![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I read a collection of short stories called “The Secret Romantics Book of Magic”. I think I got this because I was trying to figure out if anything labeled Romantasy was going to be appealing to me, and this had short works by a bunch of authors who write romantasy, and a few authors who I was already familiar with. As with all such collections, the works vary in type and tone. Some were really good. One had a rape / SA as part of a really interesting reworking of doomed / fated lovers in Chinese / Japanese stories. I would have preferred a warning, honestly, but I don’t regret reading it either, which is saying a lot for me because in general I feel like this is a choice and it’s a choice better not made most of the time.
Next up was a sample of Siggy Shade’s Tentacle Entanglement, which I think I got when I learned that tentacle wtf was a whole subgenre of monster wtf. The sample was good enough to get the whole thing (via kindleunlimited, so this wasn’t much of a commitment) and I read it through. If spoilers bother you, you should never be reading my book reviews.
Both the Kelly Armstrong short story in the previous read, and this novel share a certain gleeful justified homicidality, a vigilante vibe, if you will. In the Armstrong short story, the aw shucks I’m a virgin just in from the woods and you need a virgin sacrifice for a monster so why not me is cover for offing the royal families that engage in such. There was a recent movie along these lines as well — royal family has to sacrifice a member, so they marry someone to a son and then toss her to the monster, but it turns out poorly for the royal family. I can’t recall the name of the movie at the moment, and don’t know if this short story and that movie are in any way related beyond sharing a story arc. The nature of the monster is definitely different — in this one, the teen girl is partnered with a shapeshifter. The heroine of the Siggy Shade novel is a barista by day, artist by evening whose boss rents her an attic room and lets her hang her art in the shop. She does NOT know that he is secretly stealing and selling her work for a ton of money and claiming he is the artist.
Into this sad and lonely existence, the heroine invites — using a “meditation podcast” a friend at the shop recommends — her soul mate who she imagines in some detail but not in others. She gets an Umbra from a doomed planet, a lot of tentacles, and a weird fated mates bonding process that requires the Umbra to assimilate … a human. Not the heroine! Yay for that. Oh, and in the process starts out looking like whoever they assimilate well enough to pass as them, but retains shapeshifting abilities.
The boss is awful to the heroine, particularly after the Umbra first shows up and shows the heroine a really good time all night long and the boss hears it through his ceiling / her floor. The heroine at this point is afraid of being fired (multiple hours overslept missed her shift type of thing) and honestly it is a little strange that he does not because he seems like the sort of asshole who would fire someone and dump them out on the street in the middle of winter. And we don’t even know about the stealing her paintings thing, which is of course the explanation.
After another day or two, the boss grabs her by the arm and the Umbra takes, er, umbrage and the three of them have it out in the boss’ office. This is where they learn all the details, and they discuss what to do about it and oh, look, how convenient, this will be the meal Mate needs to fully bond / convert / be able to live in our world. Also, this way they own the building the coffee shop and the two apartments are in, which is FURTHER convenient for the coworker who has an Umbra too, and they are waiting for him to sell his first book and get paid (he’s a writer).
As a moral system, this thing is pretty bent. Was the boss horrible? Sure. Deserved a death sentence? Absolutely not! FAFO, and fictional, and thus fun? Probably? But I’m not completely certain. This book has some of the best boundaries involving sexual activity that I’ve run across in a while, and really takes seriously the idea of aftercare (as these things go). I do love a heroine who speaks up and says, No, not that, but I’m willing to do this other thing. And I truly love a book that takes the need for lubrication seriously, which in this particular subgenre is … wack.
It reminded me in some ways of a series I gave up on when a witch heroine tied up a couple witch law enforcement and then kept them tied up on the floor for days, showing up only to untie them long enough to use the loo and eat and drink maybe a couple times a day for less than an hour. This is _not okay_. And Linzi Day’s Gretna Green series takes very seriously the morals of imprisoning someone, when that someone has the ability and in many ways the authority to be judge-jury-executioner of extremely bad folks. I don’t regret reading it, but I’m definitely finding that I care about this more than I used to and I don’t necessarily want to reverse course.
