A Shiver of Light

*Book source ~ Library

Title ~ A Shiver of Light

Series ~ Merry Gentry, #9

Author ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

Publisher ~ Berkley

Published ~ 3 June 2014

Genre ~ Fantasy

Pages ~ 384

My Rating ~ 1 bite and a nibble

Princess Merry Gentry is very pregnant and more than ready for the babies to make an appearance when she finds out she’s having triplets instead of twins. What?! Before the news can really sink in she goes into labor a few weeks earlier than expected and the next thing she knows she has three babies and she’s alone in her body again. However, her troubles are far from over. King Taranis is still bat shit crazy and claiming paternity of one or all of the babes, Queen Andais is cutting a bloody swath through her court, refugees from faerie flee to Merry and her men and they need a steady plentiful income to support everyone. It’s just another day/week/month in the life of a Princess of Faerie. Will they all survive?

I’m not sure where to start in how bad this book truly is. Were it not for a kernel of corn of interesting plot lending a bit of color to this big brown steamy pile of shit I would have given this book a DNF rating. Andais the bat shit crazy aunt wants to visit the babies and Taranis the bat shit crazy uncle claiming paternity to at least one baby are the two things that kept me going. In particular, I wanted to see how they would deal with Taranis. In the end I couldn’t really decide if the climax was worth my time. Probably not considering my favorite of Merry’s men dies and another loses his immortality. Really?! I slogged through this torturous writing for that? GAH!

Regurgitation, reiteration and repetition are definitely a problem for LKH. I’ve seen it happen with more frequency in the Anita Blake series, but seriously? This book wins the bloody prize. Let me list my reasons as to why.

1. Repetition of fact dumping ~ I lost track of the number of times the reader is told about:
1. the nails the soldiers wear
2. what everyone looks like
3. who each of Merry’s men were before they lost most of their powers and started getting them back
4. who Andais and Taranis are, what court they rule and what their powers are
5. everyone’s powers are listed multiple times in case we didn’t see it the first time
6. how the Goddess and God (or Consort) have blessed Merry and her men because the arrogant Sidhe won’t listen
7. how Merry likes it during oral sex
8. the names of the babies and why those names were chosen only to not have them called those names at all in the epilogue

2. Crying ~ Seriously. Merry spends more time crying than almost anything else and blaming it on baby hormones.

3. Conversations ~ Stilted and useless, for the most part
1. including a person’s name in every fucking sentence
2. including a person’s nickname in every fucking sentence
3. putting ‘my’ or ‘our’ in front of people’s names in every fucking sentence (ex. my Merry, our Killing Frost)
4. having conversations about shit that everyone already knows about and lived through as if it’s all new info to the people involved

4. Old favorites ~ LKH has many words, phrases and types of scenes she likes to repeat over and over again. The one I’m most sick of? Spill. Hair spills, clothes spill, people spill into a room and guys spill instead of cumming. Find another word, for fuck’s sake!

5. Need mo’ money ~ Can someone tell me why they need more money? And why they keep talking about it? Andais and Taranis don’t have an income, right? How do they support their courts? The sithen, right? Merry has her own slice of faerie, so why do they need money?

I hope I’ve hit the high points. It’s been a couple days since I read this and I’ve tried very, very hard to wipe it out of my memory. If I had to list what pissed me off the most about this book then I’d have to say all of #1 and #3 of my list. I’m 46-yrs-old. I read, on average, about 250 books a year. I’m no dabbler in the reviewer world. I like to think I have a good handle on how well-written or shoddy a book is. IMHO, this is just piss poor writing. Pages upon pages of filler wasting my time and frustrating the shit out of me. This book is pathetic.

To sum it all up, this book is a mess. It’s not even a hot mess. It was like LKH phoned it in over a static-filled cell connection while she was taking a dump after hot wing night. What it needs is an editor who has the power to actually EDIT. And then there’s the ending. I mentioned my favorite of her men is killed. Pointlessly, I felt. But whatever. Should there be another book, I won’t be reading it.

LKH, you may think you know what you are doing and your sycophants see no problem licking your ass, but they are doing you no favors when they worship your every word as gospel handed down from on-high. It’s shit. Plain and simple. You built a wonderful world that I couldn’t wait to read more about with each book, but then it degenerated into…this. Your publisher should be embarrassed that they actually printed this garbage. I never used to have you on the same list (Shit Writing) as Stephenie Meyer and EL James, but this book has just landed you on that list. And that makes me sad.