Reviewed by Carissa
TITLE: Closed Eyes
AUTHOR: Jerry Bomhan
PUBLISHER: Less Than Three
LENGTH: 77 pages
BLURB:
Ryo was once a soldier, a hardened warrior who put her life on the line without hesitation or regret. Then she met Kei and found someone worth living for.
Now Kei has vanished, and Ryo must once again don the garb of a warrior. However, a life of peaceful labor has dulled her previously sharpened edges, and the mission to save the love of her life may be her final in more ways than one…
REVIEW:
When Ryo comes back home from the fields and finds that her lover, Kei, vanished without a trace, she knows something has gone wrong. Kei wouldn’t just leave her without saying anything. Then she finds out that her lover’s father has plans for Kei–marriage, kids, prestige–and Ryo–death. But Ryo cannot just walk away from Kei, no matter what harm in may bring herself, so she follows after Kei to get her back. Unfortunately nothing is ever easy, and Ryo might just find herself fighting for her life over a woman that may not have her even if she wins.
When Less Than Three Press did a recent run of f/f books, I decided to pick up a few of them review. I don’t normally read that many f/f books, but I’ve been trying to broaden my horizons, and some of these stories looked really good. I ended up picking three books, all for various reasons. This one I picked mostly because I loved the cover. The blurb sounded interesting, but the cover was pretty damn gorgeous and it swayed me into selecting it.
The story started out interesting enough. I loved the setting of this story (feudal Japan(ish)), and a women who knows her way around a sword is always a plus in my book. But I could tell from almost the get go that this story was not going to agree with me. And surprisingly it wasn’t the f/f content that I had issues with, like I was fearing.
This story reads very much like an action flick on 2x fast-forward. You can see the story fine, and you can probably figure out most of the details, but there is very little emotion to it. There is a lot of ‘telling’ and very little ‘showing’ in this book. It read very much like this: Ryo is an X. Ryo loves Y. Ryo left her old job because of Z. Ryo has this motivation. Ryo will do this now. Ryo fights. The sentences of this story may have been well written, but the characters were flat.
There are also way too many bloody sword fights. Which is an odd thing for me to say, because I love watching a good sword fight–but on paper sword fights can get tedious very quickly. On film, sword fights are great–you have grace, skill, deadly persuasion–all at lightning paces. On paper they start to get a bit ‘will someone just stab someone and get this over with already.’ It really made me want to just skim those portions of the book. Unfortunately they are like fifty percent of the entire story, and the story is not that long to begin with.
It didn’t help that Ryo and Kei are the embodiment of the two archetypes that I like least. The Inexplicably Talented Fighter (who, even after years of not actually fighting can still pick up their weapon of choice and defeat all enemies) and the Fainting Maiden (who is always in need of rescue but never does a bloody single thing to rescue herself).
So while there was a lot of really good potential in this story, for me it was a bit boring to read. I never connected with any of the characters, the fight scenes bored me to tears, and by the time they got around to forgiving the dude for practically raping Kei–because it’s for the country so that clearly makes it ok!–I had hit my limit. This is not a terrible story, but it hardly blew me out of the water, either.
RATING:
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