Customer Reviews

Soul Song

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

SOUL SONG starts out with a bang and moves with a fast pace in the book and to a startling conclusion. Neither Kitala Bell nor M'cal are normal members of their species.

Kitala's father was a white man and her mother was a black woman from Lousianna. Kit's grandma, Jazz, was and is a powerful voodoo priestess. Death has only strengthened her powers to protect her beloved granddaughter. Kit has her own unique powers she can see the murders that will take place and how they are committed on the faces of the living. She is a concert violinist and travels not only to play but escape the knowledge she has of the deaths that are to come.

M'cal's father is a Merman and his mother was human. His father is one of the few who possess the ability to soul sing, either to help or to destroy. Even tho he is of mixed heritage M'cal has inherited this ability. He is also enslaved by a witch, one that he thought he was in love with. She has stolen his powers and forces him to steal souls and bring them to her in order for her to retain her youth. Now she wants Kit and sends him to procure her soul.

Kit sees a woman at her concert who is to be murdered and even knowing that she will not be able to save the woman, she tries to warn her. Suddenly she and the woman and her uncle are attacked and kiddnapped. M'cal sees the attack and ultimately saves Kit. She touchs him in a soul deep way with her music and her face. He manages to free her and send her away with the warning that if he sees her again the witch will force him to take her soul.

The rest of the book is a wonderful ride and of course Dirk and Steele, the agency come to the rescue. Kit is a friend of Del who married Hari, the shapechanger from TIGER EYE. I enjoyed this book very much and as with all her books you never know where they will lead. Do not miss it.

In SOUL SONG, Marjorie M. Liu returns readers to the magical, fascinating world of Dirk & Steele a bit indirectly. M'Cal is a merman who is enslaved to a witch (much as Charlie was enslaved in "A Dream of Stone and Shadow" in the DARK DREAMERS anthology), who forces him to use his extraordinary vocal powers to steal souls with which to augment her power. His new target is renowned fiddler Kitala Bell. But instead of stealing her soul, he saves her life - and she saves his right back.

Kitala has more talent than her music, but it's not something she welcomes - she can see how people are going to die. Her grandmother, a powerful voodoo priestess, tried to teach her how to handle her powers, but Kitala wanted to live in denial, and when her grandmother died, she lost her chance to learn. Despite the fact that she does know she can't do anything to save the people she sees, when she sees a young woman with a knife in her eye in the audience of her Vancouver concert, she tries to warn her. For her pains she gets tangled up in a web of human trafficking with two corrupt cops on her tail. The only thing standing between her and them is the man who saved her, the man who fascinates her...the man who is under compulsion to kill her.

There's something absolutely heady about this love story - on the run together, knowing that at any moment, the compulsion on M'Cal might kick in and he'll end up killing the woman he's falling in love with, but Kitala trusting him all the same, a testament to the core of his honor that the witch could never touch. It's love on a knife edge, as you see often in romantic suspense, but M'Cal and Kitala connect so deeply through the music in their souls that you know once the knife edge is gone, they'll still be together. M'Cal's situation helps Kitala connect with the full source of her powers, and Kitala's trust in M'Cal enables him to wake up to his situation, to the fact that his resistance to the witch was almost gone, and gives him the courage to fight anew. Together they're stronger than they ever were alone. They trust each other, they redeem each other, and it's simply beautiful.

This series just gets better and better with each book. Though M'Cal and Kitala are not core Dirk & Steele players, I would still advise new readers to start with TIGER EYE and read the series in order -- even with having read the prior books, I had to remind myself of some of the backstory. That way you can keep up with the tightly complex world Ms. Liu is building, plus you get to read several more wonderful books - it's a win-win.

Although the Dirk and Steele agency play only a small part in the novel, we do get to reconnect with a few old friends.

The novel itself follows M'cal a merman, with the power to destroy, or give life with his voice, who is enslaved by a witch, and Kitala Bell, a world renown fiddler, who has also inherited many of her Grandmother Jazz Marie's powers (namely seeing people who are going to die violently). Together Kitala and M'cal work to free a young woman who has been kidnapped from her evil captors, and to free M'cal from his enslavement to the witch who holds his soul.

