Touched By Venom: Book One of the Dragon Temple Saga [Paperback]

Janine Cross (Author)

Book Description

Series: The Dragon Temple Saga | Publication Date: November 1, 2005

On a large dragon estate in Malacar, young Zarq Darquel's rebellious ways go unnoticed by the watchful eye of the Dragon Temple-until she accidentally captures the attention of an eccentric and dangerous dragonmaster and unleashes a storm of tragedy. Zarq and her delirious half-breed mother flee through the underworld of their land-from The Zone of the Dead to a sanctuary for outcast dragons, through discovery and persecution. Consumed with the desire for revenge, Zarq develops a taste for the highly addictive venom drawn from the dragons she has been taught to revere, and sinks into a realm of bizarre magics. Here, influenced by the divine grace of dragon memories, Zarq glimpses possibilities of revenge and social revolution; but to achieve such, she must defy not just the sexual taboos and patriarchal conventions of her society, but the Emperor who rules her nation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set in Malacar, a land with a repressive patriarchal society that both worships and enslaves dragons, Cross's bold debut introduces headstrong nine-year-old Zarq Darquel, who lives a harsh but not completely unpleasant life as a member of the pottery clan on a dragon estate. When destitution forces her father to sell Waisi, Zarq's beautiful older sister, into sexual slavery, her mother, Kavarria, who belongs to the disdained Djimbi race, tries to save Waisi at all costs, but more tragedy follows. Zarq, her life governed by her mother's madness and obsession, eventually winds up as a sexually mutilated nun caring for retired bull dragons. Turning the fantasy cliché of the underdog girl who dreams of dragon-mastery into a grim but fascinating coming-of-age tale, Cross scratches only the surface of this richly detailed, well-imagined world. Hints of a plot involving social and religious revolution hold promise for future installments of the Dragon Temple saga.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

A compelling and harrowing journey...a vividly rendered world. -- Jacqueline Carey --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 353 pages
• Publisher: Roc Trade (November 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451460480
• ISBN-13: 978-0451460486
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,345,283 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars and one more thing, July 5, 2006

By 

Anthrophile (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Touched By Venom: Book One of the Dragon Temple Saga (Paperback)

In addition to other things already mentioned, I have one very strong issue with this book. I'll try to put this somewhat delicately.

It's a question of basic logic. The descriptions given of the heroine's erotic/masturbatory feelings and practices do NOT jibe with the reasonable, believable experiences of a person who has had a amateurish, anesthesia-free radical clitoridectomy in childhood. (The words "ripping out" are used. And "flensing flesh from bone.") Considering that the female circumcision is so painstakingly, protractedly and viciously -- almost lovingly -- portrayed by this author, early on, in extended painful detail, one wonders, for example, when later in the heroine's life she gets excited and reaches "down there," just what the hell she is reaching for. Scar tissue??

This mutilation is extremely painful to read (and I am female. Perhaps ESPECIALLY because I am female). Maybe that's what the author was going for, and so maybe that's a triumph, a tour de force, I don't know. Not being my cup of tea doesn't necessarily make it a failed novel. Blatant ignoring of logic and sense might make it so.

(I think perhaps a quick reread of some Alice Walker might be in order. I'm just saying.)

Sci-fi/fantasy is no excuse to throw out the rules with no explanation -- only those with little respect for the genre think it is. For my feminist SF fix, I'll stick to recommending Sheri Tepper and Joan Slonczewski for the time being. (This is not to say forever. We'll see, Ms Cross.)

61 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Poorly Written, November 29, 2005

By 

Jamie L. Fisher "Pirate George" (Elkhorn, WI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Touched By Venom: Book One of the Dragon Temple Saga (Paperback)

Most people are commenting on the bestiality, the castration, the female degradation in this book, so with all that said, I thought I'd comment on the writing style of the book.

I've never read anything else by Janine Cross, and I don't believe I ever will, but if she continues to write in this manner she will have a very lousy career as an author. Her editor should have perchance made a note to her about this. Most of the plot doesn't go anywhere for almost half the book. Then it all happens very suddenly, and we then return to a lot of our main character, Zarq, doing nothing.

She fills in the time with useless facts about the area, the people, and the local customs. Well over half of this information is useless to understanding the world, or anything else relevant to Zarq's particular story. Things that are confusing are never cleared up, particularly when Zarq mentions something in 'noble's tongue' and doesn't bother telling us what it is she's saying in English.

Another point of interest is that Zarq will randomly, it seems, fixate on a certain task, and then become distracted by another. It seems near the end of the book that the author was at a loss of where to go with it, so she pulled up a very long forgotten plot point and decided to have Zarq fixate on it, only to have her get distracted by her never-ending lust for venom.

I'm very confused as to how a book so poorly written was ever even published to begin with, so I tell you now to save your money, and your time, and not bother reading this. Unless you are in the mood to laugh at something terrible, this just won't cut it.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Venomously Bad, March 2, 2007

By 

Uh (A Place) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Touched By Venom: Book One of the Dragon Temple Saga (Paperback)

This is not the most horrible book I've ever read, by any means. But it's sure as heck on the top ten list of things that I wish I had never read.

First of all, though the author is not a completely terrible writer, she has some cumbersome words and phrases that got me to raise an eyebrow.
However, these have been discussed quite enough, in my opinion, so I'm not going to get into this. I'm going to review a different, and what I feel to be equally questionable, aspect of the book.

She seems to have inserted some hot-button social issues into her book without doing research on at least one of them, namely female mutilation. The darkness of these issues doesn't bother me at all. Neither, in fact, does her use of them in her book. In fact, if she'd managed to pull it off, I might be recommending this story all over the place. However, she proves her utter ignorance of them to anyone who knows anything about a woman's body, and the way it works. Since Cross seems to know so little about the issues she brings up in her work, I have to question why she felt the need to bring them up. The only conclusion I can come to is that she wanted to score points with literary critics. I find it rather offensive that she felt the need to essentially trivialize someone else's real-life plight in such a manner. Then to do what appears to be absolutely no research on the subject? Pathetic.

If you want dark fantasy, you can do so much better than this.