Awhile ago, Dorchester Publishing ran a small “contest”—fill out a survey, provide some info, and if picked, they’d send you an ARC1 of a soon-to-be published novel. The only stipulation was that if you liked it, you would talk about it. Post reviews to forums, to Amazon, to blogs. Well, I got picked, I read the book, and whether or not I liked it, I knew I would blog about it. It was the least I could do for a free book, I figured.

The promotion was for a Marjorie M. Liu novel, Soul Song. It’s the sixth book in the Dirk & Steele series. I came into this book having never read a previous book in this series, nor any of Liu’s previous novels. It is a paranormal romance, and not one I would have picked up in the bookstore, had I seen it on the shelf. Getting an ARC was a great way to try out a book I normally wouldn’t want to spend my money on. I now have an urge to look up Liu’s backlist, and gorge myself on her paranormal.

Soul Song


Although Soul Song is the sixth in a book series, the average reader wouldn’t know it unless they had read the previous books. At no point did I feel lost, wishing that I started at the beginning instead of the middle.

Liu opens the novel up in a parked car. Our future hero M’cal2 is a male prostitute—and a soul stealer. He takes the soul of the woman accompanying him, leaving her an empty shell of a woman who’s body will most likely die within a day or two. He doesn’t want to steal her soul, though, and when he’s through with the act, he returns to the water, and to the witch that compels him to do it.

Enslaved by the witch and forced to do what she commands, M’cal is powerless to stop what she has compelled him to do. The witch has demanded the soul of Kitalia Bell, a violin virtuoso, and a woman not without her own powers. Kitalia can “see” murders—she can see the violent manner of peoples death, but has no power to fight it.

On the night that M’cal first locates her, Kitalia sees a woman with a knife in her eyeball sitting in the front row during her concert. After the concert, she sees the woman again on the street. Normally she would ignore the vision—most people wouldn’t believe her if she told them they were going to be murdered, and she didn’t actually know when they were going to die. For some reason, though, Kitalia feels compelled to warn the woman, which in turn snowballs into the main conflict of the story. Caught in the cross fire, M’cal saves Kitalia from the woman’s pursuers, but informs her that he himself has been sent to kill her.

“I was sent here to kill you,” he rasped, jerking her around to face him. “I am still supposed to kill you. And I will, if you don not leave this place. Right now.

She did not blink, though he could hear her heart fluttering, wild. “You rescued me.”

“No,” he breathed. “Do not trust that.”

M’cal is a Krackeni, a merman who can shift between his fin and his legs. There are other shape-shifters in the novel, some of who hint at backstory which is probably contained in previous books, although there was no sense of missing connections and references to previous novels. The conflict escalates, as does the romance, until both are resolved in a final climactic scene.

Opinion

Soul Song was a very well written romance novel. There were only a few places where I thought the description or narration could be more polished, but that’s to be expected in an ARC. The confrontations were believable, and I truly did not know which direction the story was going until we finally got there.

My only real gripe was the passage of time. According to the characters, who comment on it, the entire novel—from the moment M’cal first sees Kitalia to the moment they have defeated the evil witch—is only two days. Two days in which two characters who had separately sworn off love for different reasons fall so madly in love that M’cal actually performs a Krackeni marriage ceremony, which bonds him with Kitalia for the rest of his life, unable to take another. Granted, this gives them a connection that later in the final scene helps the two of them come out relatively unscathed, but at the same time it makes M’cal seem like he can’t learn from the past. After all, he was enslaved to the witch because he’d not known her very long and thought he was in love with her.

Until I had been informed of the time frame from the characters, I truly thought the book had taken about a week through time, which would have helped explain the super-fast, super-hot love affair of two people who from first appearances shouldn’t be together. After all, who falls in love with their hired killer?

Also, Liu drops in four shape-shifters, when after the introduction, we really only see one of them again. It appears that their whole purpose is to fill a car with non-human men, and thus convince the reader that it’s perfectly all right that Kitalia is in love with this man who can become a fish. Which is just silly, since the reader wants Kitalia with M’cal from the first moment he saves her.

Conclusion

While this isn’t my first foray into paranormal romance, this is my first encounter with Liu’s work. I enjoyed it immensely, and couldn’t put it down. I read it in one sitting, putting aside everything else I had planned to do yesterday evening.

If you’ve been looking to start a new genre—whether you read romances, and want to try paranormal, or you read paranormal and want to try romances—this is as good a place as any.

I really hadn’t expected to like it as much as I did; I’d had the book on my bookshelf for over a week, and normally new romances don’t last that long on my reading pile.

Soul Song will be available in stores next Tuesday—July 3.

Rating

[rate 3]

  1. Advanced Reading Copy[back]
  2. The entire time I was reading, I misread this name. I know it’s supposed to be mm-cal, but I have a friend named Mi’cal—seriously, with the apostrophe and all—and I kept hearing my-cal in my head[back]