the cheerleader and the sandwich
Sep. 27th, 2009 07:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serynWhat A Dragon Should Know by G.A. Aiken
The cover image is your standard romance beefcake. Even though the hero is a dragon (who happens to shapeshift into a man on occasion.) I realize that authors get no input into what goes on the cover, but that was inapt and someone should have complained.
I thought there were several parts of this that could have made more sense if there had been better editing and the author had more experience. Unlike science fiction novels where there are multiple threads to the plot experienced by different groups of characters until the culmination where all these sub-plots are tied together, this book had several aspects to the same plot but we head-hop anyway. Every scene, every chapter, whenever the author stopped for a bit or her cat walked through the room or she breathed too hard or it was a day ending in -y, we switch to another character's point-of-view. Since I don't know any of these characters (this was book 3 in a series, which is my fault), it was even more jarring. In many of these cases, I think it could have been handled more adroitly. There was another way. Dragons have mindspeech, so the kidnapped sister didn't have to have the chapter from her own "I" viewpoint, she could have mistakenly relayed this experience. That would have allowed us to see one of the other focal characters get their heads out of their own asses.
That was my biggest problem with all of this, sure these situations were all crises, each of them was a potential catastrophe, but never does anyone think about anyone else. If 5 generations of my family gather together to defend the homestead, I'm not going to let pride stand in my way when I'm kidnapped, I'm going to assume it's part of a conspiracy and that if I get help I'll be able to return the favor instead of being a distraction.
The main characters are wholly unlikable. Conniving bitch woman who secretly runs an entire kingdom while managing the men in her household and blackmailing her sisters-in-law... but she never says anything that's true. She always lies first. It's supposed to be "cute" or "interesting" or "showing her intellect" because she can pull one over on anyone. The dragon-man cannot keep it in his pants. He's known world-wide as someone who defiles protected "virgins" to the point that he's listed as the sole exception on a truce between warring factions of dragons. He never pays for anything, he just says, "I'm a dragon, we take what we want." With that kind of attitude, I [sarcasm] cannot imagine [/sarcasm] why anyone might want to make war on the dragons of the keep.
If I had been an early reader on this book, I would have had something to say about the names of characters in this book. Earlier I mentioned my dismay that the father of the heroine couldn't be arsed to remember the names of his dozen-plus sons. The main characters are named Dagmar and Gwenvael. I continually refer to them in my head as "Dagwood" and "GwenStefani" and they do, sadly, act as though they have swapped gender roles because the dragon defers to the girl all the time. Most of the characters have similar-ish names or their names are similar to some other proper noun in the books. It's hard to remember who's who. And after several dozen scenes of that, it's hard to care. "Random shithead does something fucking stupid. blah blah blah."
A lot of pieces of the plot involve gruesome pregnancy details, like half-dragon twins that consume their (some other character) mother from the inside out. But we don't see much of the intimacy between Dagmar and Gwenvael. That is a pet peeve of mine, if the author is going to show childbirth, I expect the sex that caused the existence of the children to be shown in similar detail. When authors give ridiculously specific details in childbirth scenes, but the sex scenes are fade-to-closed-door, it makes me angry. Pregnancy squicks me, violently death-causing pregnancy should squick EVERYONE, and no one goes from watching a friend die in childbirth to sleep with her man without any concerns about it happening to herself. But I tend to view it that if we don't even see the character enjoying the sex, why on Earth would a woman keep the child? Are there women who prefer being pregnant to having sex? There must be, and it seems like ALL of them write romances.
There were some elements of bestiality. Gwenvael sticks his (unbarbed) tail between Dagmar's legs several times. That was okay-ish. But when another couple go from watching the death-by-child to fucking, the male says he wants to play "Does my tail fit in here?" and his female says it's her favorite game... but hello we've spent 2/3 of the book listening to Gwenvael lament the loss of his tail barb despite its uses in fucking whores (and Dagmar). I cannot imagine wanting anyone sticking anything spiked/barbed somewhere it might not fit on my body. That kind of inconsistency is really annoying. And it made the elements of bestiality somewhat squickier because it implies that the author doesn't keep track of her characters' states during sex.
This was a decent, if typical, romance. There are a lot of elements that show romance doesn't take itself seriously as a genre. Most of those are incoherence in plot, minimal characterizations, and a distinct lack of editing. (People complain about fanfic not having professional editing, but apparently neither do published books.) This really wasn't bad overall. It's not to my taste, and it's not literature, but it's pretty standard quality for a romance. If they're character sketches that I can fill in from my own imagination, with minimal plotting that I can mostly ignore, then I end up with a better experience. This book was trying to straddle the line into being a real book, but there wasn't the level of attention novels need.
I like romances. I like dragons. I like shapechangers. I like intelligent, strong female leads. And this really didn't do it for me. Dagwood is a sandwich, GwenStefani was a hollaback girl.