But if you are here for some tentacle sex and making a meal of the Bad Boss, well, Siggy Shade has got ya!
Next up was a sample of Siggy Shade’s Tentacle Entanglement, which I think I got when I learned that tentacle wtf was a whole subgenre of monster wtf. The sample was good enough to get the whole thing (via kindleunlimited, so this wasn’t much of a commitment) and I read it through. If spoilers bother you, you should never be reading my book reviews.
Both the Kelly Armstrong short story in the previous read, and this novel share a certain gleeful justified homicidality, a vigilante vibe, if you will. In the Armstrong short story, the aw shucks I’m a virgin just in from the woods and you need a virgin sacrifice for a monster so why not me is cover for offing the royal families that engage in such. There was a recent movie along these lines as well — royal family has to sacrifice a member, so they marry someone to a son and then toss her to the monster, but it turns out poorly for the royal family. I can’t recall the name of the movie at the moment, and don’t know if this short story and that movie are in any way related beyond sharing a story arc. The nature of the monster is definitely different — in this one, the teen girl is partnered with a shapeshifter. The heroine of the Siggy Shade novel is a barista by day, artist by evening whose boss rents her an attic room and lets her hang her art in the shop. She does NOT know that he is secretly stealing and selling her work for a ton of money and claiming he is the artist.
Into this sad and lonely existence, the heroine invites — using a “meditation podcast” a friend at the shop recommends — her soul mate who she imagines in some detail but not in others. She gets an Umbra from a doomed planet, a lot of tentacles, and a weird fated mates bonding process that requires the Umbra to assimilate … a human. Not the heroine! Yay for that. Oh, and in the process starts out looking like whoever they assimilate well enough to pass as them, but retains shapeshifting abilities.
The boss is awful to the heroine, particularly after the Umbra first shows up and shows the heroine a really good time all night long and the boss hears it through his ceiling / her floor. The heroine at this point is afraid of being fired (multiple hours overslept missed her shift type of thing) and honestly it is a little strange that he does not because he seems like the sort of asshole who would fire someone and dump them out on the street in the middle of winter. And we don’t even know about the stealing her paintings thing, which is of course the explanation.
After another day or two, the boss grabs her by the arm and the Umbra takes, er, umbrage and the three of them have it out in the boss’ office. This is where they learn all the details, and they discuss what to do about it and oh, look, how convenient, this will be the meal Mate needs to fully bond / convert / be able to live in our world. Also, this way they own the building the coffee shop and the two apartments are in, which is FURTHER convenient for the coworker who has an Umbra too, and they are waiting for him to sell his first book and get paid (he’s a writer).
As a moral system, this thing is pretty bent. Was the boss horrible? Sure. Deserved a death sentence? Absolutely not! FAFO, and fictional, and thus fun? Probably? But I’m not completely certain. This book has some of the best boundaries involving sexual activity that I’ve run across in a while, and really takes seriously the idea of aftercare (as these things go). I do love a heroine who speaks up and says, No, not that, but I’m willing to do this other thing. And I truly love a book that takes the need for lubrication seriously, which in this particular subgenre is … wack.
It reminded me in some ways of a series I gave up on when a witch heroine tied up a couple witch law enforcement and then kept them tied up on the floor for days, showing up only to untie them long enough to use the loo and eat and drink maybe a couple times a day for less than an hour. This is _not okay_. And Linzi Day’s Gretna Green series takes very seriously the morals of imprisoning someone, when that someone has the ability and in many ways the authority to be judge-jury-executioner of extremely bad folks. I don’t regret reading it, but I’m definitely finding that I care about this more than I used to and I don’t necessarily want to reverse course.
But if you are here for some tentacle sex and making a meal of the Bad Boss, well, Siggy Shade has got ya!