First Against the Wall by Manna Francis
My rating: 4/5 cats
oh god, karen, you are reading more gay smut?
well no, not exactly.
i love this series, and i am so glad dana turned me on to it. this one is her very favorite book of the series, and yet it also happens to be the least smutty one of all! for one thing, it is hard to focus on the lovemaking when you have a revolution on your hands, but even in the sexxy scenes that are included, a lot of them have that tasteful gauze curtain drawn over them and are more implicit than erotic.
so what gives, dana? as the reigning queen of M/M fiction, to the extent that you have this for your nook cover:
i would have expected a bit more manly love in your favorite installment!
but i get it—this one has a lot of action, intrigue, plotting, and character progression. it is also one of the only ones to be a complete novel, and not a novella with a bunch of short stories tacked on at the end. and manna francis can really sustain a narrative, so i don’t know why her books are always in that format. so it has a lot going for it and doesn’t need to rely on the bedroom scenes to keep a reader’s interest.
i have to confess, i got lost a couple of times with all the manipulation and high-stakes espionage, but i trusted that she knew what she was doing, and i just went along for the ride, assuming that the crossing and double-crossing would work itself out in the end. watching carnac and toreth in their battle of wits and manipulation was crazy-good fun. it is nice to see toreth come up against an opponent equal to himself in intellectual vanity and potential for cruelty.
i love warrick more and more with each passing book, and even though i still think toreth has got a ways to go, i just love them so much together, even though they violate my rule of “goddammit, just talk to each other already.” because although so much time is wasted in this one because of their avoidance of issues, i kind of think in their case it is necessary, because toreth is like some kind of easily-startled wild animal who needs to be handled a certain way or off he will go, like a sexual monster.
it is a testament to francis’ writing skills that i do not hate toreth outright. he is a supremely frustrating character, but after 6 books, he really sort of grows on you…
he’d never taken candy from a baby, because he disliked both sweets and kids, but it had to be something like this.
but the ending of this one??? so cruel.
so. so. cruel.
and unexpected.
and because of its shattering cliffhanger-y out-of-nowhere ending scene, you can bet i will be reading the seventh (and final?) book before the end of the year. because of all the books, this is the one with the most lasting repercussions, both to the administration and to warrick-and-toreth.
and i will hate to see this series end, but i really need to know what happens.
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