It surprises me how much I liked this audiobook. Emmaline is not someone I would have befriended but Ms Cole does such a good job of giving depth and evoking empathy and support for characters we might roll our eyes at on the surface. Emmaline is soft, fearful and on the surface a poster girl for weak, screaming gothic heroines, but Cole made me like her very early on, in spite of no singular or particular skill/ability/power that sets her apart. Especially considering her lineage and family of noteworthy and history-making Valkyrie.
Perhaps it was this "normality" that made it so easy to get behind Emma.
Her wonderful use of youth slang and colloquilisms cracked me up at so many turns while her treatment of the analytical, befuddled but brilliant hero tries to understand his completely unexpected "fated" female and catch up after 150 years of underground torture and missing the whole industrial and technological revolution. Our hero (tortured, true, but not dragging us into pathos-ville with it), king of Scottish Lycae finds himself trying to adapt (love his late nite reading up on everything) to a world of cars ("its just like carriage and has a parking brake"), cell phones, satellite GPS tracking and suddenly having to figure out his modern woman. Emma's contradiction of blithe insouciance (characteristic of the all dwellers from Val Hall in New Orleans) but painful fearfulness needing protection is a conundrum Lachlain is well up for.
Cole does such a fine job in creating quiet intimacy through touching conversation that I find myself completely stopping what I'm doing (painting, laundry etc) to listen and faze out to their dialogue. I realized that Cole doesn't rely on trading mutual horrors of the past to grow their character's attachment to each other--its the other things, the mundane such as Bowen's conversation about lessons learned, and sharing Lachlain's gift with Emmaline. The quiet post coital conversations between Lachlain and Emma including small misunderstandings made right. The stuff that all of us struggle thru to make a relationship. There isn't so much contrivance keeping these two apart as usual to the genre. Their courtship, Lachlain's growth and healing are the real story. The paranormal bits make it fun and hilarious at times. I've read two of the later books in this series and loved hearing more about crazy Nix and the scoop about the other Valkyrie.
This is the book you want to listen to all weekend (preferably out of earshot of others). The eroticism is electric, visceral and will leave you flushed. I had to close my windows at points. But it was neither gratuitous nor frequent and added so much to the depth of their attraction.
Although I'm the last woman to find Scottish accents attractive, I was lured in to some extent by Lachlain.
I give my rare 5 stars to both author and to Robert Petkoff. Petkoff's Russian accents are the best, and his Scottish is no slouch. His timing, tempo, inflection, accents and overall delivery were fantastic in this book and in Bowen's story.
This is one I shall enjoy listening to again and again.
Read it. Listen to it. Own it.
Rock on Ms Cole and thanks for a fabulous weekend of Lachlain's and Bowen's stories.
Out of 200+ audiobooks in the past year, I'd have to put this in my top 10.
-heading out to read more Kresley Cole,
tina
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