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3.87 AVERAGE
3.87 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
lighthearted
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I read this really fast, not as much sex as any of the volumes before and considerably less S&M.
The ending although bizarre finally got us to the desired goal of the heroine...
The ending although bizarre finally got us to the desired goal of the heroine...
Loved reading this book again, it was just so good, and I'm so close to finishing up my reread!
*First Read April 29th, 2017*
Wow, was this an up and down book! She's pregnant, but Frost becomes lost to her! And her uncle kidnaps and rapes her. Eventful book! Though I agree with another reader, this book and Mistral's Kiss should've been combined, because both were short. But then there's the 3 week time jump between books. Ah, well!
*First Read April 29th, 2017*
Wow, was this an up and down book! She's pregnant, but Frost becomes lost to her! And her uncle kidnaps and rapes her. Eventful book! Though I agree with another reader, this book and Mistral's Kiss should've been combined, because both were short. But then there's the 3 week time jump between books. Ah, well!
"no insult was meant in my choice of words, princess. i beg you not to take offense."
"I will do my best not to take offense, expect where it is given."
"it is not merely happiness we all seek. we seek some place where we belong. for the lucky few, we find it in childhood with our own families. but for most of us we spend our adults lives seeking that place or person or organization that makes us feel that we are important, that we matter, and that without us something would go undone and undoable. we all need to feel that we are irreplaceable."
"I will do my best not to take offense, expect where it is given."
"it is not merely happiness we all seek. we seek some place where we belong. for the lucky few, we find it in childhood with our own families. but for most of us we spend our adults lives seeking that place or person or organization that makes us feel that we are important, that we matter, and that without us something would go undone and undoable. we all need to feel that we are irreplaceable."
Hamilton once again succeeds at making what would normally be a very disconcerting turn of events into something surreal, yet real, and captures a reader's attention. Though, admittedly, I was sad at some of the turn of events, they were part of the story that has been woven.
If you've never read any Merry Gentry books by Ms. Hamilton before don't start here you will be lost. These books aren't really meant to be read as stand alone. You might be able to do it and still enjoy it, but honestly the most enjoyment from these books is the evolving characters and widening of the future for Merry and her men.
Most surprisingly to me, there are events which caused me to really feel in response. Most of the Merry Gentry books are popcorn: fun, quick, sexy reads with a beautiful half-fairy princess and her gorgeous harem having adventures and lots and lots of sex. There was some true pathos in this on
**NOTE: THIS BOOK DESCRIBES INSTANCES OF RAPE, INCEST, POLYGAMOUS RELATIONSHIPS, AND EXTREME VIOLENCE.
Most surprisingly to me, there are events which caused me to really feel in response. Most of the Merry Gentry books are popcorn: fun, quick, sexy reads with a beautiful half-fairy princess and her gorgeous harem having adventures and lots and lots of sex. There was some true pathos in this on
**NOTE: THIS BOOK DESCRIBES INSTANCES OF RAPE, INCEST, POLYGAMOUS RELATIONSHIPS, AND EXTREME VIOLENCE.
adventurous
dark
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Ugh, this one.
I really wanted to give this one a good rating. I was planning to right up until the end. Like a 3.5/4. So much was done right in this book. So much was an improvement over the others in the series. But then... well, let's start with the good.
This book feels like a novella, even though when I checked the page count, it was more like a slim novel. Like Mistral's Kiss, it has the name of one of Merry's lovers, Frost, in the title, which usually means a novella focused somewhat on that character. But Lick of Frost is more like Seduced by Moonlight, another book I thought was one of the strongest in the series: it's basically two stories crammed together, with thin plot lines tying them together but no attempt to introduce all the plot threads at the beginning and attempt to manage them all the way through. This helps avoid a lot of LKH's many issues with pacing.
