#31: The Fire King by Marjorie Liu

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

This may be the first romance novel to feature a heroine with one arm. Then again, Liu may also have the first one-eyed badass amoral mercenary mom. And an ancient dragon grandma who rules an entire species. They’re here too.

Soria is an agent of Dirk & Steele who lost her arm a year again. She’s lived in seclusion ever since, learning how to function without her dominant hand, and also dealing with a murder she committed in the events connected to losing her arm. Her power is the ability to understand and communicate in any language, even ones no one has ever heard before. When the shapeshifters, allies of Dirk & Steele, open a 3,000 year old tomb and find that the body inside is still alive, Soria is contacted to communicate with him, as he speaks a language no one recognizes. The man, Karr, is a shapeshifter different from any others they know of, and seems to instinctively hate shapeshifters.

Before Soria can learn why, however, the camp is attacked, and Soria and Karr end up on the run through the desert.

This book was less focused on the romance than other Dirk & Steel books (maybe because of the urban fantasies Liu is writing now?) though the D&S books, in general, tend to be less romance-centric than the average romance novel. For the most part, though, this book focused on the mythology and the history of the shapeshifters.

( spoilers )

25: "Love Walked In" by Marisa de los Santos

[alias_sqbr]

I keep meaning to do a review of this and not getting around to it.

So, in short: I quite enjoyed this book. It's sweet and light, about love in all it's forms (well, many of it's forms) family and children and romance and marriage.

A number of implausible things happen to keep the plot going, the first few I could take as part of the setup but after a while it took away from the believability of the story a bit for me. Still, this is the first non-genre book I've read in a while (there's romance, but it's not a Romance afaict) and I really liked it.

Read some less perfunctory reviews here.