I've been watching Felicia Day's online book club,
Vaginal Fantasies, and their last pick was
Gabriel's Ghost by
Linnea Sinclair, which I read a few days after they discussed it. So I was partly primed to beware of creepiness from their conversation, but then the reason I hadn't finished it yet was because I was so annoyed by the hero's careful hoarding of the truth.
From his first appearance on the page, Sully spent so much time boasting about how bodacious he
was is and how he's sure to win the body of Chaz (the heroine) that he never had time to deliver any useful information (which monsters were hunting them, what modifications he's made to the star ship drive, small details like that). Then when a crisis happens, he's suddenly all "no time to talk -- just trust me!" When Chaz complains about this, he gets all sad, tells her Another Dark Secret or insists that he can never reveal his Dark Secrets, so she has to comfort him, which uses up all the time they could spend bringing her up to speed on whatever arbitrary decisions he's made lately.
Also, he calls her "Chazzie-girl" and spends all his time ignoring her and belittling her in between his useless professions of love and her constant displays of competence. Well, relative competence. And I hadn't even gotten to his true awfulness, which the book club complained of. It wasn't so much that he kept secrets from her -- he was honest about the fact that he couldn't bear any questions and Chaz accepted that. But he would do things to her and conceal that, and then be all angsty when she got mad and make her comfort him for being so sad about being a tool. Yick!
I have enjoyed later Sinclair sci-fi romances, but in this one I felt Chaz ended up with a deeply untrustworthy man.
No comments:
Post a Comment