The cover image is your standard romance beefcake. Even though the hero is a dragon (who happens to shapeshift into a man on occasion.) I realize that authors get no input into what goes on the cover, but that was inapt and someone should have complained.
I thought there were several parts of this that could have made more sense if there had been better editing and the author had more experience. Unlike science fiction novels where there are multiple threads to the plot experienced by different groups of characters until the culmination where all these sub-plots are tied together, this book had several aspects to the same plot but we head-hop anyway. Every scene, every chapter, whenever the author stopped for a bit or her cat walked through the room or she breathed too hard or it was a day ending in -y, we switch to another character's point-of-view. Since I don't know any of these characters (this was book 3 in a series, which is my fault), it was even more jarring. In many of these cases, I think it could have been handled more adroitly. There was another way. Dragons have mindspeech, so the kidnapped sister didn't have to have the chapter from her own "I" viewpoint, she could have mistakenly relayed this experience. That would have allowed us to see one of the other focal characters get their heads out of their own asses.
That was my biggest problem with all of this, sure these situations were all crises, each of them was a potential catastrophe, but never does anyone think about anyone else. If 5 generations of my family gather together to defend the homestead, I'm not going to let pride stand in my way when I'm kidnapped, I'm going to assume it's part of a conspiracy and that if I get help I'll be able to return the favor instead of being a distraction.
The main characters are wholly unlikable. Conniving bitch woman who secretly runs an entire kingdom while managing the men in her household and blackmailing her sisters-in-law... but she never says anything that's true. She always lies first. It's supposed to be "cute" or "interesting" or "showing her intellect" because she can pull one over on anyone. The dragon-man cannot keep it in his pants. He's known world-wide as someone who defiles protected "virgins" to the point that he's listed as the sole exception on a truce between warring factions of dragons. He never pays for anything, he just says, "I'm a dragon, we take what we want." With that kind of attitude, I [sarcasm] cannot imagine [/sarcasm] why anyone might want to make war on the dragons of the keep.
If I had been an early reader on this book, I would have had something to say about the names of characters in this book. Earlier I mentioned my dismay that the father of the heroine couldn't be arsed to remember the names of his dozen-plus sons. The main characters are named Dagmar and Gwenvael. I continually refer to them in my head as "Dagwood" and "GwenStefani" and they do, sadly, act as though they have swapped gender roles because the dragon defers to the girl all the time. Most of the characters have similar-ish names or their names are similar to some other proper noun in the books. It's hard to remember who's who. And after several dozen scenes of that, it's hard to care. "Random shithead does something fucking stupid. blah blah blah."
A lot of pieces of the plot involve gruesome pregnancy details, like half-dragon twins that consume their (some other character) mother from the inside out. But we don't see much of the intimacy between Dagmar and Gwenvael. That is a pet peeve of mine, if the author is going to show childbirth, I expect the sex that caused the existence of the children to be shown in similar detail. When authors give ridiculously specific details in childbirth scenes, but the sex scenes are fade-to-closed-door, it makes me angry. Pregnancy squicks me, violently death-causing pregnancy should squick EVERYONE, and no one goes from watching a friend die in childbirth to sleep with her man without any concerns about it happening to herself. But I tend to view it that if we don't even see the character enjoying the sex, why on Earth would a woman keep the child? Are there women who prefer being pregnant to having sex? There must be, and it seems like ALL of them write romances.
There were some elements of bestiality. Gwenvael sticks his (unbarbed) tail between Dagmar's legs several times. That was okay-ish. But when another couple go from watching the death-by-child to fucking, the male says he wants to play "Does my tail fit in here?" and his female says it's her favorite game... but hello we've spent 2/3 of the book listening to Gwenvael lament the loss of his tail barb despite its uses in fucking whores (and Dagmar). I cannot imagine wanting anyone sticking anything spiked/barbed somewhere it might not fit on my body. That kind of inconsistency is really annoying. And it made the elements of bestiality somewhat squickier because it implies that the author doesn't keep track of her characters' states during sex.
This was a decent, if typical, romance. There are a lot of elements that show romance doesn't take itself seriously as a genre. Most of those are incoherence in plot, minimal characterizations, and a distinct lack of editing. (People complain about fanfic not having professional editing, but apparently neither do published books.) This really wasn't bad overall. It's not to my taste, and it's not literature, but it's pretty standard quality for a romance. If they're character sketches that I can fill in from my own imagination, with minimal plotting that I can mostly ignore, then I end up with a better experience. This book was trying to straddle the line into being a real book, but there wasn't the level of attention novels need.
I like romances. I like dragons. I like shapechangers. I like intelligent, strong female leads. And this really didn't do it for me. Dagwood is a sandwich, GwenStefani was a hollaback girl.
