The Wild Road and The Last Twilight

[sqbr]

These are two Marjorie M Lui "Dirk and Steele" supernatural romance novels.

So far there are two common themes in this series:
1)The love interests are soul mates and are drawn to each other pretty much the moment they meet, thought they tend to fight against it out of a mix of cynicism and hard-won self defense based on Bad Past Experiences.
2)To some extent the male love interests tend to feel like they're fulfilling different ever-so-slightly-furry-ish supernatural creature fetishes.

Soul Song was sexy fish-man
The Wild Road is basically sexy Goliath from Gargoyles
The Last Twilight is sexy black African man who turns into a cheetah (which is imo a bit problematic)

The Wild Road
So clearly I wasn't the only teenage girl watching Gargoyles thinking "You know, he's kind of cute for an animated non-human."

This was fun. I liked the protagonists, though both rather hardened by difficult circumstances they weren't as irritatingly angsty as the previous lot, and I found the plot quite engaging and thrilling. The female protagonist has lost her memory, and I thought the "redefining and rediscovering yourself when you don't know who you are or were" thing was done pretty well.

Note:This is explicitly set after "Soul Song" and has some spoilers for it's plot.

The Last Twilight

I started reading this at the shop and ended up buying it because I wanted to know what happened next. The main character is a CDC disease specialist, and her life dealing with epidemics was quite engaging if rather gross for a romance. Being a Marjorie M Lui book the plot quickly shifted, and it was a bit less engrossing in the middle, but overall quite an enjoyable fantasy thriller and I liked the relationship between the two leads.

I'm not the best judge of this sort of thing, but I've seen enough criticisms of the way people of African descent are associated with animals/predators etc to be a bit uncomfortable with the way the male lead was exotified by the female lead, although he is a quite well rounded and engaging character.

On the plus side we got lots of interesting African characters, and distinctions were made between different African countries and cultures (eg the male lead is Kenyan, and misses the plains while in the jungles of the Congo).

Comments

[havocthecat]

Hrm. I totally understand your concerns about Amiri being the "exotic African shapeshifter," but I've read more than half the Dirk & Steele books. Amiri isn't the only shifter, thank goodness, nor are all the shifters exoticised Africans. I personally feel that the rest of the books balance out the potential problematic nature of Amiri by lessening the exotic nature of shifters, and the fact that pretty much every single one of the main characters has some kind of psychic or magical ability that makes them unique and exotic, whatever their ethnicity.

(I also would understand if someone were to disagree with me on that issue. It's one of those YMMV things where my lines of tolerance might be different than someone else's.)

[sqbr]

I can see that. Certainly it didn't bother me anywhere near as much as it would have from another author, but it still rubbed me a little the wrong way the way it was written.

[havocthecat]

Oh, yes! I totally understand your concerns. I'd had them myself when I read the book, but ended up feeling somewhat differently than you after finishing more of the series.