Ramble Review: Shadowflame by Dianne Sylvan

Foreword:

Rambles are like reviews, only longer, much more personal (because they’re stories that I’ve read many times over many years) and they contain a ton of spoilers because part of the idea is talking about every little aspect of the book that strikes me. So be warned if you plan on reading further.

Also, since this is about the second book in a series you might want to read my ramble of the first book, Queen of Shadows.

Onward:

In high school I had a handful of teachers that pushed me to write and enter contests with my stories. I won a few, lost many and loved most of it. Once I left high school I wanted to keep it up but had a hard time finding encouragement (and you know, someone who actually took the time to read my work) and a forum for building writing skills. (Because what you’re taught in high school and even college isn’t often what holds true once you’re on your own trying to start a fiction career.)

I ended up in the fan fiction world, which is where I first read Dianne Sylvan, among others, many terrible, some wonderful. Dianne’s in the latter category. I almost hate bringing this up, except that as Queen of Shadows and Shadowflame are rewrites of these fan fics that I fell in love with a decade ago part of my rambling is comparing the new version to the ones I first fell in love with.

As I said before Shadowflame is the second in the series and it’s this book where the original story veered straight out into full on original territory, which is one reason I liked it. After reading the new official version there’s a big hole in my adoration for this book.

If you’ve read my ramble of Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour you’re familiar with how sometimes I have favorite books, but only reread parts of them. Ever other year or so I reread the history of the Mayfair witches in TWH, but only that part. Shadowflame is going to end up being a reverse of that, where I reread the book, but skip the big part in the middle. With that in mind, let me squee a bit.

I adore Sylvan’s prose. I like literally how she put sentences together, the cadence and voice that her writing has. It’s one of those books where I know the story itself is more common than I usually fall for, but Sylvan has some damned good prose and character building and world building chops that fully distract me from the bits I dislike.

In Shadowflame David and Miranda have been married three months. They’re both struggling in the face of challenges, of course. The vampire world knows that in the time between a mating and the solidification of a Pair’s power they’re vulnerable. And since Miranda is a brand new vampire, not an old powerful one that means if one of the Pair’s enemies can take her out the bond between them will destroy David as well. So they’re facing challenges, still trying to enforce the no-killing-humans policy that makes them unpopular in the Shadow World and to top things off an assassin tried to take Miranda out after a show one night.

Here’s what this book does right. The emotional content is fabulous as Miranda adjusts to not being human anymore. She tries to hold on to her few human friends (funny how we’ve never heard about her family again) but not only does that make them targets, Miranda is also changing as she’s forced to rule in a world that’s super powered, dark and violent.

Miranda also doesn’t just bam overnight become a perfect vampire queen. She’s got a big boost of power compared to other vampires but she does still have to not only learn to use her powers, but learn to manipulate the politics of the Shadow World, which includes proving to the other vampires that she’s just as hard to deal with as the Prime, David.

Also the idea that unlike other Pairs David and Miranda both work toward making Miranda an equal, not just a supporting character addresses the fact that these are immortal creatures who grew up in far more inequal times. And then there’s Prime Deven and his ″Queen″ Jonathan, characters who work well as a couple, as vampire lords and as friends to Miranda and David. (Bear with me, those of you who have read this book, because I’ll get to that.)

The plot too, is largely well-paced with exciting violenty bits well placed between political and relationship drama.

Except…

I’m not a fan or mated romances. There’s no challenge, and in fact they’re even scary. I once wrote half a novella about a couple permanently mated to each other who grew to hate each other quite a bit because I cannot imagine being unable to ever evolve as a person and develop other relationships with people.

With this book Sylvan confronts that idea head on, as she did in the original manuscript. However the execution here just fails. In the original Devin and David have a building, exciting back and forth that ends up in a relationship with Miranda’s blessing (and outright encouragement). In Shadowflame David presents to the reader nothing but bitterness at Devin abandoning him without a word for Jonathan all those years ago. David gives no sign of being tempted by Devin, Devin gives no signs of seducing David. Miranda gives hints that she knows the two are tempted to sleep together, but it comes off as borderline paranoia.

Except it’s forshadowing because out of the blue—with very little sexual tension in the scene—the two fall into bed together and David purposefully cheats on Miranda. Because it is cheating, period, because there is no consent on Miranda’s part. But she knows, because of their magical link.

