@internrachel @julia1

I just finished Shadowflame by Dianne Sylvan (360 pages). It *finally* got here after accidentally being sent to my old address, then shipped back to the store, then forwarded to my new address!

It was worth the wait, though :) I realy love the world Dianne Sylvan has created here. Yeah, it’s about vampires, which I’m pretty damn sick of if they’re not Buffy-related, but thankfully there’s still something interesting you can do with them, as this series shows.

This book picks up about 3 months after the last one left off, with David and Miranda ruling as Prime and Queen of the southern part of the US, while Miranda tries to pass as human to advance her music career. After what appears to be a botched assassination attempt on Miranda, it seems someone is targeting the people Miranda cares about, trying to kill them off to make her suffer. While trying to deal with this new threat, Miranda realizes that just because he’s her soulmate, doesn’t mean she really knows David when an ex-boyfriend she never knew he had shows up. This ex-boyfriend is Deven, the Prime of California, who dumped David suddenly and unceremoniously when he met his own soulmate Jonathan, who then became Consort of California. There’s all kinds of unresolved issues there and, well, David and Deven end up in bed together. I think that whole storyline was a really interesting exploration of polyamory and how it would work with the familiar fantasy genre concept of a soulmate. Like, just because the soulmate is the primary relationship doesn’t mean there isn’t sexual or even romantic attraction to other people too. And Deven and Jonathan have an open relationship where Jonathan is free to have meaningless sexual encounters away from home if he wants, but he feels super betrayed when Deven sleeps David, who he was with for over a decade and still loves. And Miranda, of course, is just furious about the whole thing. David does EVERYTHING all wrong in that situation (and Deven does too, to a lesser extent), but in seeing how all that went wrong you can see how it could have been worked out in a positive manner if David wasn’t such a bastard. It’s interesting, and a perspective you don’t often see in regular genre fiction. David’s still kind of a dick, though.

Luckily, Miranda still kicks ass. And even with their limited page time, Sylvan does a great job fleshing out the minor characters, like Cora and Lalita. I loved how a minor character who was killed in the last book, Sophie, is still an important element in this book as well.

The adventure/mystery was really compelling and it took several turns I didn’t see coming. I can’t wait for the next book in the series!