Grade: B

First thing’s first: I liked this book. The prose is clunky, the dialogue is awkward and expositional, and the pacing drags in the middle, but I felt compelled to read and finish it. The writing is vaguely amateurish at best, but I couldn’t put it down. Is it the story? No, because this is basically a Buffy rip-off, complete with the Chosen One, the Watchers (Guardians), and the humans who are oblivious to this battle between good and evil. In short, it’s Buffy with a black girl instead of an anorexic white girl. As if that’s not enough, the heroine is stupidly stubborn, some of the mythology didn’t make sense to me, and the head Guardian is freakishly Mary Sue, but it kept me reading. Why? Well, I can sense that L.A. Banks is trying to do something cool here, something big, and I want to be there when it happens. Fuck Buffy, fuck Anita Blake… there’s a new vampire huntress in town and her name is Damali Richards.What I enjoyed most about this book is the atmosphere. The hip-hop world mixed with the urban jungle that is East L.A. and a healthy dollop of the supernatural? I’ve never read anything like it. These people aren’t rich white folks or simple country folks who are thrust into situations that they can’t control, so wackiness ensues and shit. They are hard-core salt of the earth folks who aren’t necessarily good citizens with pristine clean police records. They carry guns, sell drugs, do drugs, prostitute themselves for drugs, maybe one of them has even shot a man in Reno just to watch him die… whatever, some of these people are just really bad. But some of them are just folks who are trying to survive and yet Banks deftly characterizes them as people you pass on the street everyday. Vampires, werewolves, demons, Neteru… they’re all real. There is no naïve single mother gets saved by a handsome CEO; everyone in this story have had hard-knocked lives and are just struggling to survive through the day.

This brings us to the heroine, Damali Richards. She is strong, brave, and an all-around asskicker. Sure, she’s a pain in the ass because she won’t listen to her Guardians who know better. Like a young buck (not doe), she just wants to go-go-go and attack, even without knowing all she can about her enemies. But she is not stupid. She’s running on instinct and only doing what she was born and raised to do. She is growing stronger and faster everyday and her Guardians are becoming more of a liability to her when they’re supposed to be helping her. Damali can be stubborn to the point of obstinacy, but she is also loyal and fiercely protective of those she loves. This is actually one of her biggest flaws because one of her loves is…

Drug dealer/thug 4 lyf/Scarface wannabe Carlos Rivera. When Damali was fifteen years old, Carlos was the love of her life, but since Damali has to lead a righteous life, she and Carlos were doomed to fail. And let me just get this out once and for all: Carlos is not a good guy. As a drug dealer, he preys on the weak-minded souls of society just so he can afford to live in a nice house, drive a nice gar, and wear nice clothes. In short, Carlos does not want to be poor, so he turns to a life of crime. He also wants to move his family out of the barrio, but they don’t want a cent of his blood money. When it all comes down to it, Carlos is ruthlessly ambitious and he will do anything, run over anyone, to get to his goal. The only thing “pure” about him is his love for Damali, but he can’t allow himself to pursue her because he believes that she deserves a better life.

Now if this book had been only about Damali and Carlos, I would have slapped an A on this fucker and called it a day. But that ain’t gonna happen. You see, this book isn’t just a romance, but more of a paranormal urban fantasy hybrid. There’s a lot of shit going on in this book that if you didn’t have the patience, you’d need a chart to make sense of it all. Like what the fuck is up with the Planets Lining Up bullshit? There’s astronomy, native American folklore, Christian mythology, voodoo, and even a dash of Dante’s Inferno in here. Like we get it, man, they’re evil and you’re good. It’s like Banks decided to mix up all this shit, threw them on the wall, and hoped that one of them would stick. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work too well because there’s just so much shit going on that some of them conflict. I understand what Banks is trying do to here, but it just drove me crazy and cluttered up the narrative. I applaud her for the effort to be original, though.

And the other thing that I couldn’t stand was the dialogue. I loved the hip-hop lingo and thought it was rather inspired of Banks to have her characters speak like that (it wouldn’t have made sense if her characters lived in East L.A. and spoke like Harvard PhDs. And I’m not saying that people from East L.A. can’t ever get a PhD from Harvard. Shut up.). That wasn’t my problem with it because I though it lent color to her narrative. My issue with the dialogue is that was way too expositional. Honestly, it makes it sound clunky and unnatural. What’s especially awful is the way Damali and her Guardians speak to each other. These people have been living with each other for more than a decade, but because of the expositional dialogue, they’re just telling each other shit that they should all already know. There are more effective, less painful ways to reveal plot points.

The other thing that bothered me was the narrative voice. The point of view that Banks utilizes is third-person limited omniscient, which means we are only privy to one point of view at a time, but nothing distinguishes them from each other. All of the characters have the same inner voice and thought processes. They all sound the same. At one point, if I thought I saw “this was no way to live” in another character’s internal monologue, I would have jammed a screwdriver into my eye. Damali should have had her own voice, as well as Carlos and the others. At times, I couldn’t tell which point of view I was reading. Okay, that was an exaggeration because I’m not retarded, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, as much as the clunky, chunky dialogue and the confusing narrative flow annoyed me, I found myself enjoying reading this book. There were unavoidable comparisons (on my part) to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Anita Blake series, but what I admired about this effort by Banks is how she tries to make this book different from its predecessors. She doesn’t always succeed, but I can see what she’s trying to do and I really believe that once she gets the exposition and the mythology stuff out of the way, she’ll be writing a much cleaner prose with a more straightforward narrative. I’m not familiar with her other stuff, so I could be talking out of my ass here, but I want to believe that this series will improve. To prove to you, dear readers, that I truly believe this will happen, I have gone ahead and purchased all of the books in this series. If they turn out to be very bad, I give you leave point at me and laugh. Hard.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: B, Romance: Paranormal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.