Stein, Jeanne C.: The Watcher
The Watcher (2007)
Written by: Jeanne C. Stein
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Pages: 291
Series: Book Three (ongoing)
First off, it's been a while. Truth is, I haven't felt like reading a thing, which is due in part to the fact I've had a lot to do, including taxes I was procrastinating, and also due to the fact I had to really sit down and brainstorm my own novel-in-progress, and I just didn't want to turn away from my own world-building in order to read someone else's. Now that I'm done with these previously mentioned tasks, I can read again, so I decided to ease into it with something quick and easy.
My reaction to Jeanne C. Stein's Anna Strong series has been hit and miss. I had a lot of problems with the first book The Becoming, but liked the voice and action enough to go ahead and try the second, Blood Drive. I liked it much better and went ahead and bought books three and four and now, after reading three, I'm kind of wishing I hadn't bothered with four.
The premise: book three has Anna still struggling to balance her vampire life with her human life, all the while trying to keep the two very separate from each other. But her two lives collide in this book when her lover disappears and seems to be connected to some very supernatural events that are going on, which includes a which trying to raise a demon to wreck havoc on the supernatural kind. Anna will do anything she can to help, but her vampire mentor doesn't trust her not to screw up, and she's got to prove she's fit for the job, even though the lives of the people she cares about are on the line.
Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.
I have to get this out of the way before I forget: there is a sort of subplot in which Anna, after having a fight with her best friend David, goes to a bar and gets smashing drunk, meets up with a guy whose brother's daughter is getting harassed by her ex-husband. In her drunken stupor, Anna agrees to help out, but she shags this guy (the father) senseless. The man's name? DAN SIMMONS.
Are you fucking kidding me? Now, if I had any indication from the book AT ALL that Jeanne Stein knows DAN SIMMONS (you know, the author of such books like Hyperion and The Terror) and this is kind of a nod of weird respect, I'd roll with it. Really. After all, John Scalzi throws out all kinds of name to honor and acknowledge his friends in the SF community, and it's cool because, well, you KNOW he knows them, and if he doesn't KNOW them, you know there's a certain amount of respect.
But for some reason, I'm having trouble believing Dan Simmons and Jeanne C. Stein are buddies. And if they are, shame on me. But did you really have to name such a character after such a WELL-KNOWN AUTHOR? It threw me right out of the story, and that would've only been corrected if Anna drunkenly turned to the guy and said, "Like the author?"
But why do I have the feeling that Stein may not have realized she named a minor character after a well-known author? I know I'm not giving her enough credit, but this book was blah enough that I'm not willing to either.
On to the book:
It was blah. :)
Let me be honest. If Stein does one thing well, she knows how to write first person, present-tense POV without the reader knowing what she's doing. Kudos. It's one of the reasons I started this series. Also, her books are fast page-turners. More kudos. You can't just stop at the end of a chapter.
But Anna's lack of character development and the sheer randomosity of a plot are just frustrating in this book. She won't feed properly, which makes her a loose canon. She won't actually sit down and let anyone TEACH her anything: she gets huffy and goes off in her own direction, which is frustrating, because each book we're getting more and more of the supernatural world (which for some reason, is simply too big for the size of these books, I don't know why) without any real context for it. Look, there's shape-shifters! And witches! And demons! And leprechauns!
Yes, I said leprechauns. That's the only thing I can think of that would accurately describe Casper, Anna's friendly voice-in-her-head that guides her out of trouble. Talk about a disappointing and kind of lame reveal.
What's worse is that while we're getting loads of supernatural thrown at us with each book, in each book, Anna laughs it off and never, ever takes it seriously until it hurts someone she knows, or threatens to. Come on, Anna: you're a vampire now. Life is NOT WHAT YOU EXPECTED. Are you REALLY going to keep doing this juvenile bullshit reaction every time something new pops up?
Probably. Because rather than sit down and really focusing on learning what she needs to, which is SEPARATE (or should be) from her balance of vampire life and human life, she just plunges head-first into action without any real thought. It's proven over and over in this novel, which makes Anna Strong incredibly difficult to sympathize with. It's an action-packed book without any real development or meat on the bones.
And let's talk about that action and how it relates to story: you've got Anna dealing with the sudden disappearance of Culebra, which is connected to the mysterious witch, Burke, she met outside Culebra's place; you've got Anna and David going on not one, but two, unrelated bounties; you've got an FBI agent whose supposedly a friend to Max investigating him; you've got Max acting weird and disappearing; you've got Anna getting mysterious phone calls about someone wanting to kill her and her boyfriend; you've got a witch wanting to raise a demon.
