Mini-review: Caressed by Ice, or Tropes I didn't know I loved

[flo]

Fair cop, Nalini Singh's Psy/Changeling series is like, the most overwritten, over-dramatic ridiculousness in the world. The world-building is fascinating (psychics AND were-everythings!), but you have to dig through pages and pages of dangerous curves, exotic golden skin and barely controlled animal lust in order to reach it. But there are glimmers of...well, okay there really aren't, and whether you like any of the twelve or so books in the series so far depends on what tropes trope your boat.

Context: I'm on a massive reread bender due to feeling like I've sampled everything in the world and haven't found anything I want to pay $7 to read more of, and I own about four of these books, and while I thought originally that I'd want to review at least two of them here, it only comes down to one: Caressed by Ice, book three.

When rereading this series, I usually do the first book, Slave to Sensation, to refresh my memory of the world and get back into the flow, then do the rest of the books I own in chronological order, skipping ahead if I get bored of the current book. This time around, I found myself rolling my eyes at more of all of the books, and the only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that Caressed by Ice would make up for everything.

This time, I just straight up skipped the second book once I realized it wasn't doing much for me.

Logically, the book is only sort of average. Both the heroine and the hero go on at length about stuff that ends up not mattering in the slightest because of fluffy romance logic or authorial forgetfulness/distraction. But it all works for me because Judd Lauren, weird name aside, is the paper embodiment of one of my favorite types of heroes.

He's cold in manner (yes). He's a ridiculously powerful (yes), ridiculously competent assassin (HELL yes), madly in love with the heroine despite himself (yes), and on top of all that, he has a sensible, if contrived reason to strive to keep his distance from her, in that he could hurt her with his ~powers if he's not careful (yeeeessss). AND he's conditioned to hurt himself rather than let loose his power, so he's in hidden pain every time he's flirting with her, so um, YES.

With that kind of man in a book I'm reading, it doesn't really matter what else is going on, unless it's terminally stupid. But Nalini Singh, despite the dramatics, writes a pretty good mystery-ish plot, which is exactly the sort of thing I like going on in the background of my romances. Brenna Shane Kincaid, the heroine, is independent and angry and hurt and more or less interesting, and she's not shy of expressing what she wants from Mr. Lauren. And she has the right reaction to finding out why he's holding back, i.e. she's fucking unhappy for him, and tries to be considerate etc.

There's naturally things I dislike about the book-- I found I disliked the constant emphasis on male dominance and aggression unless Mr. Lauren was the vector, half because it felt kind of hokey and exaggerated when the other weredudes were doing it, and half because Mr. Lauren was only really openly dominant in (or almost in) the sack.

Then again, that might be my tropes talking. I tend to love concealment and intrigue in all and every thing, so covert aggression is always going to be more interesting to me than it's more open counterpart. I'd highly, HIGHLY recommend the series if dominance and aggression float your boat, especially if you don't mind some serious OTTness.

Sadly, this is the only book in the series that presses my buttons so accurately. Everything else I've read is kind of meh, and though I haven't tried some of the newer books, none of the main pairings sound interesting enough for me to bother with. The closest matches were Hostage to Pleasure and Bonds of Justice, with the women in both books being the icy pillars of delicious competence that I like. I didn't finish rereading either book, though, because with Hostage I quickly grew to hate the annoyingly pushy and judgmental hero, and with Bonds, I wasn't interested enough in the plot, which seemed likely to play a larger role than the romance.