The first story is about dealing with a lingering plot point from the last book: The Seelie Court has accused three of Merry's bodyguards/lovers of raping one of their women in what are pretty blatantly false charges, and they've gone to the human police to do it. So Merry and her men go to a lawyer's office for a lot of interrogation, followed up by a very public mirror-call with King Taranis that goes badly. Two things stuck out for me about this section: one, I had a revelation about LKH's weird dialogue problem. In most of her dialogue scenes, people ask too many very obvious clarifying questions, and repeat themselves, and say "I don't understand" three hundred times each. Here, the dialogue worked perfectly, because Merry was being interrogated by lawyers. That's it! LKH writes all dialogue scenes like interrogations! The second thing about this section that stood out was that there was absolutely zero sex. The most we get is one scene of Merry using her seduction powers to distract a stubborn doctor while her healer treats her men with magic. I obviously wouldn't be reading this series if I had a problem with sex scenes, but Merry's sex scenes were beginning to cross the line Anita Blake's eventually did, from erotic encounters that made sense in the moment for the characters to "oops, it's been twenty pages, time for another one!" And like with Anita, LKH had become so determined to cram as many sex scenes in as possible that she made up an in-story device to explain it. At least Merry doesn't have a ridiculous physical need for sex like Anita's ardeur, but the idea that satisfying an entire harem and her desperation to get pregnant means that Merry has to have sex with six men a day, as she tells her lawyers, takes a lot of fun out of the whole premise. But here, no one has sex through the whole first storyline, and instead there is a lot of focus on politics, human-fey relations, and personal relationships. In particular, the problem of Merry having very different levels of emotion for the men in her inner circle is coming to the fore, with Merry now acknowledging that she loves Frost, and loves Doyle more, and doesn't love the others as much.
The second half of the story also picks up this thread, focusing on Merry's relationships with Frost, Rhys and Kitto especially. I'm still not a fan of Frost, but I will admit that I loved finally getting his full backstory, and it added a nice romantic element to his relationship with Merry. Rhys was one of my favorite characters from the beginning, and though I knew he was doomed not to be a favorite - heroines of LKH's stories fall for the men the author finds attractive, and those are brooding-but-secretly-damaged alpha males, not guys who are actually any fun - I am beginning to get a little tired of the growing theme of "Rhys really loves Merry, and knows she doesn't love him, but can't stop talking about it in a self-pitying way." Rhys, and his relationship with Merry, got a lot of development in this book and I really wish it didn't seem like a situation that can't end happily for him. As for Kitto... all I'm going to say about that is that I'm glad LKH has made such a point of her characters not being human, and not thinking about relationships and interactions the way humans do, because it makes Kitto's situation and his relationship with Merry a lot more palatable. LKH previously tried a similar "some people just want to be pets" thing in the Anita Blake series and it was not very comfortable.
The real focus of the second half of the book is Merry's political alliance with the goblins, and her agreement to sleep with the twins Holly and Ash to keep it going. In this section, after much negotiation by mirror-call, Holly and Ash finally come to Los Angeles for their night with Merry - and, shockingly, no one has sex there either! You could wonder if this book was ghost-written by someone else, with all the opportunities for sex that arise and aren't taken advantage of. Honestly, it was just as well, because Holly and Ash are creepy as hell, and the more they are in the story, the weirder Merry gets. Its been a theme with Merry since the beginning that she likes rough sex, and some of her lovers might not be suitable as permanent partners because they don't appreciate that side of her - it's a major issue with both Galen and Rhys - but in this book we've suddenly leapt from "Merry likes it rough" to "Merry needs a guard in the room with her because otherwise she might not want to stop until she's been permanently injured." What? What is she, Nathaniel? (Anita Blake joke.) This character element seemingly came from nowhere and made me really happy that the Holly and Ash scene was put off for another book, and replaced, instead, by the most shocking thing of all:
Forward movement on the plot.
That's right. We took some major steps forward on the plot in this book. At least three or four that I can count. Shocking, I know.
