B.D. Heywood

1.5 stars

I didn't like Koji, I couldn't connect with Tatsu whose annoying overuse of Japanese made him even less appealing to me, I did not understand Arisada's love for a traitor and a cheater, I couldn't figure out why some of the characters were in the book to begin with, even less so why they deserved their own POV.
Editing was poor. As in you're/your poor.

Half imaginary star (since GR doesn't deal in halves) to make it up to 2 is for the truly evil villain. I liked him.… (plus d'informations)

I really quite enjoyed that, but I suspect it will have a rather small core audience. Because what it reminds me of more than anything else is a Yaoi manga. This despite it being a literary novel instead of a graphic novel. It just feels like yaoi in that strange, nebulous way of mental association.

You see, just as most fans of PNR or Urban Fantasy or even regular American M/M romance novels can often sketch out the basic shape of the plot most common to their genre of choice, this one follows yaoi's established format in fairly recognisable ways. But you see, I like Yaoi, so I wasn't at all put off by the similarities.

The association was undoubtably helped along by Heywood's liberal use of Japanese terminology. No doubt my closet manga addiction and the two years I spent studying the Japanese language (which doesn't get you very far, BTW) helped me out here. I suspect some readers would have appreciated that help, because though I knew enough to be able to pronounce the words and recognise all of the ritualised terminology (seppeku, kinbaku, kaishakunin, etc), some of the curses and a couple of the normal words (like daisuki), it felt like there were an awful lot more than was necessary. It tended to clutter the narrative at times, even when quickly followed by an English translation (which most, but not all were). If all those extra words had felt completely foreign, instead of just kind of foreign, they might have really grated on me.

Some of the English language did grate on me, if I'm honest. Mostly during the extremely long sex scenes. You see these aren't hearts and flowers, gentle, clean exploits. Its often rough, dirty and ... well, I probably can't say realistic. It's obviously not, but I thought the fact that things smelled, chafed, hurt, bled, and so on lent a real(ish) feel to it all. And while I appreciated this aspect of the story, some of the terminology used to create that same impression left me wanting--phrases like, piss slit or the liberal use of spunk--once or twice, fine, but over and over...not so much.

What I liked most in this story, and one more thing that reminded me of Yaoi, was Saito's long standing, unquestioning, whole-hearted love for his unmei no hito (soulmate), regardless of the body it resides in. He pined for him for 800 years for gods sake. That's what I call dedication and I found it to be one of the only sweet things about the story. Almost everything else had an edge of some sort.

On a side note, while probably not purposeful on the author's part, because of the red hair and scarred cheek I couldn't help visualising Saito Arisada as Rurouni Kenshin. I found this a little distracting.

All-in-all however, while not without faults and inconsistencies, I enjoyed the read and would be up for trying another of Heywood's works.… (plus d'informations)