Shadowfever

brittany — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

How do I review Shadowfever by Karen Marie Moning? Do I caution readers about the fact that it is book five in a five book series? That previous events are not described and characters come into play with little explanation? Or do I discuss how enthralled I was by the story? How I could not put it down, even without understanding a lot of the plot?

The plot of Shadowfever is hard to describe. The main character, Mackayla Lane, or Mac, came to Dublin to find out who killed her sister in the first book, Darkfever. Not long after she arrived, the walls between the human world and the fairy world fell, bringing together both good and bad fairies, the Seelies and the Unseelies. It destroyed Dublin as the two groups fought each other and the humans. Over the course of the series, Mac learns about her sister’s life, about her own past and its connection to the fairy world and the keepers of the magic, and meets her lover, Jerricho Barrons. Shadowfever brings her story to its conclusion.

Much of the book is hard to follow, if only because the elements are unfamiliar. The book opens with Mac mourning the death of Barrons. The scene is long and painful, but without knowing who Barrons is, it has little impact. Mac has to find the Sinsar Duhb, which is both a book and a sentient being. There is lots of fighting between the various groups looking for the book, and without a chart, it was hard to follow the various groups, between the Seelie, the Unseelie, the Druids, the Abbey, and the humans. The narrator even changes without warning.

But, despite all of this, I was hooked on this book. Once I was able to situate myself in the story, I had a good sense of the characters and the basic plot. Mac is a wonderful character, strong, powerful, and complicated. All of the other characters, good and bad, fairy and human, are interesting, if leaning a bit too much toward “perfect,” “complicated,” and “sexy.” Still, trying to figure out who they were was interesting.

If you are a fan of urban fantasy, I recommend the Fever series, but I would start with the first one.

Written by: Taylor Rhodes, April 10th 2011

Behind the Bedroom Door: Getting It, Giving It, Loving It, Missing It

admin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:17:00 +0000

Edited by Paula Derrow

Delacorte Press

“Daring. Provocative. Unflinchingly honest,” the book jacket proclaims of this anthology subtitled “getting it, giving it, loving it, missing it.” It is sex, and Behind the Bedroom Door is a collection of essays from twenty-six contemporary women writers.

Don’t be confused. While some of these essays are sexy, this writing is neither erotic nor academic. These are personal essays covering points across the adult female life cycle, the thoughts and feelings of individual women about their individual sex lives.

In “The Sweetest Sex I Never Had,” Hope Edelman recalls her first sexual experiences as a teenager. “If you define sex as an act of penetration, we weren’t having it, but that feels beside the point,” she writes of the hours she and her boyfriend spent giving each other pleasure. Sadly, some teenage sexual encounters are actually sexual assaults, which cause repercussions well into the adult years, as attested to by Stephanie Dolgoff in “Kiss Poker” and Anna Marrian in “Under the Influence.”

We know that pregnancy and childbirth are not only the biological culminations of sex, but also two factors that change the way a woman and her partner(s) interact sexually. In “Pregnant Pause,” Pari Chang tells how her husband stopped relating to her sexually during her pregnancy, while in “Sex with a (Much) Younger Man” Elizabeth Cohen confesses that she was the one who halted sexual intimacy with her husband while pregnant with their child. Brett Paesel shares her experiences of trying to get pregnant and how that affected her sex life in “Procreational Sex.” She says, “…sex, always so easy throughout our relationship, became a thing to be calculated, negotiated, withheld.” Both Susanne Paola (“Toys in the Bedroom”) and Lori Gottlieb (“Mommy Lust”) divulge secrets of sex once there are kids in the house.

I especially enjoyed the essays steeped in humor. With “Ouch, You’re Lying on My Hair!” Valerie Frankel deals specifically with the comedy of sex. “Looking for Mr. Snickers” is Jenny Lee’s funny retelling of how, after she leaves her husband, she decides “sex is a commitment, even if it’s only for a night.” Although discussing the serious issues of what arouses her and what leave her cold, Bella Pollen keeps the tone of “Turn Me On, Turn Me Off” light and humorous.

The essays in this book are definitely hetero-normative. Twenty-four of the authors write about having sex with men. In “Look Both Ways Before Crossing,” Meredith Maran writes about having sex with men and women (although the word bisexual is conspicuously absent). Thankfully, Ali Liebegott does nothing to hide her queerness in her piece “In the Beginning,” a consideration of the early, heady days of a new love affair “pretty in all its potential.”

On the surface it may seem that sex is the theme tying together the stories in this volume. However, these essays truly deal with women learning about themselves through sex. The writers in this anthology don’t just write about the sex they’ve had; they use that sex as a prism through which to examine themselves, their hopes, their needs, their desires. Instead of using this collection simply as entertainment, readers would do well to use these stories as a catalyst for learning about themselves through studying the role sex plays in their own lives.

Written by: Chantel C. Guidry, February 25th 2009