the heroine is awful. ( )

3.5 Stars ( )

An interesting start to this series. I was a fan of the Dark Hunters. This series isn't quite as compelling, but I think I might can read more about this band of assassins. ( )

It's a bit overwrought. But I'll give book two a chance since I love her Dark Hunter series so much. ( )

The first page of the prologue begins with a line of dialog: "I quit The League tonight". It's a well-chosen, well-constructed first line for a novel, if not particularly original or precisely "great". It is, in fact, exactly the kind of thing you'd write after ten minutes of pondering how to start a novel about an assassin who quits his secret assassin cult to rescue a fair damsel, some time in the days immediately following a three hour writer's workshop held at the local book store by someone who had recently published his or her first novel.

You know . . . a few days later, so you have time to forget some of the advice you might find on the first webpage that comes up in a search for "first line of a novel" when you're stumped for ideas on how to write a great first line.

It's a good opening line. It's a short sentence, and while it does not immediately grab you the way some of the greatest first sentences of novels ever written do, it does perhaps intrigue the reader. It hints at something big and, perhaps, shadowy. It serves to introduce the protagonist in a way that says something about his decisiveness, about his past, and about his relationship with that past, but it does not overburden itself with detail. Good job, Ms. Kenyon.

The next couple of pages make up for that. Quite ample detail overburdening follows shortly, mostly by way of ominous narrative pronouncements, flashy visual markers that scream "I AM A LETHAL ASSASSIN FROM A CULT THAT DOESN'T KNOW WHAT 'SECRET' MEANS". Some boring observer character provides a bit of narrative perspective without seeming particularly important, and seems privy to all the ultra-secret super-assassin character's non-secrets. The expository detail revealed through this perspective character's attention is, in fact, nothing like the kind of detail he would likely notice, having already known the shadowy assassin guy -- who is, I shit you not, "literally one with the blackest night" according to the narrative text -- quite long enough for these flashy status markers to fade into his conscious background.

Literally? Are you serious? I do not think that word means what you think it means.

We find out later that, in addition to being apparently made up of nocturnal lack-of-sunlight-stuff and an inseparable condition of identity with the middle of the half of the diurnal cycle without direct illumination by the nearest star -- but only some nights, the "blackest" of them -- he also has fangs. Well, okay, then. Did I mention his "armor" snugly fits his (well-muscled, obviously) figure like a latex glove? Of course it does. For some reason Mr. Blackest Night has white-blonde hair like all the other assassins who are One With The Night, by the way. Yes, we're still on the first page (except for that fang thing).

On that page, about two-thirds of which is actually used (the top third nothing but the word PROLOGUE and some whitespace), in the midst of all that overburdened detail (plus a distinct paucity of details about the perspective character, apart from the fact he's some kind of doctor-professor type), Ms. Kenyon finds time to insert three separate instances in addition to the first line of the novel that are one-line, short (or short-ish) single sentences laden with melodrama and dramarama and maybe some bananaramadrama -- rather more than a dram of drama per sentence. Let us examine our potently purple prosaics:

1. He was used to that. (note: The (melo)drama in this line is entirely dependent on the preceding paragraph.)

2. They only felt the sting of death as he dealt it to them. (note: This would actually be a much better, less ham-handed line if it was just included at the end of the preceding paragraph. Ms. Kenyon evidently believes she must bludgeon her readers with the significance of the line.)

3. No one voluntarily left The League. (note: I'm beginning to feel like The League is the title of a football movie.)

Beautiful stuff. It's like poetry. No, really, I mean it. I have this wonderful book somewhere around here, titled Very Bad Poetry, which has provided me hours of delight. Ms. Kenyon's writing is at least slightly better written than most of that book, though I dare say it is probably rather less enjoyable, on the whole.

Let us not get distracted. I really want to share the first line of the second page, in which I have not altered the emphasis one whit. This is the first case of italics in the novel:

No one.

Once more, with full context:

No one voluntarily left The League.

No one.

In case a separate line was not good enough for highlighting the absurd melodrama of the second single-line statement here, there's a page break. I wonder whether that was an intentional text layout decision.

I admit I read much of the second page as well. It does not get any better.

I also skipped around the novel, and found that every chunk of text I read was in some respect trite, threadbare, overexposed, melodramatic to unreasonable extremes, or otherwise ill-advised. I got input from the missus, who got some 170 pages through this thing before her endurance finally broke down and she gave up on it, thus proving she has far greater strength of will than mine. She told me much about the insipid nonsense strewn throughout, including paper-thin "worldbuilding" that reads like paint-by-numbers in some pretense at providing something original rather than just filing the serial numbers off boring everyday aspects of life in the United States. In fact, hearing the missus describe the way Ms. Kenyon describes the interplanetary world in which our protagonist and his female love interest live, I get the distinct impression Ms. Kenyon changed the names and planets of origin of things in one of the many similarly-plotted assassin-gone-rogue novels out there and called it a day. Only the author's introduction, talking about the main characters of this novel being imaginary friends from her childhood, contradicts that impression.

Obviously, I could not bring myself to read the whole of this book, or even more than a cumulative dozen or so pages' worth while searching (in vain) for some sign of good writing.

This is the first thing I found while skipping around, and I leave it as parting words for you in case you think I am just being overly harsh about the first couple pages and the rest couldn't possibly be that bad because beginnings are hard:

"No, I haven't," she breathed, trying to stay calm. He had a soul, she knew it. She'd seen him do too many things that contradicted such brutality. "I asked you once before if you enjoyed killing. Do you?"

He looked away from her.

For a moment, she didn't think he'd answer, then he shook his head. "I hated it," he whispered, pushing himself away from her.

"I hated it," he said -- no, he whispered. I immediately thought of that "romantic" scene in Star Wars: Attack of the Clowns where Hayden Christiansen's petulant tweenager's delivery did nothing to improve the slimy stalker quality of a terrible come-on, beginning with "I don't like sand."

Good grief. ( )