ending 2007 on a sour note

[furyofvissarion]

The Eternal Rose - Gail Dayton. I read the first two books in this trilogy for the pr0n-o-riffic polyamorous bits: Orgasmic multipersoned sex magic! Multiple partners & parents as the norm! It made the painfully awkward names & terminology, & cheesy plot, & sometimes just awful writing bearable.

This book really took the cake, tho', & brought out everything I feared Dayton would do in the earlier books regarding Daryath, the homeland of one of the main characters. Kallista, leader of the Adarans (the people w/polyamorousness being the norm), must bring her ilian (her family) to Daryath on a state visit.

In Daryath, polyamory is seen as perverted; marriage must be between only one man & one woman. There are religious fundamentalists in charge of everything. They have trial-by-combat. The few Daryathi magicians are kept w/in the state temple & their magic can't be used to help the people. It turns out that the Daryathi are secretly keeping Adaran slaves & breeding them in order to try to get their own magicians. Oh, yeah, & it also happens that the reason behind all this is that the Daryathi people are being controlled by demons. But no worries, Kallista & her folks purge the demons & show the Daryathi the errors of their ways.

Did I mention that Our Heroes, the Adarans, are white, & that the Daryathi have dark skin & clumsy faux-Arabic names? Why is this stuff still being done in 2007? (And why did Juno publish it???)

Oh, & at one point, the Adarans must take a Daryathi into their household, & give him a name. Someone says that they have named him Night, "because he's dark." AUGH.

There are also a couple of dodgy sex moments (You're basically unconscious b/c of grief over someone's death? Let's rape you into bringing your mind back into us! And you're not wanting to bond sexually w/the new member of the ilian? Let's force you into it... until you get all turned on by it!).

Comments

[nightgarden.livejournal.com]

That's unfortunate. The first two books were total guilty-pleasure-crack for me, and I confess I was looking forward to the third one. Doesn't sound like anything I'd want to give my money to, though (and as I recall, her books are hard to find at the library).

The author has apparently written a bunch of really cheesy series-Harlequin The Sheikh Who Kidnapped Me type of romances, so...maybe I shouldn't actually be surprised? :(

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I had hoped the series would get better instead of worse. I read it all the way through, but complained the whole way.