Mercedes Lackey's The Fire Rose
Mercedes Lackey has written like ten million books, so I've never been sure where to start, but someone suggested I might like her Elemental Masters series. This first one is a loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but with some fun additional plot--it's 1905 California, the Beast is a powerful sorcerer dude/railroad baron who tried to transform into a wolf and the spell went badly wrong, and the Beauty is a great academic girl who finds herself in dire straits and ends up taking a job reading and translating books for the Beast (who can't read b/c he's a weird wolf-man). Now, this book was mostly enjoyable, but I had a few problems, primarily the bad guy, who is beyond villainous. Like, his hobby is actually raping girls who have been tricked into sex slavery. I'm NOT making that up or exaggerating, it's what he does for fun, and he totally wants to rape the main character. I also could have done with less of her assuming no one will ever like her b/c she's an academic/plain. Like, paragraph upon paragraph is devoted to her thinking this. We get it. But I mean, obviously rapey villain is worse. I also thought this was too long--it dragged quite a bit in the middle and I was eager for things to just HAPPEN already, and then everything happens all at once in like the last five pages. By the end, I was sick of both of the main characters and I am not planning to read any more in this series. B-.
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