Grade: C+

The first three chapters of this book are awful. Think Sailor Moon fanfic crossed with a really bad Anita Blake fanfic with a dash of dog-shit and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. The plot meanders, the heroine is annoying, and the dialogue is vintage Velveeta. My main problem with it is that the author doesn’t take the time to introduce the characters and allow her readers to get to know them much less care about them before tossing them into a shitstorm. Actually, one shitstorm after the other. But then something happened. As horrible as I thought it was, I couldn’t put it down and when it was finished, I found myself looking for more. Hell, the first thing I did after I finish it was log on to Amazon and order the sequel. Shoddy characterizations and overwrought prose aside, I realized at the end of the book that I actually dug it. If you’re not a fan of heroines that everyone wants to fuck or rape, bitchy women who would make Alexis Carrington look like a puppy dog, murky mythology, rape as punishment, or alpha males who show their alpha-ness by growling or sporting wood, then this is probably not for you. This is Anita Blake starting from Narcissus in Chains and forgetting the first ten books of the series ever existed (just like how it is now!). This is Sookie Stackhouse turned slutbagwhore after a lobotomy. This is Jaenelle Angelline with all of her Mary Sue potential realized. And ya’ll, this is just the beginning of a series. Mwahahaha.

Mona Lisa (was her last name ever mentioned?) is an ER Nurse, but if you’ve got visions of her zipping around as Super Nurse, you better put it out of your mind right now ’cause it is never mentioned again except in the end and that was barely a blip. Mona Lisa is the most speshulest nurse evah and everyone in the hospital lurves her ’cause she’s good with kids and animals and fish and mean people and bums (probably). Her speshul talent is being able to diagnose human folks just by touching them, but Mona Lisa thinks she’s got more powers inside her that she just hasn’t tapped yet. Enjoy:

Darkness and light lay within me. I’d always known it, sensed it… a dormant force that lay quiescent along with the latent ability to heal, untapped as yet—to my relief, my despair. Waiting. Until then, sickness called to me and lured me with its invisible tendrils of aches and pain.

Worst. Power. Ever. Anyway, before we can find out how Mona Lisa applies her powers to her everyday life, she meets up with a REALLY HAWT MYSTERIOUS dude who is bleeding from a stab wound in the stomach. Mona Lisa immediately senses that he’s different and speshul just like she is, even though she doesn’t really know what she is. You see, Mona Lisa was abandoned on the front steps of a church as an infant with only a silver cross around her neck and her name etched on it. Injured Dude starts spouting stuff about Moon People and Queens and how Mona Lisa is really a long lost Moon Queen and instead of calling the psych ward, Mona Lisa actually listens to the dude and gives him the keys to her house so he could hide from the Moon People who are after him. Before you can ask, “what the fuck just happened?” the two of them are having lots of magic speshul sex and heading off the Moon People High Court and Mona Lisa, an ER nurse who SHOULDN’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS SHIT AT ALL, is suddenly acting like a seasoned courtier, a ninja assassin, and sexually healing people like nobody’s business. Did I mention that she was raised by humans and she didn’t even know about the existence of the stupid Moon People at the beginning of the book?

They get to the High Court of the Moon People—fine, Monère—and Mona Lisa finds out that she is, indeed, a Queen and her mother Queen Mona Sera is a vile, evil bitch (much like every single woman in this story except for the virgins and the old people). As it turns out, Mona Lisa is only a quarter human and three-quarters of her is Monère, a race of humanoid folks who once lived on the moon like gods and goddesses. When the moon dried up, the Moonies (as Mona Lisa likes to call them) fled to Earth, set up shop, and have been living among humans for thousands of years. Aside from Mona Lisa finding out that the Monère are a race of assholes who were probably better off dead, Gryphon, the injured dude who became her lover, is dying from silver poisoning ’cause Mona Sera stabbed him in the gut with a silver dagger (silver is poison to the Monère) when he tried to escape from her grasp. Oh, and there’s no cure for silver poisoning. Later, Gryphon! Aw, don’t worry, kids. Gryphon isn’t going to die! Mona Lisa can now heal everything with her magic ginny-hole! Oh, and because Gryphon isn’t enough to satisfy stanky old Mona Lisa, she takes another lover named Amber (ha ha, he’s a boy!), a lobotomized Ken Doll former rapist with a very large penis! Yes, that’s right, a former rapist. Mona Lisa forgives him, you guys, ’cause he didn’t mean to rape all those women, really! As if that’s not enough drama, all the Queens want to kill Mona Lisa ’cause she’s super-speshul and potentially the most powerful of all of them. Of course she is.

