Teddypig’s guest review of Savage by Lila Dubois
Paranormal Fantasy ebook published 7 Nov 07 by Liquid Silver Books
Blurb:
Anleeh spent five long years working to forget from where he’d come. No one would imagine that the calm and debonair Lord Justice was once a barbarian warrior who bathed in the blood of his enemies. Terrified of ever losing the control he fought so hard to gain, Anleeh vows never to return to his homeland of Den.
Sheltered all her life in the Temple, Siara longs for adventure. Saddled with grave responsibility due to her studious and steady nature, Siara wants to leave it all behind for a life of great adventure and purpose. When the newly crowned king and queen recruit her as an ambassador to the far off land of Den, she leaps at the opportunity. Her companion, Lord Anleeh, is not so eager.
If they are to succeed Anleeh must not only strip Siara of the trappings of civility, but demand her submission. Anything less than her complete obedience and loyalty will make them vulnerable to attack in a world where fighting and sex are considered close kin. Siara surprises him with not only her strength, but her passion and spirit. They discover exquisite pleasure and unexpected understanding in each other’s arms. Yet, Anleeh hides the truth of what he was from Siara, even as he feels his beast crawling beneath his skin.
Contains: D/s, Spanking, public sex
Read an excerpt. Â
I have to admit to buying this book in part because of Forbidden‘s spectacular cover art created by April Martinez and not just the number of favorable reviews I have read of this series. This book had all sorts of stylistic references to some of my favorite fantasy writers. The Travelogue Fantasy Romance found in the first 75 pages is straight out of classic Andre Norton ~ Year of The Unicorn from her Witch World series . It’s here that he-man Anleeh starts “training” Siara to submit to him adding a whole BDSM dynamic into the budding relationship without the typical leather and chains. After the couples arrival in Den the story changed, though, and started to remind me somewhat of John Norman‘s Gor series with the whole male dominated warrior culture, worshiping the primitive animal nature of man, and the manly man subjugation of woman.
Lila Dubois’ writing is top notch and I was quickly drawn into the story and its characters. My reference to Andre Norton should tell you how much I enjoyed it since this style of writing is what initially got me into reading Romance in the first place. All those early Sci-fi/Fantasy writers tossing Romance elements in liberally with their sword battles and strange new worlds. So this was a very fun read for me. Lila got me involved not so much with the Romance part though, since Siara readily admits right from the start to having already fallen for the big hunk-a-burning-love that is Anleeh and Anleeh eventually admits to himself on the journey to being ever so much more so attracted to Siara. The Romance, let’s face it, is a given the minute the sex starts happening so the main conflicts arise from their arriving in Den.
So in Den with the men, Anleeh, the great warrior, returns all civilized and sissified to this Gor-lite culture that worships only the manliest beastly man. We discover, when Siara talks with his mommy, that Anleeh really ran off to The Land Between the Sea to get away from his daddy and uncle who were all into him becoming this great warrior beast-like killer who ravages their enemies on the battle field. Sorta like how Anleeh starts sexually ravaging Siara in front of the whole Hall of warriors and family. But Siara, she likes it!
Siara on the other hand was raised in prim and proper The Land Between the Sea. So even though Anleeh helps her discover her inner sexy vixen chick she still is not all that keen on the Den idea of justice by female subjugation. Especially when she watches a woman named Allana being beaten with a cat o’ nine tails for having been caught by her husband having an affair. The guy she has the affair with, well he gets nothing, it turns out it is all about the woman’s fault for being sexually impure or something like that. How dare they!
There I was reading a dark dark fantasy with all these angst ridden conflicts which were pretty dang cool seeing as how the hero and heroine’s internal struggles with this society matched up with the whole diplomatic mission they were on. A real “mirrors within mirrors” type of deal with Anleeh seeking to come to terms with his inner psychotic beast of war and Siara coming to terms with some really fucked up male chauvinist pigs in fur pants. Then I started looking at how many pages we had left after the whole travelogue and damn, not many, so I was wondering to myself how Lila was going to resolve all these issues she kept bringing up. They were some pretty nasty issues mind you.
