My fifth book by this author, fourth in this series.

It’s quite possible my lowish rating is due partially to how I had approached this series. As in, I gobbled up the books as prior one was completed, before taking a breath. And the inherent emotionalism/emotional roller coaster kept building and building until I just couldn’t take it any longer. It’s possible I’d still have rated this around this rating regardless, we’ll never know now.

I was somewhat slightly nervous about starting this specific book because I knew it was deeply connected to, and or was the basis for The Chronicles of Alsea. And I had read the first book in that series already, so I wasn’t certain how much of this would end up being something of a modified reread.

My worries were not meet. This book did in fact visit Alsea. And then left again. And the entirety of the Alsea section was over by the 8% mark in the book. It was also, mostly, massively boring. A lot of the feeling that I’d expect from a DeLancey book didn’t seem to be there for this section. As in, it was bland. The information is just relayed without much else.

Voyager, while attempting to get home, gets caught in another void. With other ships. Gets a certain amount of damage, but the biggest issue was the loss of food. So it looks for food. Arrives at a pre-warp civilization. One that has just two cities on the entire planet. Because they are pre-warp, Janeway and the away team have cosmetic surgery to make them look like Alseans. Two sets of away teams beam down to the planet. They find food. They buy food. They have the food delivered to abandoned warehouses. They beam food up. They begin to depart the system. They stop when they pick up a Borg signal coming from the planet. They hurriedly investigate. Find that it’s about to explode and kill three million people. They rush to help keep the ship from exploding and keep the people from dying. They meet Andira Tal. They deactivate the Borg ship. They have dinner with Tal up on Voyager. She links Janeway and Lynn. Voyager leaves. The end. And everything was conveyed in about that level of emotion and excitement. 8% of the book has now been read.

I had the thought, while reading this book, that there’s a feeling, false or otherwise, that the author had been massaging the Voyager books for a longish while. Bringing them up to a higher quality. As mentioned, I could be wrong about that. I mention, though, because this specific book reads more like the first book the author wrote. I’m phrasing that wrong. I mean, that this specific book reads as if it is the first book the author had ever written. With all the flaws and issues inherent in first books. That or, since an entire series of books was made up based off of the first 8% of the book, more time was spent on those other books, and less on ‘polishing up’ this one.

None of that really mattered in the rating. The rating is deeply connected to emotional roller coasters the author seems to love deeply. Before this book there were just two couples who didn’t go through a particular pattern. A pattern of coming together, having one or both fuck things up, have them split, have them come back together, have them reach the highest levels, and while there have one or the other fuck up again, and have them crash yet again. Repeat. 80,000 times. That’s how these books read. Up, down, plateau, Janeway, while in a state of blissful happiness suddenly becomes weirdly enraged, and boom, explodes. Yet again the relationship is in turmoil. Or, yet again Lynn feels inadequate, and boom. Or, yet again, Revi feels undeserving of love, and destroys her relationship with Seven. The only one who didn’t regularly fuck things up was Seven. Odd, I know.

I had mentioned that there had been just two couples who hadn’t been on this roller coaster before this book. Then ran off and talked about what the ‘roller coaster’ meant. Well, back to the two couples. Harry Kim and his girlfriend, and Tom Paris and his girlfriend B’lanna Torres. Vaguely interesting, that, how the relationship that actually did go through a bunch of up and downs, and emotional turmoil on the television show, Paris and Torres, were ‘flat’ in DeLancey’s books. Well, until this book. And Harry Kim himself also had a bit of emotional roller coaster to ride in the official books – mostly the books set after the return of Voyager to Earth and reuniting with Kim’s girlfriend/spy.

Is there a message here? The two straight couples that have any importance in the series have very limited ‘trouble’ to handle, and the one that Torres and Paris face isn’t internally created (unlike on the show), but externally created. Granted, Kim and his on ship girlfriend have no real scenes in the books. They are just seen, and/or talked about. So, for all the reader knows, they do have issues. But the focus isn’t on them so the reader doesn’t learn of them. Right, the message. Straight couples equal no internal emotional turmoil. Lesbian couples equals massive, and I mean massive, and repetitious horrifying angsty turmoil. Constantly. There’s never a level reached wherein things kind of level off. No, always bitter angry fighting. So, am I supposed to be seeing a message from that? Are lesbian relationships inherently unstable and explosive? By the way, there is, in fact, one male-male relationship mentioned in the series, but they have just one scene (up to now), and neither are ‘important’ characters.

So, yeah, my lower rating for this specific book is based on all of that above. The constant beating against my head that lesbians are unstable, plus . . . um well, for the first time I started skipping passages, pages. I mean, for fuck sake, someone important actually ‘dies’ and I just kind of read it with no emotional impact. Just, get it over with already. Heartless, I know, but this was something like the 26th time in this book where some relationship got into trouble, where someone was at the height of happiness and suddenly tragedy strikes. For fuck sake. There’s only so many times the emotional manipulation can occur before I just grow numb. Seriously, I just became numb. I just couldn’t keep my brain from numbingifying itself to save me.

So, yeah, maybe the low rating is because I read all of these books all at once. But, then again, maybe I would have had a lower rating for this book anyway.

I feel vaguely bad on two levels: this is the first DeLancey book I didn’t rate 5 stars, and remember this is the fifth I’ve read, and everyone else who has ever read this book just absolutely loved it. I was just numbed. (Hehe, so I go look at the ratings. What do I see? “100% of people liked it”. Hmms. 34 rated it 5 stars, 14 rated it 4, and I’m one of the 4 losers who rated this book 3 stars. There are no 2 or 1 star ratings for this book).

January 14 2016
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