Book Review - Alexis Hall's Iron and Velvet
Published by: Riptide Publishing
Publication Date: December 14th, 2013
Format: Kindle, 254 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)
Kate Kane stays away from vampires. Sadly they don't stay away from her. After a disastrous teenage romance with the sparkly Patrick she has learned many things. One is Patrick will never understand that she's gay and will forever leave creepy drawings on her pillow of her sleeping. Two is that you don't work for vampires. Especially if it's a vampire prince who is sex on legs. Which Julian Saint-Germain, the Prince of Cups, definitely is. But Kate's a P.I. and a P.I. has to pay the bills, especially if your partner up and got killed on you, and the vampires are willing to pay her the "I don't work for vampires" rate. So she agrees to take a look at their problem. Their problem is a dead werewolf in the alley behind one of Julian's clubs, The Velvet. The werewolf in question is Andrew J.H. Vane-Tempest, who happened to be dating the club's drag queen. He's been drained of blood, but not in a vampiric way. Which makes Kate think that this is political. Shit, she really hates politics. But she's willing to play if they're willing to pay and off she goes to track down the local alpha werewolf, Tara Vane-Tempest, who just happens to be a lingerie model in the middle of a shoot. Now this would be one of the "perks" of the job. The downsides being; being in the middle of a war between vampires, werewolves, and mages, having to deal with so many exes it's almost ridiculous, evil ghostly spirits, oh, and the fact that her mother is the immortal embodiment of an abstract concept making Kate an honest-to-God faery princess, running out of booze, not having money to replace the booze, and inevitably dying because of some stupid job she agreed to. But she is a beloved daughter who will be sorely missed. Though as she delves deeper into the mysterious death of Andrew J.H. Vane-Tempest the inevitable happens, the bodies start to pile up. But Julian doesn't seemed concerned, Julian's only concern seems to be getting into Kate's pants. She plies her with pudding and the past. Being eight-hundred years old means that Julian has quite the history, especially as she was a demon-hunting ninja nun for the Order of St. Agrippina before she was turned. Or as Kate calls her, Sister Julian, Pudding Nun. And oddly enough, Kate's growing quite attached to her pudding nun. The problem is, that pudding nun's life is in danger and if they want a future together they are going to have to fight some serious shit. As in sewer battle.
This is a review I've drafted over and over again in my head in the hopes of getting it right once I wrote it down. One reason is that when I'm not enjoying a book I'm reading I try to pinpoint why, and this inevitably leads to me marshaling my thoughts in a manner that might look like a loose outline for a review with specific phrases that strike me or possibly just random words that after the fact don't even make sense to me. The other reason is that my friend who recommended this series to me recommended it to me with the caveat that it's one of her favorites. And I don't know about you but when I don't like a book that someone I care about loves, it feels like I'm betraying them so I have to be very clear and concise as to why I feel how I feel. Iron and Velvet has an identity crisis. It doesn't know what it wants to be; noir, urban fantasy, romcom, parody, pastiche, mystery, vampire romance, and on and on. Now a master of the craft can weave all these disparate genres into a beautiful patchwork quilt where concepts and characters that shouldn't work together somehow magically do. Alexis Hall is no master. This is his first book and therefore we are left with scraps that switch from genre to genre like a car with a clunky transmission. And yes, I'm mixing metaphors, but if I was going to be tonally inconsistent, well, this is the book review to do it in. Because this identity crisis of what this book is bleeds into every aspect making it ill defined except for the odd specificity when he's lifting from other source material. Alexia Hall is a magpie unable to create a cohesive whole. You wouldn't be wrong to think Kate Kane is quoting Hugh Grant in Notting Hill for no reason I can figure out, and her entire backstory being the plot to Twilight? You're right there as well. And while it's funny to see that the entire plot of Twilight, all those hundreds and hundreds of pages, can be easily reduced to a couple of paragraphs, this cribbing of Kate's backstory from another source is lazy. Why not merge different vampire teen romance tropes into something unique and original? Because until the sparkling happened, the creepy drawings on the pillow could have been from any obsessed vampire. Therefore I was always kept at a distance from Bella, I mean Kate, because at no time did she attempt to become someone new and original. At least we know she was a "Beloved daughter. Sorely missed." Because she kept mentioning it over and over again. Was there no editing on this book? Because an editor would have said this book needed another pass. It needed some originality and some sense of place. It's just so much surface that after awhile you realize if you're trying to find depth, or why the apartment and the office move around in time in space, that you're never going to find it because there isn't any there there. I'm hoping this is all because it was a first book because otherwise I'm in for a long slog.
Post a Comment