Flight into Fantasy

Once upon a time, there was a book blogger. She was pure as the driven snow, and lived a happy life reading books of all genres, unaware of the dangers that could befall the unwary.

Then one day, the book blogger got herself a twitter, and, recognizing the potential Twitter represented, she made friends with other bloggers. All was well in the land, and the sweet and innocent book blogger reveled in her new friendships, and the book recommendations they brought.

Then, one day, Katiebabs and another book blogger–our narrator cannot remember who–commenced a conversation on Twitter about The Cat Star Chronicles by Cheryl Brooks. Actually, the conversation was specifically about something found with alarming frequency in this series. No, I’m not talking about exclamation points, although those pop up quite frequently. I refer instead to… snard.

Before you ask, snard is what happens when a man in this series finds a woman that he likes very much. While smexing her, he usually emits excretions that taste, according to one of the books, like hazelnut. These cause spontaneous orgasms in the female.

Anyway, our erstwhile book blogger, being a fan of fiction of questionable taste, made haste to acquire the series and read the first four in something like a week, devouring the books the way she has also been known to devour whipped cream straight from the container. (This explains why our intrepid book blogger is not a small woman.) And the books were good. They were engaging, didn’t require a whole lot of brain power, and didn’t seem to take themselves all that seriously. The fourth book, especially, introduced our blogger to a tortured hero she just wanted to hug.

Months passed, and soon there was a new addition to the series, which our intrepid blogger eagerly dived into. And it is this book she–OK I–will review today.

First, a little background on the series. Apparently, the Zetithian race was destroyed a couple of decades ago when their planet was blown up. A band of Zethithian soldiers were captured, however, and sold into slavery. Each of these men endured a lot before finding a woman they were drawn to, women whom they gave their snard to on a regular basis. (And if you think I should be above random references to snard throughout this post… you obviously don’t know me very well.)

Anyway, in this fifth installment of the Cat Star Chronicles, Fugitive, Earth artist Drucilla has come to the idyllic Barada 7 to paint birds after a breakup with her latest gay boyfriend. Apparently, homophobia still runs rampant in Brooks’s future, which makes me sad. Anyway, she soon becomes aware of Manx, who is, you guessed it, a Zetithian. Manx thinks Drucilla smells wonderful and wants to boink her ASAP, but there’s a bounty on his head. So, needless to say, wacky hijinks ensue.

There’s a lot to like here–at least if you’re a reader like me who enjoys an element of cheese in her fiction. Manx and Drucilla are both quite likeable, and even though I didn’t buy the chemistry completely, I wasn’t sorry they ended up together. There are also great secondary characters, including couples from previous books, some precocious children, and a garulous alien. I enjoyed reading about all these people immensely, and am sad that I have no idea when the next book will come out so I can see what else Ms. Brooks has in store for them. Because there’s definitely a few loose ends I’d like to see explored. I hope there is at least one Zetithian female wandering around, because I really want to meet one. And the answer of who destroyed the Zetithian home world is still not revealed.

That all being said, I do have significant quibbles. In the first place, I feel that there was way too much going on, and that an editor could have been a bit more strenuous in tightening things up. There were way too many POV shifts to characters whose heads I didn’t need to be in. And I don’t actually want to read sex scenes involving previous characters. They had their books. It’s time to keep them out of the spotlight.

The other thing that bugged me was that the sex scenes were raunchy. I don’t read erotic romance for loving descriptions of how much the heroine wants the hero to smear her face and body with his snard; I don’t care how much like hazelnut the stuff tastes. And when I wasn’t reading raunchy sex, I was reading repetitive sex. I know there are only so many ways to say that nutella-flavored excreta has awesome effects. But surely saying so over and over and over and over and over again rather ruins the effect.

The result of all this was that, while I enjoyed this book while I was reading it, it took me a while to finish, and I didn’t think it had the same campy quality that the other books in the series had, which I liked so much. The end result is a mixed bag, and so I’m going to have to give it a C+.

Other Opinions

• The Bookgirl
• Kylee’s Journal
• Cheeky Reads
• The Book Binge