Lazy Readers Channel: Fury's Kiss by Karen Chance

A Reread Review

So I honestly found Fury's Kiss to be interesting, but not really satisfying. There are threads of story here that don't really seem to go together until the end, where the "true" antagonist just kind of jumps out and reveals themselves. Also the pacing is all over the place. That's kind of a function of the plot, but... not at the same time. It's odd and I'm not really a fan this time around (this was my second read). My memories of my first read of Fury's Kiss actually completely omitted the non-Dory-centric B Plot, so there's that. I also somehow remembered Dory and Dorina melding a lot more than they did... obviously that was wrong, but there you go.

I did quite enjoy getting the slice-of-life with Dory, Claire, Ray, and Claire's fey guards toward the beginning of the book. I think Dory and Claire deserve some normalcy and some downtime outside of their respective jobs. It's probably my favorite part of Fury's Kiss. Slice-of-life stuff is nice to get every once in a while and there's a reason a lot of fanfiction takes place this way. However, it does stand out against the rest of Fury's Kiss, which is honestly a lot of chaotic fight scenes.

Karen Chance really excels at writing chaotic fight scenes. I do think, however, that reading them in smaller chunks like I tend to actually helps my being able to follow them. Otherwise, like they did on my first read, the fights do tend to be a big blur. I really quite enjoy Dory's fight scenes in particular because she's rather straightforward in her fighting style. Nothing too fancy until the ending, which -- and this is my only spoiler -- was a clusterfuck of Master Powers. Which, by the way, haven't really ever been discussed in either this or the Cassie Palmer series. The only one we've really seen up until now was the Consul's nifty sand thing and her snake dress and I just assumed it was because she's The Consul and therefore had some special quirks. But no, apparently not. Apparently there's a whole range of X-men-like powers Master Vampires can have and multiples at that. Just... what the hell? Kind of neat, but would have been cooler if they'd been set up better.

I find the whole Dory/Dorina thing interesting. It makes sense that Mircea would do what he did to their brain and I'm interested in seeing how Dory and Dorina reconcile themselves into one cohesive being... assuming they do that eventually. I'm honestly really interested in seeing more Dorina. The couple slices of her we got were interesting, to say the least. And wow that's a lot of "interesting" in this paragraph.

I am glad Dory and Louis-Cesare finally figured out their shit. I'm really hoping they end up being a cohesive couple and not a bunch of drama-for-dramas sake. After all, there is a bunch of that here, too. I'm over it. I want more healthy couples in my vampire romances.

I feel it would be remiss of me to not mention Ray. I really do like his character. He bounces from being completely ridiculous to competent and actually feels like a rounded person. I'm not entirely sure I like him being a vampire info-dump, but I guess someone had to give Dory the info she didn't have.

I also quite enjoyed Kit in this one. You get to see two sides of his personality. Nice to see he's still got some humanity in there, even if he does go a little nuts in Dory's direction because of it. And yes, I do agree with Dory about his being pushy and intense while trying to figure out how his former "children" or whatever died mysteriously. Still not satisfied with how that storyline resolved itself, but... eh. I guess it works?

Yeah, Fury's Kiss was basically bookended by the B Plot. I really think Fury's Kiss was more about Dory discovering more about her "other half," as it were, than it was about why Lawrence and others of Kit's team were killed. In that, I think it succeeded more than it failed. However, the endings to both A and B plots were unsatisfying. I vaguely wish I was reading along the specific Dory storyline of this pair of book series, because I would really like to see how Dory handles the endings. But alas, I'm now on to Cassie Palmer for a few books.

Favorite Line

"Thank you, Captain Obvious."

"I'm on the Senate," he reminded me. "It's Lord Obvious. And I don't want any mistakes tonight." - Dorina Basarab and Kit Marlowe

In Other News

I've spent the last few weeks working on a pair of holiday art projects: Ornament Garlands and Snowman Repaints. The garlands took several of my days off as I decided to get as much glitter off of them as possible... the glitter spilled from inside the ornaments into the packaging and took forever to get off.