Anyway, the Queens rule over the males and each of them have their own territories like vampire masters. If I haven’t mentioned it, each of them are also evil, vindictive bitches who punish other women by ordering big, violent brutes to rape them. Basically, each of them would probably eat their own young and ask for seconds.

While reading this book, I had a really hard time accepting that Mona Lisa could immediately fit in with the Moon People even though she wasn’t raised among them and had never met one until Gryphon stumbled into the hospital where she worked. I could buy that Mona Lisa had never felt like she truly fit in with the humans, but to know the High Court customs and traditions without anyone telling her about them? I mean, the bitch just strolled into the palace like she has always been a part of them. There was no learning process for Mona Lisa, no musical montage (may I suggest Eye of the Tiger?) featuring Mona Lisa training or reading old texts, no adjustment period. I would have really liked to see scenes like that ’cause it would have helped me understand this character more. If this were a comic book, the artist would have shown us a few frames of the character learning about her people, but we get none of that. All we get is Mona Lisa having sex with her “bodyguards”, kicking ass even though she has no fighting experience (what the fuck would an ER nurse know about street-fighting?), and narrowly avoiding getting raped. A whole bunch of times. On top of that, we also have numerous scenes of the Queens mouthing off and throwing dirty looks at Mona Lisa ’cause she’s prettier than they are and more powerful, men losing their minds with lust over Mona Lisa, and supposedly cold-ass warriors trailing after Mona Lisa like a puppy dog. I mean, she could probably teach Mary Sue on how to be a Mary Sue!

As for the men, they all either want to give their lives in service to Mona Lisa or rape her repeatedly so they can steal her powers. That’s because Mona Lisa can share her powers by having sex with people (paging Anita Blake!). As for the two saps who are in love with ML, they are barely discernible from each other. One is blond and one has black hair. One can transform into a mountain lion and the other can turn into a falcon. Other than that, they’re really interchangeable. And neither of them mind sharing Mona Lisa ’cause they would rather die—DIE, I TELL YOU—than live without her. Man, that bitch really does have a magic ginny-hole. The most interesting character in this story is Halcyon, the PRINTH OF DARKNETH, who also happens to be madly in love with Mona Lisa (and really, who isn’t?) and would do anything to have her, but only in comparison to Amber and Gryphon because they’re basically Ken Dolls with GIGANTOR PENISES.

In the end, we don’t know jack shit about any of these people except that I would like every single one of them to jump into an active volcano. The mythology—or what little there is of it—is inconsistent and you get the feeling that the author is literally pulling the rules for this world out of her ass as the story goes along. The dialogue is atrocious—I don’t care if you’re a centuries old Moonie, USE SOME CONTRACTIONS—the character development is practically nonexistent, and there are plot holes you can drive a truck through, but I gotta tell you guys, I had a lot of fun reading this trashy, contrived piece of fluff. It’s like two day old pizza. It tastes super-good, but would probably give you explosive diarrhea. It really does enter the so-bad-it’s-good territory and sets up residence there. I can’t wait until Mona Lisa becomes so powerful that she takes over the world and heals the entire planet with her magic vagina. I bet in the next book, Mona Lisa will sleep with half of the Monère. Sure, she’s saying now that she will only sleep with men she loves, but in the beginning of the book, she also told Amber that she will only sleep with Gryphon. Check this out if you like your Sailor Moon fanfic smutty or ’cause you’ve worn out your copy of Danse Macabre! C+

P.S. How awesome is that the author is one-name like Madonna or Cher? The lady has a brassy pair, I tell ya. Shake ya tailfeather!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: C, Romance: Paranormal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.