Dance with the Devil (Dark-Hunter Series, Book Seven): Sherrilyn Kenyon UPDATED

Here's another updated review!  You can find my original review from 2008 HERE.  My feelings about this book seem to have stayed the same.  I still find Zarek to be one of the most psychologically and emotionally complex characters of Kenyon's.  He truly does evolve on so many levels.  He starts off so animalistic and then you realize there's SO much you don't know about him.  At all.  You have NO idea what he has been through, what he has endured, and the demons that still haunt him even many centuries later.  There are so many nuances to his character that I don't feel as if I caught them all or even appreciated them to the degree I do now -- either this book is worth reading more than once, or I'm just a lot more mature in the last 10 years...could be both.

Astrid is a great counterpart to Zarek.  I will, however, say that I don't see much point to her blindness if she's just able to use Sasha to see.  For example, she held off looking at Zarek until he was conscious, but wouldn't it have been a hell of a lot easier to tend his wounds if she could see his back?  No one said she had to look at his face.  Then, when he was awake, that was the first thing she looked at...  Seems a bit pointless.  Unless the reason is so she can seem helpless to those she is judging and, in turn, see how those men treat someone they view as helpless.  This is something in which I can see some merit, but, if it is the real reason, it isn't explained well.

Thanatos is a good bad guy with nothing to lose, and this makes him all the more dangerous.  I was more than a little frustrated by Acheron's inability to help or keep an eye on his Dark-Hunters, the way in which Artemis is so flippant (though I suppose that's in character for her), and the degree to which Acheron went to hide things from Zarek.  Simi is also a point of contention for me.  I found her more annoying than funny -- like she's a parody or an inside joke with Kenyon and her friends and I just don't get it.  I love the idea of Acheron having a "daughter," just not her.  Her speech and obsession with barbecuing (and barbecue sauce) all really rub me the wrong way...  Maybe it's just me, though.  There were times when I felt something similar for Sasha.  While I loved the fact that his crabby butt was a part of this story, he sometimes went a little bit overboard.  Once again, it could just be me.

Overall, I do think Zarek is still one of my favorite, most tragic Dark-Hunters.  I didn't cry this time around, but I did get slightly choked up.  I recommend this book, but be prepared to have your heart beaten to a pulp by Zarek's backstory.

A Mercy: Toni Morrison

"In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy.  Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North.  Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland.  This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm.  Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding to their lives.

"A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery.  But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and daughter--a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise the abandonment."

This was another book that I read for my Multicultural American novel course.  I can certainly see why Toni Morrison is the winner of the Nobel Prize.  Her writing has something about it that is profoudly deep and almost lyrical.  This book took me only a few days to read.  While I enjoyed parts of it, there were the passages from the point of view of Florens that really, really...baffled (is that the word I want to use...I'm not so sure) me.  I practically got to the point of actually disliking the portions from the girl's point of view.  I really do understand that the point of these passages was to breathe life into the character, Florens, and show that--while she knew how to read and write some--she was still untrained and "simple"-for lack of a better word.  The plot was extremely jumpy and was hard to follow, but I was able to catch up after re-reading passages.  It is very difficult for me to say whether or not I enjoyed the book.  I liked it better than a lot of books that I've had to read for other classes in the past, but it certainly was not my favorite.  The wrting--while rich and interesting--was sometimes difficult to follow.  I genuinely believe that the only reason that I somewhat liked the book was only because I forced myself to look deeper than the words.  I will not try to dispute Morrison's status as a well-known and widely touted brilliant author, but this book was not really the most delicious cup of tea for me.  Like I said earlier, I liked portions of the book.  The work as a whole was not bad.  I am just not sure if I will--by my own choice--choose to read a book by Morrison in my free time.  I recommend this book for the conditions under which I read it--in a classroom/educational setting.  It was a decent book with interesting situations and history to the plot, but one really has to be open to it.