Now, some of this connects, but in reading, it feels like one-damn-thing-after-another kind of plot. The witch, for some reason we've yet to determine (that or it was so inconsequential that I overlooked it while reading) wanting Anna to purposely crash her demon-raising party and kidnaps Culebra to get her attention. The first bounty Anna and David went on led to the mysterious phone calls and really ended up not being all that interesting in terms of resolution, because Anna killed the guy easily. It would've been interesting if, even though he was human, he gave her an honest-to-God run for her money. You've got Max's story with Martinez, who thinks Max gave away the location of the safe house and therefore got Martinez's family killed, and whew... talk about a mess there. Can I just say how annoying it was we never really learned WHO gave that info away? There was a part of me that was kind of hoping it was Max all along, just to give him a darker edge, but the other part of me was like, "Who cares? If Max didn't do it, this whole subplot is stupid because no one's going to reason with anyone else and it's just going to be a bloodbath." And it was.
The book's all over the place and it doesn't really resolve. I'm tired of the soapish moments with Gloria versus Anna (and I'm just as tired of Gloria as Anna is, but I wish Gloria would become something more interesting, like a vamp in disguise, rather than just her best friend's annoying girl). I couldn't stand Anna's stance on needing to break up with Max and then her rescue of him. It would've been nice if she'd realized, during any of this, that she really was in love with the guy, but nope. Nothing, nada. A part of me was hoping that something would happen where Anna would have to turn Max in order for him to survive, but that didn't happen. Maybe that's a plot for the future (maybe she'll do it to David), but instead, the book treads water. Sure, Max learns what Anna really is, but even that is anti-climatic.
This is the kind of book that really sheds light on the BAD stereotypes of urban fantasy: men who meet Anna want to fuck her, and she wants to fuck them because of her tremendous sexual appetite (all courtesy of being a vampire, because blood lust and regular lust is one and the same); a kick-ass heroine who doesn't have a single female friend to turn to, and all the women who are in the supporting cast are pretty much antagonists, even Anna's mom (the exception being Sorrel, but even Anna doesn't want to get too close to her because of her emotional empathic ability).
It's just frustrating. There's no growth of character. And in this book, no real focus of plot. I've little interest in reading the next, Legacy, and I'm really wishing I hadn't picked it up, especially since I glanced at reviews and noted some of the same problems in that book that are in this one.
I don't know. Maybe not reading anything for two weeks has made me overly critical, but then again, I've also spent those two weeks brainstorming my own work, and god knows how critical I am to my own stuff, so some of that is bound to leak into my reactions to published work. But there's nothing here really pulling me to come back to the series: I don't like the heroine, there's no romantic pairing, and the friendship between Anna and David is weak because they're both in love with each other and have no idea (this could be appealing if Anna were more likable) and then there's the Gloria factor, a character that's just there for soap-opera drama. Even the world-building is lacking, as I'm not getting anything NEW out of this urban fantasy world, so there's nothing there either to keep me coming back.
And don't get me started on the level of sexual violence that keeps popping up in these books. Blood Drive, I understood and sympathized with. This time, argh.
My Rating
Wish I'd Borrowed It: for the third book in the series, it lacks focus and any kind of development, especially in characterization. The world-building keeps adding more stuff to the pot, but none of it's anything that interests me, and it doesn't seem rooted to the fictional world so much as just tossed in. None of the subplots really gelled together in a satisfying way, and I really, really dislike the heroine at this point. If I didn't already have the fourth book in the series, I'd stop here. But I do, so this series gets one more shot, though I'm 99% certain it's not going to do a thing to change my mind. There's nothing new or unique about this urban fantasy series, and the only credit I will give to the author is her excellent use of first-person, present tense POV and her ability to keep you turning those pages. That's it. It's a fast read, but when you sit down and really reflect on what you've read, you realize there's not much to chew on. Oh well.
Cover Commentary: another absolutely lovely cover, and I like how what appears to be a holster from afar is really a shape-shifting snake, though it plays little to no role in the book.
Next up:
Eventually, you'll get reviews for Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh and Blood Ties by Pamela Freeman, which I started before my brain said, "NO MORE BOOKS!" and turned itself off. Really, you'll get those reviews.
But next is Patricia Briggs's Bone Crossed