2007-10-15
When on a plane ...
... you wind up reading books grabbed at the airport. At least I do, when I've finished off what books I'd brought at the start of the trip.
And thus I wound up reading Barb & J.C. Hendee's Dhampir. With a blurb on the front of "a mix of Lord of the Rings and Buffy the Vampire Slayer," I should have known better. The cover art shows a fantasy-goth chick with an unintentional spinal deformity and her goth-y male sidekick and magicwolf elf-dog, both with similar unusual anatomy, posing on what seems to be the only open water on a frozen lake.
The main character is a half-human, half-vampire woman who was given items of great magical effectiveness against vampires by her apparently self-hating vampire father (before he split, leaving mother and daughter to fend for themselves). Her male companion is a half-elf who had been trained from infancy to be a top-level assassin by his father and his guild, and who was given a magical elf guardian dog (who everybody calls a wolf, but the authors are careful to tell the reader each time this happens that the elf-dog is not a wolf). The half-elf disagreed with his last assassination task, and went AWOL after completing it, resulting in his meeting the female lead when he was picking her pocket -- because he was so inept at anything except assassination he was starving. The three of them then go on the road, doing the kill-the-vampire con game on credulous pseudo-european villages.
Then they start running into real vampires (who are given equally improbable backstories at great length in flashbacks).
As you may have guessed by now, it isn't my cup of tea, though it is a smooth (if predictable) read. It's the first of five books, with more likely in the works.
And thus I wound up reading Barb & J.C. Hendee's Dhampir. With a blurb on the front of "a mix of Lord of the Rings and Buffy the Vampire Slayer," I should have known better. The cover art shows a fantasy-goth chick with an unintentional spinal deformity and her goth-y male sidekick and magic
The main character is a half-human, half-vampire woman who was given items of great magical effectiveness against vampires by her apparently self-hating vampire father (before he split, leaving mother and daughter to fend for themselves). Her male companion is a half-elf who had been trained from infancy to be a top-level assassin by his father and his guild, and who was given a magical elf guardian dog (who everybody calls a wolf, but the authors are careful to tell the reader each time this happens that the elf-dog is not a wolf). The half-elf disagreed with his last assassination task, and went AWOL after completing it, resulting in his meeting the female lead when he was picking her pocket -- because he was so inept at anything except assassination he was starving. The three of them then go on the road, doing the kill-the-vampire con game on credulous pseudo-european villages.
Then they start running into real vampires (who are given equally improbable backstories at great length in flashbacks).
As you may have guessed by now, it isn't my cup of tea, though it is a smooth (if predictable) read. It's the first of five books, with more likely in the works.