One day after the treaty gets signed just as our now sex crazed couple is getting ready to pack up and head back to The Land Between the Sea there is a call to arms and Anleeh rushes off to fight the bad guys for dear old dad and uncle. He returns a fully raging psychotic beast of war that he feared he would become. But Anleeh, he likes it!
Siara then uses THE POWER OF LURVE to show him what exactly he had been missing about himself all these years. That’s right all his problems were magically solved when he changes into a real beast, so she touches him and BAM he’s a panther…. Hold on! Um, what does this fix if he was upset over being a human just “acting” like a psycho killer beast? So what the hell difference does it make if he can actually turn into a wolf or a panther or a dragon or whatthefuckever? That just means he has real claws. I don’t get this ending! How does simply turning into an actual beast resolve his internal conflicts with acting like a beast in battle with daddy and uncle cheering him on? Am I being dense here? Is it just me?
Oh, and THE POWER OF LURVE also seems to resolve Siara’s conflict as well, so beating a poor woman for adultery is fine because she LURVES Anleeh and she would never ever ever do anything like that. So it does not really matter. *heh*
See how I came up with this Gor thing? I liked this story and all that but it really started to bother me in the end like some sort of immature male sexual fantasy right out of the Conan Coloring Book for Preteen Boys (published by Teddiuspigus Press). I still cannot figure out how turning into a were-dragon and flying off into the sunset fixes all their damn problems.
Grade: C
Join Teddypig over at The Naughty Bits
I’m glad you took one for the team Teddy, cause this book sounds like it would just piss me off to the point that I’d end up doing some serious damage to my laptop when it hit the wall.
Well I should repeat that I really loved Lila’s writing style.
She kept the werewolf romance so symbolic and nuanced that I thought she was going to keep it like that. So when that changed and he actually turned into an actual beast… *sigh*.
I am also not one of those people that absolutely needs every loose end tied up. I just wanted some small direction or simple acknowledgment that these personal issues were still valid.
As I said, the Romance was a sure thing in this story so all these small angst kept me involved and to ignore them while smacking on the HEA was just more *sigh* inducing.
I guess my expectations were peaked by the quality of the writing from the beginning.
I wanted to read Forbidden, but never got around to it. I can’t decide if this would make a good guilty pleasure read or inspire great rage in me. Hmmm…
From The Dean’s Desk:
The Dean is concerned that perhaps the reviewer did not actually read all of the text but only skimmed for the sex bits. If only the reviewer had actually bothered to read and understand the strand of cultural identity that Ms. DuBois was setting up, the ethnocentric comments leveled regarding what are clearly cultural norms and activities would have been either set in context or eliminated.
The Dean finds it annoying when authors work hard to not play to western European stereotypes, are then rebuked by those who cannot carry their scholarship out of the classroon and into some actual application. Ms DuBois is to be commended for consciously side stepping the problem that many writers commit when they impose current time and culture- specific norms of morality and conduct onto what is clearly a storyline that is not.
The dialogue is intense and necessary for plot points (as opposed to just getting characters to the next sex scene), the imagry is detailed and rich, the editing smooth and useful, and the cover acceptable, although not at the level of Forbidden. The Dean was more than satisfied with this offering and was left with no unanswered questions.
The Dean suggests that the reviewer perhaps confine himself to those genres with which he is familiar (and apparently only comfortable) with the conventions of the genre. On the other hand, perhaps actual scholarship should be applied in order to broaden the reviewer’s literary base. The Dean suggests the collected works of Niven, Brandbury, and other actual masters of science fiction.
Huh. Interesting approach for an RFG.
Sorry Dean I disagree.
I count Andre Norton as an “actual master” of science fiction and also one of the first women to succeed as a writer in that genre.
From The Dean’s Desk:
How entirely quaint of you to disagree with The Dean and yet offer no additional evidence of your contention. Scholarship, dear child, is what is necessary here if you aspire to review genre writing.
The Dean