Book Review: The Shadow Queen
Mar. 12th, 2009 01:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
isaacsapphireThe Shadow Queen by Anne Bishop is indulgent joy, tying together the Trilogy with The Invisible Ring AND integrating the Ephemra books into the Black Jewels world. Seriously, this has to be the only prose I know of with fanservice.
I’m taking editing this semester, and I used the first book of the series for my style sheet so I spent a lot of time looking at the fine details of the grammar and punctuation and such. They’ve got yelling in regular uppercase letters instead of small caps for this book. The small caps in previous books were a bit of an oddity, but I liked them and plan on requesting them for my own books, as they are easier to read and look neater on a page.
And they finally include a place guide in the beginning of this book, which was probably needed five books ago, but better late than never.
The sheer number of squee-worthy moments in this book and the quality of them… yeah. Like this:
“Daemon? Have you kissed men before?”
“I have.” Sadi’s mouth curved in a predatory smile. “Some of them even survived the experience.”
“Have you taught other boys to kiss the way you just taught me?”
The smile softened, and there was an odd expression in Daemon’s gold eyes. “I taught Jared. And Blaed.”
And here I’d been scared that Shadow Queen was going to Joss my Daemon/Jared fic before I’d even finished it.
There are a bunch of other very pretty moments, including some good fic-starters, but the scene where Daemon goes to Saetan all broken up about essentially having a flash-back and afraid that he’d scared and hurt Jaenelle. OMG, that was just… yeah. Dead-of-happiness fangirl over here. The S&M possibilities for this universe are just way too tempting, especially when most of them are at least half cannon.
Seriously, is or is not fanfiction for this series redundant? There’s just such a sense of… I’m not sure exactly how to describe it, but ‘fangirl-ness’ or ‘shojo-ness’ both come to mind as possible answers. Also ‘slash-able-as-hell-ness’.
So this has totally re-energized my desire to write fic for this universe.
I’m taking editing this semester, and I used the first book of the series for my style sheet so I spent a lot of time looking at the fine details of the grammar and punctuation and such. They’ve got yelling in regular uppercase letters instead of small caps for this book. The small caps in previous books were a bit of an oddity, but I liked them and plan on requesting them for my own books, as they are easier to read and look neater on a page.
And they finally include a place guide in the beginning of this book, which was probably needed five books ago, but better late than never.
The sheer number of squee-worthy moments in this book and the quality of them… yeah. Like this:
“Daemon? Have you kissed men before?”
“I have.” Sadi’s mouth curved in a predatory smile. “Some of them even survived the experience.”
“Have you taught other boys to kiss the way you just taught me?”
The smile softened, and there was an odd expression in Daemon’s gold eyes. “I taught Jared. And Blaed.”
And here I’d been scared that Shadow Queen was going to Joss my Daemon/Jared fic before I’d even finished it.
There are a bunch of other very pretty moments, including some good fic-starters, but the scene where Daemon goes to Saetan all broken up about essentially having a flash-back and afraid that he’d scared and hurt Jaenelle. OMG, that was just… yeah. Dead-of-happiness fangirl over here. The S&M possibilities for this universe are just way too tempting, especially when most of them are at least half cannon.
Seriously, is or is not fanfiction for this series redundant? There’s just such a sense of… I’m not sure exactly how to describe it, but ‘fangirl-ness’ or ‘shojo-ness’ both come to mind as possible answers. Also ‘slash-able-as-hell-ness’.
So this has totally re-energized my desire to write fic for this universe.
