Monday, July 23, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Romancing the Null by Tina Gower



Romancing the Null is the first in Tina Gower's self-published fantasy romance series "The Outlier Prophecies."  I saw the book recommended on twitter (or at least a link to it RTed) by another urban fantasy self-published author, Annie Bellet, whose series (The 20-Sided Sorceress) I greatly enjoy, so I decided to give it a shot, as this book is currently available for FREE on Amazon Kindle.  So, a book recommended by an author I like for free?  That will get a download, if not a read from me.

Unfortunately, while Romancing the Null is the same length as the 20-Sided Sorceress Books (roughly 200 pages), it's not nearly as good, and I wont be continuing the series further despite the other two books being available for a combined 99 cents.  Gower sets up a modern world heavily influenced by the regular presence of the supernatural which certainly could show promise, but well the driving force of this book are the main characters and their relationship and it just....did not work for me.  Couple that with the investigation being rather eh, and it's a miss.  Again, the book is free, so there's no harm in others trying to see if they enjoy it, but for me, it's a pass.

More after the jump:

------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------
Kate Hale is a Blank - in a world where the supernatural is commonplace and oracles predict nearly every aspect of life (and death) for all people, Kate is one of the few whose fate is not foreseeable by an oracle.  Despite this, Kate has a job as an actuary working in the Accidental Deaths Predictions Department, where she unfortunately has the old office of the most legendary actuary in the world, a woman way out of Kate's league.

But when an Oracle pops up in Kate's Office and tells Kate that he is going to be murdered, Kate finds she can't simply hand off the case to someone else.  And when she tries bringing it to an investigator's attention, she winds up with a werewolf partner with some serious mental anguish as her only aid - aside from her druid cousin - in solving the case.  But can she really do it, or is she so far out of her depth she's only going to cause further deaths?  And why hasn't someone more important noticed this dangerous prediction earlier in the first place?
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It's easy to see what Romancing the Null was trying to do - start a series of fun urban fantasy books where the supernatural (creatures, oracles) is somewhat commonplace in a world that looks like ours, have the main characters be solving mysteries (with larger importance to the overall series arc becoming more clear over time) while having a potential romance between them as well.  It's easy to tell because it is trying incredibly hard to pull this off, to the point where the reader is kind of hit over the head with these intentions.  One character is a werewolf who quite literally is on the verge of a nervous breakdown due to a lack of physical intimacy, and while it's possible for that to work, well...the book's introduction to this is beyond blunt:

"Your little werewolf friend is going to be like an obsessive dog with a bone.  He won't give up.  He won't go half-ass. And he's protective too.  If he gets riled up, then he'll crave sex.  Lots of sex.  Sex calms them.  Vigorous sex or exercise."    
The speaker of these words isn't given a ton of credibility by the narrating main character, but they're then immediately confirmed, which is just....well, again maybe it'll play for other readers, and romance and sexual attraction hardly needs to be subtle, but this just felt to me like the author begging the reader to get "YOUR MAIN CHARACTERS ARE GOING TO EVENTUALLY AT SOME POINT BE CRAVING EACH OTHER".

The book's mystery is hardly great either - at one point, the book is even lengthened by our main characters having a "memory block" put on them that prevents them from connecting a name to a prior memory - except the reader has no such compunction, so it was kind of annoying to wait for a chapter for the characters to catch up.  Our bad guys' motivation isn't particularly interesting and their organization is necessarily cryptic (to come up again later in the series presumably), and well again it just didn't work for me.

Now again, the book is free for kindle!  So there's no harm in anyone trying it out, and at around 200 pages it won't take long to read through it.  So maybe others will like it a lot more.  For me, well, it was worth what I paid for it.
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