The book is well written. The first couple of chapters are a bit slow, but the pace picks up quickly after that. And while I would have liked to have reconnected with more of the Dirk & Steele crew, I was pleased to see Koni had a larger part that usual. A definite must have for anyone who likes Marjorie's books. This one will be going on my keeper shelf.Soul Song (Dirk & Steele, Book 6)

Marjorie M. Liu returns to her Dirk & Steele world of myth, magic and mayhem to bring a story of a musician who sees violent deaths and a merman who can sing away your soul. Kit Bell, daughter of musicians, hears the music of the universe welling up in her soul and brings it forth from her fiddle to share with enraptured audiences. M'cal, a creature of both sea and land, captured by a ruthless witch and forced to serve her desires, can sing away a person's soul. When he is sent to steal Kit's soul, his song and her music combine to change both their destinies.

Ms. Liu has created a convincing world that in turn hides and reveals mysteries of myth and magic. Shape-shifters, mermen, voodoo priestesses all hide in plain sight to find, guide and and sustain others of their kind. In this particular offering M'Cal and Kit are determined to rescue another caught up in a titanic struggle against a seething, rapacious evil waiting for a chance to invade our world. Like her other couples, Ms. Liu has created a hero tortured and tormented, trying to hold on to what honor he can. Her heroine, while stunned to find herself in the middle of a fairy tale, is not afraid to wade in and kick butt. I love the fact that Ms. Liu's characters are not conflicted about using violence to counter violence. Dialogue exchanges between characters is by turns hilarious and revealing. And it is always a pleasure to check in with former characters to see how they are doing.

Although not necessary, it is helpful to have read the previous novels in this series. I highly recommend this book to all of Ms. Liu's fans and to anyone wanting to check out her universe.

I found this book to be a let down after the others in the series I have read. The characters, when not just plain boring, seem to make endlessly stupid decisions to run headlong into to danger. Nobody has any lasting emotional damage though torture and rape run amok though out the book. The ending was ridiculously upbeat for such a dark story, as it seems no one had any hard feelings about said torture and rape. This book was so bad that I no longer read anything by this author.

I am a loyal Dirk & Steele fan and have read all six of the books in the series. I have to say comparing to previous 5 books, this one is a bit disappointing. I bought this book when it first came out in July 2007 and was expecting to finish it within days. Unfortunately the book felt so flat and unattractive that I had to put it down for months. It's now January of 2008 and I finally just finished reading it. I think the idea of mermen is very interesting and creative but the story line just never took off for me. The hero and heroine were flat and one dimensional. They did not draw my interests at all and I skipped quite a few pages about them. In fact, the kidnapped woman, Alice, seemed more intriguing to me than the main couple. The only reason I even finished this book is because I wanted to find out more about the magic creatures Dirk & Steele kept discovering. I did not care about the main couple's love story at all. The two of them were also repeatedly captured, tortured, hurt, dragged, beaten, slapped,... It was over the top and I did not care for it at all. Ms. Liu also used music and singing as the hero and heroine's supernatural talents and she unfortunately did not do a good job conveying the magic of their voices, music, and instruments. However, as disappointed as I am about this book, I am not giving up on Dirk & Steele series yet. I will be the first in line to buy the next installment and hope Ms. Liu will bring back the magic that was so refreshing and intriguing when I first discovered this series.

As always, Marjorie M. Liu delivers with a raw, emotional story. If you have not read her previous books, it's not necessary to do so to enjoy SOUL SONG, but I'd highly recommend it. You'll love them.

The heroine of SOUL SONG is Kitala Bell. If you remember her from her very brief cameo in TIGER EYE, she was the professional fiddler. Kit's a bit of a 'classical' music rock-star, and my mind likened her to Vanessa-Mae. Kit is half-black, half-white, and she's part-witch and part-cursed to see people's murders before they happen. Heavy caseload for the poor girl, if you ask me. But I like that Liu never gives us a cookie-cutter heroine. She likes to mix up the romance standards.

M'cal (the hero) is a merman, an ancient race called the Krackeni. Liu mentions that he's a man-hooker. Do what? You can't do that in romance! But I kept reading. Turns out that M'cal is the magically-bonded slave of a witch who sucks down the souls of others to survive, and M'cal is the one that retrieves the souls for her. He hates it (with good reason) but he can't escape her or disobey her. Things take a turn for the worse when she directs him to steal Kit's soul next.

