Sunday, October 30, 2011

Frost Moon and Blood Rock and reader perceptions

Dr. Anthony Francis is an inventive author who has created a fascinating alternate Atlanta filled with a paranormal underworld that includes vampires, werewolves and...magical tattooists!  Dakota Frost is a master of her art and one of those unusual people, an ethical magic wielder.  Her tattoos are much sought after and the power for them comes from within her.  She has an interesting coterie of friends and associates to call upon that give a wonderful flair to the tales that are presented in Frost Moon and Blood Rock and both of these books are quite entertaining.  My favorite scene is her manipulation of the watch tattoo (yes, you will just have to read the story).  My NOR review for the former is still pending (will update when it is posted) but the latter is at this link

The following is a mini-rant so if you are not in the mood, it might behoove you to move on to something else.  (-:

Now, occasionally I wander around Amazon.com looking for new releases or alternate pseudonyms for the author that I am currently reading and out of professional curiosity I sometimes look at the general trend of reviews.  I am always very startled to discover those that are diametrically opposed to my views so naturally I scan through to see what the issues are for that particular reader.  I guess that personally I tend to skim past items that I consider a little icky (e.g. I am not really fond of gory scenes and will avoid movies that have blood spurting everywhere--much to my younger brother's chagrin-- but I just speed through that kind of description in the books that I read without dwelling on the scene).  I am afraid that the scenes in these works that several readers found quite offensive didn't even impinge on my radar.  Part of the issue seems to be that the main character is, gasp, bisexual!  And her former lover is into kinky sex scenes.  Then, she is propositioned by a young weretiger whom she scares off by pretending to reciprocate her attention.  And....that evidently equated to the author being some kind of agenda-promoting pedophile?  NOT!  I am not sure how people forget that these are stories they are reading, not biographies or encyclopedias or reference works.  Do bad things happen in the stories?  Yes, otherwise there is no conflict or problem to be solved or whatever.  Do people in our society have all ranges of sexual preferences?  Yes, of course they do.  Are some of them objectionable?  Of course.  But to tie in bisexuality with pedophilia?  How did we go there?  Fans of Joey Hill, Kim Harrison, etc. would be pretty surprised to discover that strange fact about their favorite characters.  I guess we'll just have to continue saying, "different strokes for different folks" but I may have to start taking the time to do Amazon reviews as well so that there are alternate viewpoints posted as well, lol.

2 comments:

  1. While I like reading amazon reviews before buying a book to see what others like and dislike about it, it is interesting to see how people react to things like this., There will always be those out there who need to complain and make a bigger deal out of things than it needs to be. For some to take being bisexual and compare it to pedophile is ridiculous. I've done a few *Very limited amount* of amazon reviews when I like a book a lot or hate a movie. lol

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  2. Well, to be accurate, I think the reader was already offended that the main character was bisexual and then there are some iffy scenes with the young weretiger which prompted the reader to start talking pedophilia.

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