared not name them, even to herself.  “Naught you can give.”. . .

He watched her, as if trying to determine whether she spoke truth or merely toyed with him.  “The bargain cannot be struck. . . . Though I would offer kindness, it seems equality in this exchange is impossible.”

“And would you take the temptation if I were like Isabel?  Beautiful and pure?” . . .

“If you were like Lady Isabel, you would be married. . . . And it would be a betrayal of fealty to my lord and God.  Will you betray your liege in return?  To whom do you owe loyalty, that it would be equal?”

. . . “Do not be kind to me,” she said finally. (pp. 32-33)

Brook weaves together the lust between Hugh and Lilith with some of the existential questions of the novel so that the relationship between the two of them has a deepness, even early on in the book, and the metaphysical issues Brook is introducing become more accessible through Hugh and Lilith’s interaction.  It’s a nice combination, and it keeps the first section of the novel very buoyant. 

The second part of the novel was less successful for me, in part, I think, because it is difficult to keep an effective balance between complexity and intensity, especially when an author is both worldbuilding and relationship building with as much intricacy as Brook is.  Her writing style reminds me very much of Jo Goodman (of whose work I am a big fan), both in her languorous attention to detail and her tendency to make sure the reader doesn’t miss anything.  I love the attention to detail, the way, for example, she describes the various areas of San Francisco (I go to school in the Tenderloin, so I had no problem imagining demons exploiting lost souls there), and the care she takes in focusing the reader’s attention on the mundane details of modern life for characters who are far from mundane.  More wearing in the second part of the novel, however, are the detailed explanations of things I would have been perfectly happy discerning myself:

Steam filled the small room.  Lilith quietly closed the door, began slipping out of her clothes.  The outline of Hugh’s body, wavering behind the frosted glass; his hand was braced against the shower wall, his head bowed beneath the spray.

She stepped inside, and he turned toward her, gave a half-hearted smile.  “Are you here to tempt me?”

“No.” She ran her hands over his shoulders, and she kissed him. His lips were salty; she drew back, studied him.  Not all of the moisture on his face was from the shower. . . . (p. 373)

I wish Brook had enough faith in her readers or confidence in herself to let Hugh’s salty lips speak for themselves (well, you know what I mean).

In writing this review, I looked back over the first part of the book and noticed that the explicating prose is there, too, but I didn’t notice it as detrimental until about a hundred or so pages from the end of the book.  Several reviews of the book have pointed out that the second section is talkier, and that is certainly true, as is the fact that the plotting and worldbuilding of the book are pretty intricate.  But I don’t really think that’s what made the second section drag a bit for me.  I do think it’s a pacing issue, but one related more to the cumulative weight of Brook’s descriptive prose than a failure to keep the action moving at an engaging pace.  Because there is a lot of action in the second half of the book, especially near the end, but I felt slightly labored in reading it.  I do not, however, think this is a fatal flaw in Brook’s writing as much as a first original full-length novel issue.  Certainly I don’t think that the book was too intricately plotted or detail-heavy to be accessible.  There were points, especially in the beginning, where I wondered about something that was explained more fully later.  And there were moments in the second part of the book where I had to re-read passages or flip back to catch up on something I thought I had missed.  But again, if Brook can find a way to better balance the explication and description with the actual details she needs to get across – that is, to discern more effectively what is and isn’t necessary to explain— I think her prose will become much more powerful and the pacing of her work smoother. 

As for the characters, though, Brook excelled in drawing two protagonists who antagonize as much as they demonstrate their heroic qualities.  The mirroring between Lilith, who seems to thrive on deception and destruction, and Hugh, who appears to value only honor and order, is really lovely, creating two remarkably likeable characters that are not one-dimensional or unambiguous in their morality.  While Lilith enjoys exacting a twisted price from people who commit horrible acts, she also sees it as justice somehow, and not simply the perversity that drives those who do not know truth from falsity.  Created from a human form, she never completely loses her humanity, and as hard as she tries to remain demonic, Lilith cannot bring herself to fully ruin Hugh.  And while Brook could have easily made the monkish Hugh a staid, rather boorish counterpoint to the dynamic Lilith, instead she draws him as unsettled and self-accusing, ill at ease with a Guardian’s responsibilities to protect humans but still aspiring to honorable service.  I have to say that I have a weakness for angsty heroes and ballsy heroines, so both Hugh and Lilith work for me on every level.  Plus the whole notion of service gets a nice workout in the novel, from what it means to serve a master deceiver (Lucifer) to what it means to submit to one’s passions and feelings.  Where strength finds its match in vulnerability; where honor can be found in a lie; where action takes place in reflection – all of this and more filters through Demon Angel.  As I was reading the book, I kept thinking about my high school Latin class, and the definition of “virtu” we learned:  the best that man (hey, they were Romans and my teacher was an old-fashioned kind of guy) can do.  That contemplation of virtue, of the highest aims of humans and what counts as “best” under morally ambiguous circumstances, is definitely a preoccupation of Brook’s fictional world.