Spoilers:
First big plot development: In the first section, we learned that not only is Taranis bat-shit crazy, like to the point of making Andais seem like a sane and stable monarch, but there is a secret cabal of nobles within his court who would like to vote him incompetent (bizarrely, the Seelie Court appears to have a twenty-fifth amendment) and replace him with Merry. This development seemed huge - I couldn't even blame Andais for being freaked out over it, though she didn't need to torture poor Crystall like that - but by the end of the book Merry seemed to be thinking it was a fake-out and wouldn't work. Still, Taranis is definitely going down in this series, and if the two courts are still separate by the end, someone else will sit on his throne. That's something.
Second big plot development: Merry did some sort of major magic that seemingly created a whole new sithen around her - well, actually, Maeve's - house in LA. I'm guessing that what we'll eventually see is Merry creating a new court that combines both Seelie and Unseelie qualities - like, say, accepting everyone but not torturing them - and this is the beginning of that development. But to do this great magic, she needed a sacrifice, and that was inadvertently Frost, who was transformed into the white stag. There is an exactly zero percent chance that Frost is gone forever, but this did add some emotion and gravitas to the moment, and really nicely played on Celtic mythology, so I loved it. Also, probably we'll get at least one book without Frost, so, bonus.
Third big plot development: Merry is pregnant! With twins! Who... somehow have three fathers each! I understand why a lot of reviewers thought this was a cop-out, but look, LKH is all about promoting the polyamorous lifestyle. Merry was never going to end up with one monogamous husband. It seems likely that going forward, the six winners will be her kings and only lovers, and we'll be rid of distractions like Amatheon and Adair and Abeloec. That's a good thing. The six men left are Doyle, who is great; Frost, who is currently a stag so we won't have to deal with him for now; Rhys, who is going to get hurt, but I still love him; Galen, also great, and much more interesting now that he knows how bad he is at politics and is trying to improve the situation; Sholto, who I adore and who is uber-excited to be a dad; and Mistral, who... I don't know, hopefully will get some character development at some point. The story should work a lot better with just these six in the picture.
All of these were great developments, and the book was well-written for the most part, and the sex wasn't ridiculous... so why the lower rating?
In the last few chapters of the book, Merry is abducted from her home by Taranis, and wakes up injured in his sithen. She is very quickly rescued by the conspiracy of Seelie nobles who want to make her queen, aided by her bodyguards. But though she doesn't remember it because she was unconscious, it appears that Merry was raped. And look, I'm not someone who thinks there is no room for rape stories in fantasy. I do think they are annoying prevalent as backstory for female characters, but this isn't backstory, it's part of the ongoing story. And it's possible LKH will handle this with sensitivity going forward. She does a good job with Merry's emotional turmoil in the last chapter as she realizes what has happened to her. And this book definitely represented an improvement in her handling of consent and rape storylines over her previous books: for the first time, Rhys' experience with the goblins is treated as a trauma he needs to deal with slowly and not something he's being unreasonable for getting upset about, and though Lady Caitrin is initially presented as a liar making up a rape accusation, it is eventually made clear that she was presenting the truth as she knew it. This is a big leap up from some of LKH's previous books, where women are constantly lying about rape. So maybe this story will be handled well. But this is a series that started with Merry being raped in the first book and then never mentioned it again, so I don't have high hopes. And the whole thing just seems very unnecessary. Taranis is crazy. He thinks he's the father of Merry's twins about an hour after the rape, even though she's weeks along. He could have thought the same thing even without every having touched her. There was no need to add this element except to have a random sexual assault as part of the story.
I really wanted to give this one a good rating. I was planning to right up until the end. Like a 3.5/4. So much was done right in this book. So much was an improvement over the others in the series. But then... well, let's start with the good.
