Khanh the Killjoy

In my experience, sensory discordance has almost always been limited to audio/visual. For example, seeing Orlando Bloom and Viggo Mortensen (Legolas and Aragorn, to the uninformed---I weep for you) standing next to Peter Jackson. Or maybe drifting off to sleep to the soothing sound of a solo violin, only to be blasted awake by the some angry riffs of Japanese hair metal that for some fucking reason I idiotically decided I want included in my "sleepytime" playlist a few days back.

I didn't know that I could be so rudely jolted out of a reverie while reading a book until I read the opening chapters of Dreamfever. We start with Mac, who is not Mac, who is Pri-ya, and being raped by the Four Unseelie Princes. She is incoherent with unwanted lust, her mind wrestling with the horrifying effects of fae glamour. Her mind, her body is being violated, she can barely remember who she is.

Who the fuck are you?
Here on the floor, in my final moments—MacKayla Lane’s last grand hurrah—I see that the answer is all I’ve ever been.
I’m nobody.

The situation is appalling, and I an rather outraged at myself for loving her inner monologue in this moment, but it can't be helped. Mac's voice, her inner thoughts, are so beautifully written that I am at doubts with myself.

And then---like a hopelessly lost marching band that has somehow wandered into a Rachmaninoff concerto, Dani appears. Well, feck me! How diddly ho, dudes! We're gonna fecking hunt us some fecking fey right fecking NOW with my supercool supersword!!

As I said. Discordance. 10 pages later, I'd had it. It was only after a friend told me that Dani was only the narrator for the first few chapters that I picked it up again. My god, Ms. Moning, I don't know whether to hate you or to congratulate you on the fact that you wrote a character so convincingly annoying that I wanted to strangle her on the spot. Did I ever hate Mac for using petunias and daisies as swear words? I take it back. Fecking this and fecking that takes the fucking cake for pissing me off every time.

I question the presence and the age of Dani in the novel, I really do. Was it so necessary to make her 13 years old? Was it so necessary to insert a girl who is little more than a child into a book that is so utterly adult in its darkness, in its intensity, in its sexuality? Was it so necessary to make her so utterly immature and at the same time, so completely competent in her capabilities and super(ha!)natural abilities? I understand that Mac needs someone to care for, that she needs someone relatively uncomplicated (because Barrons and V'lane is more than any woman can simultaneously handle) to look after, to be an alternate sibling. I understand that Dani's shell is a cover, in parts, for her dark past, for being forced to grow old before her time.

But 13 year old Dani, really? I would raise an eyebrow at the insertion of a 16-year old companion to Mac. But a 13 years old...and such a caricature of an annoying, overly sexual teenager. It is just too much, and I don't know if I can handle the next book if there is more of Dani, in the role of narrator, in it.

I really don't know how to feel about this book, and maybe that is part of the series' charms. I absolutely loved the first 50% of the book, I absolutely hated the utter pointlessness of the Silver in the last 25%.

I loved Mac and her bravery, I was there with her as she struggles with herself, her distant, vague recollections, her struggles with memory, her amnesia, her inexplicable distress at hearing the word "sister." I was intrigued when observing black Mac, Mac 4.0. I enjoyed seeing her wrestle, often with futility, verbally and physically (and sexually) with Barrons. I cheered when Mac returned to us. I always love it when I see my heroine snap out of a "state," be it comatose, be it grieef, be it amnesia. That moment when she wakes up, and gets ready to kick some fucking ass is a thing of beauty.

With an explosive inhalation, I snap upright in bed, and my eyes fly open—like coming alive after being dead and interred in a coffin.
I am Mac.
And I’m back.

And she is pissed. Understandably so. Fucking Barrons. Fucking V'lane. Fucking useless, the lot of them. One of the rare moments in which I actually agreed with Dani is her observation of how completely fucking useless Barrons had been in protecting Mac.

And Barrons—what’s his deal? Doesn’t he want her alive? Why have they all abandoned her when she needs ‘em the most?
Men.
Dude, they suck.

I had hoped that this would be the book that settled it once and for all: is Khanh on Team Barrons? Nope, he's still a complex douchebag to me. If anything I'm even MORE confused on how I feel towards him. On the one hand, he did something pretty despicable in my eyes: he sleeps with Mac, without her consent. It was Mac, but it was not Mac. Mac was under a spell, she was Pri-ya, driven almost insane by the fae, and is now in a desperate state of lust. Mac has amnesia, she does not remember anything. It took Barrons weeks to reteach her English. Yet he has sex with her anyway.

“I was out of my mind. I’d never have done it otherwise.”
Really, his dark eyes mocked, and in them I was demanding more, telling him I wanted it to always be this way.
I remembered what he’d replied: that one day I would wonder if it was possible to hate him more.
“I had no awareness. No choice.” I searched for words to drive my point home. “It was every bit as much rape as what the Unseelie Princes did to me.”

I agree with her. One may argue that it's pretty hard to resist a naked girl who's crawling around begging to be fucked, but this is Jericho fucking Barrons; I expect better of him, I have higher expectations of him. He had never crossed that line with Mac before, and he let me down by doing so now, and I think I hate him more as a result. Yes, what he did to help Mac recover her memories was pretty sweet, he painted her nails, he replicated her room, etc. It's not enough. He didn't have to screw Mac without her conscious consent.

The last half of this book was a letdown. It felt random as hell, and I felt there was no point to plopping Mac smack in the middle of another realm. She also made a pretty dumb decision that I thought was more Mac 1.0 than Mac 4.0, she knows how valuable she is, she knows the Lord Master is baiting her, and she decides to take the bait because of her chivalrous need to save her parents. I want Mac 3.0 back.

Is it wrong of me to want more destruction? The world is in pieces, but it never felt like it. I wanted more descriptions of the horror. I wanted more blood, more death. Instead, I got a freaking World After scenario in the Aerie with freaking human girl groupies waiting to pleasure the fucking (I keep wanting to say fecking now, thanks a lot, Dani) Fae. The destruction of the world never felt enough, it never felt completely urgent, it never felt horrifying to me. Maybe I'm just immune to violence now, but I wanted more of it.

It was still a good book, but I feel very let down by the actions of the characters of whom I had grown fond.