Honeyed Words
Sarah Beauhall Series: Book Two
Lesbian protagonist. Urban fantasy.
. Not Recommended.
June 18, 2012 | Revid 511 < prev | next >
Sarah Beauhall, apprentice blacksmith and dragon slayer, is enjoying a well earned vacation in Vancouver with her girlfriend, Katie. She surprises Katie with backstage passes to her favorite band and during the after-party, Sarah witnesses an assault on the lead singer and unsuccessfully tries to prevent his kidnapping. The kidnappers escape with the singer, but Sarah knows who—or rather what—they are; dwarves.
This is the second installment of the Sarah Beauhall series and it certainly reads like the second of a trilogy, with tons of filler material and plot threads that go nowhere. Sarah acquires a racy new motorcycle and a pet kobold, makes herself chainmail, flirts with a witch, and mentors some teenage elves. Oh, and battles a ghost. The plot was a rehash of the first novel and a mishmash of Norse mythology. Most of the secondary characters seemed contrived.
The angst Sarah experienced in the first novel is gone—which is a shame, because it left me with nothing to recommend except the kobold. I did rather like the kobold.
The book was interesting enough. I wouldn't be so hard on it except for a genuinely icky element—a brother-sister pair of adolescent elves who spy on Sarah by watching her through mirrors. The brother more so than the sister; he watches Sarah through the bathroom mirror when she showers and through the wardrobe mirror while she makes love to Katie. At the end of the book, Sarah discovers the young man's voyeurism and shrugs it off with "boys are like that."
I was mystified by her reaction. Throughout two books Sarah was portrayed as fiercely protective of her boundaries. It seemed odd that she would casually dismiss a peeping tom. It seems more in line with her character to rip out his Adam's apple through his eye sockets.
No woman I've ever met would ever be so nonchalant about this kind of privacy invasion. Then it struck me that this book was written by a man. Oh. Perhaps the first novel was written from a carefully studied point of view. But Honeyed Words consists of a whole lot of sexual wish fulfillment. I thought it was in poor taste.
There's a third book in this series; Forged in Fire. I'm not particularly inclined to read it but if someone else would like to review it, I'd like to hear how it turns out.
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