And if that’s not bad enough when she confronts him Miranda beats the crap out of David. This is presented as a normal reaction, maybe because they’re emotionally amped up vampires, or maybe because it doesn’t matter if Miranda gives David a black eye because he’ll heal in a few minutes. But it’s not okay. As a reader the cheating and the assault is not okay. Sadly the latter is never addressed after the immediate scene in which it occurs.

The cheating however? Well all action, even the attacks by the mysterious would-be assassin stop for weeks ″in book time″ so that David can whine and complain about hurting Miranda and Miranda can coldly pretend she doesn’t care and doesn’t really love David any way. Some emotional reaction is totally expected, but considering David didn’t appear to be on the fence with his relationship with Devin in the first place and he doesn’t try to make anything up to Miranda, there is no ″coverage″ of him rebuilding their relationship, there’s just him longing for her and missing her and him beating himself up over his actions…it’s just too off.

But luckily their magic requires them to make physical contact and David conveniently gets magically poisoned by the assassin (one night when doing the broody Angel moping on a rooftop thing). So Miranda suddenly realizes that for good or ill she’s stuck with him (and really does love him), and David is of course, much less emo once his wife starts sleeping with him again.

Which could be tolerable if the whole aspect of them being soul bound mates and stuck no matter what was brought up again, in a sense that the magic forces them to forgive each other (like via a magical addiction to each other) or in the aspect that Miranda has to face closer to the beginning of the book, that being the fact that they’re not human and therefore have to evolve past human emotions and societal influences. But it’s not. It’s just over, they make up and move on with no real other study of what happened.

And of course it turns out the assassin is a member of a super secret organization of vampire secret agents and the only one with an info dump, I mean, information on her is the man David cheated with, Devin. Who has also been pulling strings to hook David and Miranda up since he’s known all along that they would end up soul-mated. So Miranda and David are forced to forgive Devin too because they wouldn’t be alive or together without him. Supposedly.

Once all the emotional wangst is brushed under the rug by faulty logic they can focus on the person trying to kill them, who is, quite possibly the least developed character in the whole series so far. That bad guy is a one trick pony who has about as much logic behind her actions as David’s cheating, Miranda’s forgiving and Devin’s big reveal. In fact the bad guy’s motivation is directly related to Miranda and David’s major angst. Whether the author meant it or not, it’s real easy to read into this book that people who forgive each other even for nasty behavior manage to get over it and successfully beat their problems, but people who can’t magically let it go are poisoned and driven crazy by it and run around killing people.

It really is like Sylvan continues the great momentum from Queen of Shadow then stops two thirds into the book to drop a bunch of stuff that makes no sense, then realizes there’s a assassination plot to wrap up and not enough room to do it under word count. The book gets better after that huge hiccup, but never quite recovers, sacrificing what could have been a quality bad guy/death plot for all that relationship drama.

Also there’s Cora, who is one of my all time favorite characters. In the original fic (and this one) she finds the strength, despite being raped, abused, held hostage for a decade, being starved and emotionally tormented by a king vampire, to just walk out of her circumstances (barely able to walk in the first place) and find a better life for herself. I so totally identified with Cora and loved seeing how, like Faith and David helped Miranda recover from her madness in the first book, Miranda helped Cora be brave enough to buck her abuse and trauma and become something better.

Only like the assassin plot gets dropped for drama after initially being part of a major event Cora just kinda gets forgotten in the halls of the Haven until her prince arrives and she’s tidily swept off into the ″tied up plots″ pile.

Finally, I want to point out an observation not of this book, but in how this book was received. There’s no doubt that there’s some pretty big things that readers have taken a valid issue with in this book. However it’s important to keep in mind that somewhere along the way Queen of Shadows got billed BY READERS as a paranormal romance, which implies happily ever after. Except that the author and the publisher have sold this series as an urban fantasy for a reason. It is not a romance. The original fic goes places that romance readers will not like (like this book). It is a little unfair that readers are so outraged, not just because of the bits of the book I outlined, but because they put the book in the PNR section despite the author and publisher’s outside information of plotlines to come and now much of the outrage comes from Shadowflame not being a romance book. But it wasn’t in the first place.

While, again, there are very good reasons to not like this book, it’s not fair to make with the angry against the author for not meeting romance readers’ needs when this isn’t a romance book.

So, that’s my ramble on Shadowflame. Have you read it?