As I said before, I really liked the San Francisco setting, and followed along in my head through various locations. Although I personally think that traversing the Bay Bridge is a more hellish experience, it was clever having the gates to Hell located under the Golden Gate Bridge.  It was a hoot to see Colin again (from Brook’s story “Falling For Anthony”), with the delicious irony in his insistent desire to paint his self-portrait through time.  I also adored Lilith’s hellhound, Sir Pup (a tribute to Sir Hugh the puppyish medieval knight), who was allowed to be a character and not just an amusing oddity.  And I liked the fact that while icky and ugly things happen in the novel, Brook doesn’t linger over the details, so I got a sense of how bad Chaos and The Pit were, for example, but didn’t get excruciatingly gruesome descriptions I’d have to work to forget later (what can I say --I’m a wimp).  I very much appreciated how Brook built the sexual tension between Lilith and Hugh while not glossing over the fact that Lilith was a demon.  Her true demon form includes scaly red skin, leathery black wings, cloven hooves and forked tongue, and she creates a sexual spark in Hugh at her most inhuman looking; in fact, the first time they have sex Lilith is in her full demon shape, complete with claws and blood-drawing scales on her breasts and nipples.  That her appeal to Hugh extends beyond her transitive human form(s) was one of the nice surprises of the novel for me, as was the fact that Hugh remains pretty sexually inexperienced for some 800 years of his relationship with Lilith.  Brook doesn’t make a big deal of the fact that Hugh is a virgin, in the same way she doesn’t write Lilith as a slut who needs to be reformed, and while I really did wonder at how Hugh remained “pure” for all that time, it worked within the parameters of the story because of his generally ascetic ways. 

I’m definitely looking forward to the next book, Demon Moon, not only because I want more of the vain vampire Colin, but also because I’m hoping some of my lingering questions from “Falling For Anthony” and Demon Angel will be answered.  I’m still not certain I understand all the nuances of Brook’s mythology, even as she draws from Milton, Dante, and Bosch.  I haven’t had time to go back through Demon Angel to piece through the origins of some of the characters and the relationships, so I don’t feel confident yet in holding against the book some of the things I may have missed.  I do hope, though, that as the series continues the world Brook is building becomes more fleshed out.  And I have to say that I finished Demon Angel satisfied that in Brook’s paranormal world, love is the highest form of service, and earthly justice found in a very human and very happy ending for the lovers. 

Our Intrepid Hero is Leo Graf, Engineering Instructor Extraordinaire, known across the galaxy (or at least, GalacTech, his employer) for his mad welding and safety instruction sk1llz. His latest task is to teach a group of young ‘uns at a space station what is basically Advanced Shop Class in Space, something he’s done often enough. But these young ‘uns are different. They’re unusually well-behaved, and have been indoctrinated from the cradle to listen to their superiors and only minimally question authority. And then there’s the fact that they’re genetically engineered so their bodies are less susceptible to the ravages of long-term life in freefall, including retention of bone density and organ health, thus saving the company the expense of periodically sending them downside.

Oh, and there’s the small matter of the extra pair of arms they possess in the place of legs.

Graf is perturbed by the situation--not so much by the deliberately engineered mutations as the fact that the Quaddies (as they’re informally called) are treated like livestock; he also finds the extensive psychological conditioning the Quaddies go through disquieting. The action finally kicks into high gear when technological developments make the Quaddies obsolete and Bruce Van Atta, the über-villainous program director, reveals how he plans to dispose of them. Graf knows that what Van Atta (and GalacTech) want to do is wrong, but he’s not sure what he can do until (cue Summer Blockbuster Preview Guy’s voice) he comes up with a plan so crazy, it might just work.

Given the astonishing ethical and philosophical implications of the genetically-engineered Quaddies and the politics of corporate ownership of sentient entities, very little time was spent examining the nuances of the situation. In fact, precious little time was spent on setting, period, which left me feeling somewhat dissatisfied, because when I read science fiction, I enjoy a certain amount of rivetty crap. I don’t want to be inundated with specs and theory, but a some detail is nice, and I’ll confess right here and now that I’m a whore for complex world-building a la Hyperion or A Fire Upon the Deep.

The relatively sparse details did mean book moved along at a decent clip, though the pace is uneven--not much happens in the beginning of the book, and the last third or so is crammed with nail-biting moments. I enjoyed that part of the book best--the Crazy Plan of Leo’s required massive co-ordination, and almost everything that could go wrong, did. The problem was, by the time I got to the nail-biting stuff, I wasn’t particularly invested in the characters and the story, so instead of flipping the pages as fast I could to find out what happened next, I felt at most mild curiosity, though I was certainly able to appreciate the clever makeshift solutions they came up with.

In terms of characterization, the points of view are divvied up amongst various characters, which can be effective in bigger novels, but this isn’t a particularly meaty book. As a consequence, you don’t get to spend too much time in anyone’s head except Leo’s, so most of the other characters don’t feel as complex or developed as they should be. And to tell you the truth, everyone’s kind of boring--the good guys are, anyway.

Also, Graf has a romantic entanglement that was completely unnecessary, one that emerged out of nowhere. I’m not sure why it was included, because his motivations were convincing enough without the True Lurve component; not only that, he and his objet d’amour didn’t spend much time with each other at all, which made the romantic aspect a mild annoyance more than anything else.

Oh, and boohiss for the two-dimensional and utterly sociopathic villain. After the third time I was hit over the head with the fact that Van Atta does things only when they serve his self-interest, I got it. I didn’t need to be hit on the head with it again.

And one last nit to pick: I’m not in any way a dialogue tag Nazi, but oh dear Lord did Bujold have a problem with those in this book, to the extent that I started noticing them. And I’m not normally a person who’s bothered by dialogue tags, mind you.

Overall, this was a pleasant enough read, though not particularly memorable. I admit, I was a bit disappointed, given how various friends of mine have built up Bujold in general and the Miles Vorkosigan saga in particular to me. However, I have no qualms about picking up another Bujold. I hope it provides me with a less yawn-a-riffic experience than this one.