I finished Midnight Awakening last week - my predictions didn't come true, but that's probably for the best. All in all, it was as thoroughly entertaining as the rest of the series.
In a lot of MB books and others of that ilk, you have a sense of the hero rescuing or fulfilling the heroine in one way, and the heroine helps the hero in a different way. Like pieces of a puzzle - or a hungry bird and lonely bird feeder. But usually their attraction is more based on something animal/chemical. What I enjoyed here was the way Elise and Tegan rescued each other from the same sort of self-destructive vigilantism. I liked that they had that whole lost love/vengeance thing in common. Like that their attraction was based a little more on their characters.
I also enjoyed the part Elise played at the end. I hope the warriors will see from this that they can utilize Elise and the other females more often. I mean, those females have some pretty awesome superpowers. Best of all, I like Savannah's superpower of reading the history of an object and knowing about its owner. That would actually be a cool superpower for a writer to have, too, though not quite as cool a superpower as the power to not have a job.
Anyway, this being the third book I've read, there are a few recurring freaky things I wish to discuss, and all I have time to write about right now is freaky thing #1, but this one is the complexly freakiest anyway.
Entertainingly Freaky thing #1: The infantilization of the breedmate ladies as they suck the warriors blood.
Something about the whole feeding-off-the-warrior thing kept on striking me as a very strange and odd, and I remembered the feeling from previous books.
Of course I was having too much fun reading to stop and think about it, but finally, then, I did. At first I thought it was just the use of the word mewling to describe the sound the women make. Mewling, if you look it up, is to cry weakly, as a baby or young child, or whimper or wail.
But part of the effect was also lines like this: "The pinch of her blunt little bite was an erotic pain that went through him like an arrow." It's always about the blunt little teeth.
It actually never occurred to me until now that that's what babies sort of have in common with vampires, that they feed off human bodies for food; and the way the breedmate women feed is more babyish than vampirish, though it's a little of both. And then you add in the sex part, and it's its own crazy deal. Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing here. I enjoy this weird and creative world building. It's just something I think about - briefly, while they are feeding off the warriors, the breedmates turn into these oddly infantilized creatures. Is it just me, or have other people noticed this? It will be interesting to see if this continues in Rio's story, which I have and can't wait to read. (After LOS!)
Okay! Next up, the other 4 freaky things.
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