This book feels like a novella, even though when I checked the page count, it was more like a slim novel. Like Mistral's Kiss, it has the name of one of Merry's lovers, Frost, in the title, which usually means a novella focused somewhat on that character. But Lick of Frost is more like Seduced by Moonlight, another book I thought was one of the strongest in the series: it's basically two stories crammed together, with thin plot lines tying them together but no attempt to introduce all the plot threads at the beginning and attempt to manage them all the way through. This helps avoid a lot of LKH's many issues with pacing.
The first story is about dealing with a lingering plot point from the last book: The Seelie Court has accused three of Merry's bodyguards/lovers of raping one of their women in what are pretty blatantly false charges, and they've gone to the human police to do it. So Merry and her men go to a lawyer's office for a lot of interrogation, followed up by a very public mirror-call with King Taranis that goes badly. Two things stuck out for me about this section: one, I had a revelation about LKH's weird dialogue problem. In most of her dialogue scenes, people ask too many very obvious clarifying questions, and repeat themselves, and say "I don't understand" three hundred times each. Here, the dialogue worked perfectly, because Merry was being interrogated by lawyers. That's it! LKH writes all dialogue scenes like interrogations! The second thing about this section that stood out was that there was absolutely zero sex. The most we get is one scene of Merry using her seduction powers to distract a stubborn doctor while her healer treats her men with magic. I obviously wouldn't be reading this series if I had a problem with sex scenes, but Merry's sex scenes were beginning to cross the line Anita Blake's eventually did, from erotic encounters that made sense in the moment for the characters to "oops, it's been twenty pages, time for another one!" And like with Anita, LKH had become so determined to cram as many sex scenes in as possible that she made up an in-story device to explain it. At least Merry doesn't have a ridiculous physical need for sex like Anita's ardeur, but the idea that satisfying an entire harem and her desperation to get pregnant means that Merry has to have sex with six men a day, as she tells her lawyers, takes a lot of fun out of the whole premise. But here, no one has sex through the whole first storyline, and instead there is a lot of focus on politics, human-fey relations, and personal relationships. In particular, the problem of Merry having very different levels of emotion for the men in her inner circle is coming to the fore, with Merry now acknowledging that she loves Frost, and loves Doyle more, and doesn't love the others as much.
The second half of the story also picks up this thread, focusing on Merry's relationships with Frost, Rhys and Kitto especially. I'm still not a fan of Frost, but I will admit that I loved finally getting his full backstory, and it added a nice romantic element to his relationship with Merry. Rhys was one of my favorite characters from the beginning, and though I knew he was doomed not to be a favorite - heroines of LKH's stories fall for the men the author finds attractive, and those are brooding-but-secretly-damaged alpha males, not guys who are actually any fun - I am beginning to get a little tired of the growing theme of "Rhys really loves Merry, and knows she doesn't love him, but can't stop talking about it in a self-pitying way." Rhys, and his relationship with Merry, got a lot of development in this book and I really wish it didn't seem like a situation that can't end happily for him. As for Kitto... all I'm going to say about that is that I'm glad LKH has made such a point of her characters not being human, and not thinking about relationships and interactions the way humans do, because it makes Kitto's situation and his relationship with Merry a lot more palatable. LKH previously tried a similar "some people just want to be pets" thing in the Anita Blake series and it was not very comfortable.
The real focus of the second half of the book is Merry's political alliance with the goblins, and her agreement to sleep with the twins Holly and Ash to keep it going. In this section, after much negotiation by mirror-call, Holly and Ash finally come to Los Angeles for their night with Merry - and, shockingly, no one has sex there either! You could wonder if this book was ghost-written by someone else, with all the opportunities for sex that arise and aren't taken advantage of. Honestly, it was just as well, because Holly and Ash are creepy as hell, and the more they are in the story, the weirder Merry gets. Its been a theme with Merry since the beginning that she likes rough sex, and some of her lovers might not be suitable as permanent partners because they don't appreciate that side of her - it's a major issue with both Galen and Rhys - but in this book we've suddenly leapt from "Merry likes it rough" to "Merry needs a guard in the room with her because otherwise she might not want to stop until she's been permanently injured." What? What is she, Nathaniel? (Anita Blake joke.) This character element seemingly came from nowhere and made me really happy that the Holly and Ash scene was put off for another book, and replaced, instead, by the most shocking thing of all:
Forward movement on the plot.
