wolffyluna

I’m combining two books here, due to only getting 20 pages through one (though for different reasons from last time!) and one not actually being a romance novel, unless you have a weird definition of ‘romance’ and ‘novel’.

This is an urban novel about vampires in arranged marriages. And okay, so some of these complaints might just be because I picked up the second book in the series: but good god the worldbuilding.

So, the first 20 pages is our Leading Man going to a bachelor party with friends at a vampire groupie club, followed by “As You Know Bob”s about the world. But this exposition doesn’t give you the ‘whys’, and often raises far more questions that it answers.

To explain what I mean, I’ll give an example where the author succeeded in worldbuilding and gave you enough hooks to work out what was going on yourself: Leading Man is a born vampire, as opposed to a human who was turned, and this puts him at extra risk from the vampire slavers (yes, there are vampire slavers. With an ~eeeeevil lab~). Why? He doesn’t say. But, we have enough implications, eg born vampires are kinda rare, are quite different from turned ones, and the slavers don’t get how the work, that we can make reasonable assumptions. They’re rare and poorly understood, Evil Lab wants more test subjects to understand how they work. Makes sense.

EXCEPT THE CONCEPT OF VAMPIRE SLAVERY DOESN’T. Like, the character lampshades that he doesn’t understand how this whole slaver sitch happened, BUT WHY IS THERE VAMPIRE SLAVERY. WHY DO PEOPLE WANT VAMPIRE SLAVES. CONSIDERING THIS IS THE CONTEMPORARY USA, WHY ARE PEOPLE SO OKAY WITH SLAVERY-THAT-CALLS-ITSELF-SLAVERY. Also, if vampires are marginalised and distrusted (as one would assume with vampire slavery) WHY ARE RICH PEOPLE OKAY WITH THE WELL KNOWN VAMPIRE CLUB BEING IN THEIR NEIGHBOURHOOD^*. The author makes no attempts to justify this at all.

And like, I can come up with plausible-to-me explanations of vampire slavery, but they are depressing and inevitably a comment on the flaws of American culture, which isn’t quite right for a paranormal romance? Though probably pretty reasonable for a pLOT REVOLVING AROUND VAMPIRE SLAVERY.

And so I stopped reading.

^* The author explains why the vampire club is in a posh area with ‘because posh areas are less policed, and the rich people don’t care.’ Which, why don’t the rich people care???

This isn’t a romance novel, but it’s an interesting piece of non-fiction. It’s a look at the genetic evidence of evolution, with some sidebars about ‘why are people okay with DNA evidence in forensics, but aren’t convinced by the DNA evidence of evolution.’ And it’s an interesting look at the nitty gritty of how evolution works, from ‘how do mutations happen,’ ‘how do mutations spread through a population’ and ‘how does time and natural selection play into this’. And Carroll also goes through some distinctive pieces of evidence of evolution, from mutations that keep repeating themselves in many different species because they keep getting selected for, to genes that do not mutate across domains because they are so important that selection hammers down mutations, to fossil genes (which are what happens when a trait stops being a selective advantage, so nothing ‘punishes’ accumulated errors.) It’s interesting and pretty cool.

...I also appreciate it, because it has some beautiful Academic Shade(TM). Directed at none other than Stephen Jay Gould, which is brave. (tl;dr for the shade: Gould has this idea that if you ‘rewound life’s tape’, the same things wouldn’t evolve each time, and you’d get different results. Carroll points out that there are some mutations that are so good, that despite them occurring randomly, show up in multiple unrelated species, because they are so awesome. Ipso facto, evolution can and does repeat itself, take that Gould! (Like, he actually quotes the life’s tape thing. It was definite shade.)