Friday, February 26, 2010

Flirt

An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novel. Says so right on the cover.  Talked up as one in her interviews.  Bzzzzt, Flirt isn't even close to long or complicated enough to be a novel, even a half-assed one.  Skin trade: 496 pages.  Flirt: 192 pages.  Novella I believe is the word she was looking for, though it's verging on a shortstory.

Oh, but get this... Flirt is sure as hell priced as a novel. At the $23.951 cover price for the hardcover, it comes in at just under 25 cents per page of paper it's printed on.  Or to put it another way, it's apparently been deemed to be worth right around a third as much as an equal weight of silver.

Ok, now that we've established false advertising and gross overpricing, let's get on to the content.

The only recurring character, aside from a few pages at the beginning and again at the end, was Anita herself.  Ok, we could work with this.  Do some quality character development on Anita, introduce another major character or three and flesh them out, slut her up like nobody's business and have her spend half the book in naughty-fun-time, or just fall back to large amounts of gratuitous violence.  Any of the above would have worked in a novella.

But does she do any of these?  Hell no.  She has to go and try to throw all of the above in and even makes a paltry attempt at fleshing out Anita's relationships with Jason, Nathaniel, and Micah.2 What she ended up with was what you'd get if you wrote a great novel then went back and stripped every single thing that made it interesting out and left only a bare outline of a plot.

Summary time.  Don't bother buying this book, even if you're a die hard fan.  Don't even bother borrowing it from an unlucky friend who bought it.  If you're of a copyright violating bent, don't even bother pirating it.  I'll save you the trouble and tell you everything you need to know about it in one sentence.

Anita picks up a one-eyed werelion named Nick(y) who is completely lacking in any other noteworthy character traits.

There you go.  Now you can go on waiting for the next book and hope she doesn't give us another greedy ass-raping in Bullet.

1  Yes, I know the ebook is only $9.99 but you can't buy an ebook, you can only license them temporarily.  You pay ten bucks and own nothing.  Hell of a deal, yeah?
2  I had to pause here to bang my head against my desk, go smoke a cigarette, and glare at various, innocent, inanimate objects before I could finish this without using the word fuck about every third word.

3 comments:

WickedLilPixie said...

ROTFLMAO you warned me earlier so I avoided this like the plague.

WickedLilPixie said...

And oh oh I popped your comment cherry!!! *takes a bow*

Tiffany @ KindleVixen said...

i <3 you. seriously you rock LOL. I knew this would be bad and was debating it.