Friday, March 2, 2012

Taming the Scotsman by Kinley MacGregor

This series is pretty good (Brotherhood/MacAlister), though it's pretty clear what kind of man Kinley MacGregor, also known as Sherilyn Kenyon, likes--tall, generally dark, and brooding. She's just as good as Jim Butcher when it comes to beating down the cutie. My only problem is that I'm worried that her brooding guys will lose some of their personality when they're tamed by the lady--will they be just as fierce 5 years later? But anyway.

I'm sitting here laughing my butt off because the big, bad, and sexy hero just handed his sword off to the chatterbox heroine who it turns out is quite the swordswoman so that she can fight the girl who helped kidnap them--while he's just standing there watching the fight with the 4 men who round out the kidnappers instead of beating them up easily while the only 2 swords available are occupied by the women.

For the most part I've been enjoying the books by this author and her real name (series is "Dark-Hunter"). They're fun romances where there's actually an enemy besides poor communication skills (which just annoys me and is why I've avoided romances like the plague before) which is right up my alley. The problem is that you can tell when an author writes romances and when they write epics that just happen to have romance in them--Kenyon's fight scenes are greatly lacking. It was very smart of her to invent a conviently blind character for one of the books. 'Course, I'm the first to say that a fight scene goes into too much detail--we really don't need to have 3 pages of battle for a great book. Butcher's background in martial arts means that he knows exactly what he's talking about when he describes, for instance how one man can take on 12 men singlehandedly. I did a year of Aikido with a friend teaching and I picked up enough to know how beautiful this fighting style is--using the weight of your opponent to throw them across the room. Kenyon glances over these fights, letting other characters talk while the fighting "just happens." I mean, if these women are as good with a sword as she claims, then why don't her hero and heroine ever practice against each other? I'm reading The Warrior now and I think that Cat and Lochlan should have an epic sword fight that ends up with them rolling on the ground kissing for the first time. They have such an antagonistic relationship the fireworks should be quite entertaining.

She also has the problem of the seriously anti-climatic resolution. I mean sure, sometimes the long, overly complicated conclusion is unncessary--sometimes you just need to push the big baddie into the convient fiery pit or shoot the missle into the 2 meter wide hole in the otherwise indestructible Death Star. But sometimes you want more than "I'm a goddess, see me just will you to death, even though I decided not to, and or for some other reason couldn't, for the past 300 pages" though granted, I'm now thinking that she has some overarching plan in mind...or at least I hope. I mean, Butcher is very good at leaving lose ends that come to bite Dresden on the ass three books later.

But all in all Kenyon is a very smart writer. I read the first two books and decided that even though the climaxes were dull, I had to find out more about the bad-ass leader "Acheron", so I decided that I'd read the series until his story got told. Well, one trip to goodreads.com told me that that would not be the 4th or 5th book, as I thought, but rather the 15th--I probably will read all the series because I found some really intreguing spoilers (I've found that sometimes spoilers make for better reading because I know what to look for and forward to).

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