From there, the story runs away with itself, and took me along for the usual grand ride. Liu has plot in spades, and I usually can't guess where she's going next with it, and so I'm forced to read read read readreadread until I find out what happens next. The rest of D&S make a few appearances, but not enough to be obnoxious, and Kit and M'cal fall in love, beat the bad guys, and make sweet lurv together. It's a romance. You know these sorts of things happen.

Of course, it's also a very different kind of romance. In addition to playing with character 'standards', Liu writes a very convincing action story that's almost eclipsed by her evocative writing. Those that haven't read paranormal romance before would do well to start with Liu.

I've read all of Marjorie M. Liu's Dirk & Steele books. I LOVED Tiger Eye, liked the next couple, but Soul Song was VERY DARK. Torture, rape, increasing amounts of violence...I could barely make it through to the end. The new characters had very little substance, and even the ones from previous books were two-dimensional here. If this is the direction the series is going, I'm afraid I won't be sticking with it.

Marjorie M. Liu has written an amazing novel about a man of a supernatural race, enslaved by an evil being and forced into a life of unwilling violence and sexual servitude, who experiences a glimmer of long-forgotten hope when he meets a good-hearted, artistically talented human woman with some special gifts of her own. "Soul Song," although it fits the description, is not that novel. "Tiger Eye" was a fresh and interesting read, with an unusual plot and characters I truly found myself caring about. "Soul Song" is an inferior imitation of the author's own earlier work.

I enjoyed the other Dirk & Steele novels, but this one failed to engage me - and not only because I felt as though I'd read it before. There's simply too much going on, too many threads in the plot, and they aren't all tied up neatly in the end. (Not just in a sometimes-life-is-messy-like-that way, either, or even a look-for-the-sequel-coming-soon-to-a-bookstore-near-you way. More of a there's-so-much-going-on-in-this-book-that-even-the-author-can't-keep-it-all-straight way.) Not only is the plot overinvolved, it feels contrived: everything's a bit too pat, and there's no organic flow at all. I kept feeling that the author was making things up to suit her needs of the moment, rather than creating a fictional universe with the integrity of self-imposed limitations. The hero of the novel is placed under an enchantment so that he can't touch another person without terrible pain (shades of the author's own "Shadow Touch"?), and the heroine just happens to be the one person who can counteract this enchantment, and she does it purely by intuition and by happenstance? Give me a break.

Also, I found the violence in this novel to be a bit over-the-top. I'm not the least bit squeamish; I own a couple of floor-to-ceiling bookcases' worth of criminology literature, popular true crime, and serial-killer thrillers. But really, how many times in one book do we need to have blood pouring from someone's head as the hero uses his magical power to sing a person to death? And then we have a nose bitten off, a heart torn out, and a woman who literally explodes.

The things I've enjoyed about Liu's previous novels - the sensitive treatment of very real physical and emotional pain, the morally nuanced worldview in which good and evil are both very real yet continually in flux, the touches of ribald comic relief - are present in "Soul Song," but they lack the vitality and novelty of her previous work. I can't help thinking either she's gotten lazy, or she's trying too hard. Either way, you can take a pass on this one.

I always read reviews, mainly I skim them but I like reading them. Anywho, I've been reading romance novels for a long time, which to me isn't only about the sex but the interaction between 2 people. I've only read the stories of Delilah/Hari's, Kit?M'cal's, and The Gargoyle's, and trying Dean/Miri. Of all of them Deam and Miri is taking me the longest to get into but I'm going to try to read it. I love that her stories are about psi-characters. Not all the characters are psis but- yes the main ones are. And yes it's like X-men or Fan 4 but then those are psi-movies. So I don't get the negativity in this area. I like the action in the books, the series is based around a detective agency- of course there's going to be action. As for Love, I got the sense that the characters do fall into love with each other and that love is a choice for them. NOW the all important sex scenes-:-) I'm not going to mince words the shower scenes in Soul Song are mm...mmmmmmm...the cave scenes...oh my.

SPOILER:

I caught in one of the reviews the question about The evil witch's immortality, how eating souls gave her the ability to be immortal. It's not the souls- she eats souls for knowledge-bank accounts, social security number, simply put so that she can steal. Also, it's about control she controls everythinng M'cal does- she own him that feeds into her desire for power. Immortality comes from Ivan. I could tell you why but I won't...hahaha..

And as for why the witch isn't called by her name- a name is a window into your mind. To know your name can be very powerful. Both the good and bad guys know this- which explains calling the witch by every name in the book but her own until.......give it a shot.