That's right. We took some major steps forward on the plot in this book. At least three or four that I can count. Shocking, I know.
Spoilers:
First big plot development: In the first section, we learned that not only is Taranis bat-shit crazy, like to the point of making Andais seem like a sane and stable monarch, but there is a secret cabal of nobles within his court who would like to vote him incompetent (bizarrely, the Seelie Court appears to have a twenty-fifth amendment) and replace him with Merry. This development seemed huge - I couldn't even blame Andais for being freaked out over it, though she didn't need to torture poor Crystall like that - but by the end of the book Merry seemed to be thinking it was a fake-out and wouldn't work. Still, Taranis is definitely going down in this series, and if the two courts are still separate by the end, someone else will sit on his throne. That's something.
Second big plot development: Merry did some sort of major magic that seemingly created a whole new sithen around her - well, actually, Maeve's - house in LA. I'm guessing that what we'll eventually see is Merry creating a new court that combines both Seelie and Unseelie qualities - like, say, accepting everyone but not torturing them - and this is the beginning of that development. But to do this great magic, she needed a sacrifice, and that was inadvertently Frost, who was transformed into the white stag. There is an exactly zero percent chance that Frost is gone forever, but this did add some emotion and gravitas to the moment, and really nicely played on Celtic mythology, so I loved it. Also, probably we'll get at least one book without Frost, so, bonus.
Third big plot development: Merry is pregnant! With twins! Who... somehow have three fathers each! I understand why a lot of reviewers thought this was a cop-out, but look, LKH is all about promoting the polyamorous lifestyle. Merry was never going to end up with one monogamous husband. It seems likely that going forward, the six winners will be her kings and only lovers, and we'll be rid of distractions like Amatheon and Adair and Abeloec. That's a good thing. The six men left are Doyle, who is great; Frost, who is currently a stag so we won't have to deal with him for now; Rhys, who is going to get hurt, but I still love him; Galen, also great, and much more interesting now that he knows how bad he is at politics and is trying to improve the situation; Sholto, who I adore and who is uber-excited to be a dad; and Mistral, who... I don't know, hopefully will get some character development at some point. The story should work a lot better with just these six in the picture.
All of these were great developments, and the book was well-written for the most part, and the sex wasn't ridiculous... so why the lower rating?
In the last few chapters of the book, Merry is abducted from her home by Taranis, and wakes up injured in his sithen. She is very quickly rescued by the conspiracy of Seelie nobles who want to make her queen, aided by her bodyguards. But though she doesn't remember it because she was unconscious, it appears that Merry was raped. And look, I'm not someone who thinks there is no room for rape stories in fantasy. I do think they are annoying prevalent as backstory for female characters, but this isn't backstory, it's part of the ongoing story. And it's possible LKH will handle this with sensitivity going forward. She does a good job with Merry's emotional turmoil in the last chapter as she realizes what has happened to her. And this book definitely represented an improvement in her handling of consent and rape storylines over her previous books: for the first time, Rhys' experience with the goblins is treated as a trauma he needs to deal with slowly and not something he's being unreasonable for getting upset about, and though Lady Caitrin is initially presented as a liar making up a rape accusation, it is eventually made clear that she was presenting the truth as she knew it. This is a big leap up from some of LKH's previous books, where women are constantly lying about rape. So maybe this story will be handled well. But this is a series that started with Merry being raped in the first book and then never mentioned it again, so I don't have high hopes. And the whole thing just seems very unnecessary. Taranis is crazy. He thinks he's the father of Merry's twins about an hour after the rape, even though she's weeks along. He could have thought the same thing even without every having touched her. There was no need to add this element except to have a random sexual assault as part of the story.