Customer Reviews

Touched By Venom: Book One of the Dragon Temple Saga

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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.)

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.

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.

Horrible book that seems to be aimed at either making the audience vomit or titillated. The beastiality and the ritual circumcision scenes--Just because you can write it, doesn't mean you should. Bad usage of florid language. Just overall a horrifically bad book.

I've been tempted by this book for a long time. The cover art is sensual; the blurb is intriguing and contains a promising quote by Jacqueline Carey, one of my favorite authors. Something held me off, though, until recently I finally broke down and bought _Touched by Venom_ used.

First of all...yowza. I thought I was into dark fantasy. Little did I know, compared to _Touched by Venom_, pretty much everything I've ever read is all rainbows and unicorns. This is definitely not a book for the faint of heart. Janine Cross doesn't shy away from the grit of a peasant's life (brutality, disease, excrement...) or from the scourges of racism, sexism, and classism. Our heroine, Zarq, is on the wrong end of all three of these bigotries and so her life is difficult in the extreme. Readers may be particularly disturbed by the inclusion of female circumcision in _Touched by Venom_. There is also bestiality in this novel.

I'm not going to bash Cross for including atrocities in her novel; after all, with the obvious exception of dragon bestiality, all of these horrors have occurred in humanity's past, and many are still occurring today. I do think the story would have been better had it included any sort of brightness, any sort of tenderness between the characters, anything to break up the relentless parade of brutality. Some reviews have compared _Touched by Venom_ to Anne Bishop's Black Jewels series. I disagree; Black Jewels had humor, romance, and friendship. If this is similar to any of Bishop's work, it's her Match Girl short story, which focused on the tortures inflicted on suspected witches during the "Burning Times."

I also believe that _Touched by Venom_ could have been paced better and/or the heroine made more dynamic. Zarq spends the first half of the novel as a small child; all of her decisions are made for her by others. Even after she grows to late adolescence, Zarq seldom makes a choice of her own, instead being buffeted along by the will of others. It's only after page 300 that she really starts acting of her own volition (the book is less than 400 pages long, by the way). And even when she does, she does it in such a thoughtless way and makes such a botch of it that I don't have much sympathy for her.

It may be "realistic" that a society as oppressive as this one would produce citizens as passive as Zarq. However, that doesn't necessarily make for the best *story*. Fantasy works best, in my opinion, when the main character has spirit and courage beyond the ordinary. The character doesn't have to be perfect--in fact, it's often more compelling when s/he's a flawed person with a humble background--but s/he needs to be the kind of person who writes his or her own destiny.

I've heard that Zarq begins to defy the powers-that-be in the two sequels to _Touched by Venom_. Unfortunately, this book doesn't exactly inspire me to reach for the others. I may end up giving them a try eventually, as Cross is a competent writer, but for now, I think I'm going to take my leave of Zarq Darquel.

"Touched By Venom" has the best cover art I've seen in a long time. Wow! Whoever did that cover deserves a raise, because they are more responsible for sales than anyone else, including the author.

This novel follows the maturation of a young girl, Z, who grows up in a mideval society -- with dragons added. It portrays a totalitarian society through the eyes of someone near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. The story chronicles depressing and horrible events in Z's life from 9 years to adulthood. Many of these events are beyond "R" rating and well into "X", and not for consentual sex. The back cover is very misleading -- Z doesn't team up with her mom & spend the book trying to rescue her sister -- rather, the mom & sister suffer their own horrid events, which hurt the girl in turn. Expect no happy events, ever.

To be fair, the writing style was fairly good -- I disagree with other reviewers on this point. The only real complaint I have with the writing style is an occasional glarring inconsistency between how characters are summarized upon first appearance (e.g., Z's opinion of them) and how said characters act in the book. Z's mother, for example.

The mood & gestalt are somewhat similar to "Nightlife" by Rob Thurman, Anne Bishop's "Black Jewels" novels, and Charles Dickens' writings (not "A Christmas Carol", but his other more depressing look at life in England). So, if you liked those, you'll probably enjoy this book. Not recommended for teens or sensitive readers.

If one might judge by the cover blurb this book seems to be marketed as a young adult coming-of-age fantasy. The art is beautiful, and like many covers has nothing to do with the narrative within.

Bad Roc! Bad-bad-BAD! What were you thinking?

My favorite YA books do NOT include female circumcision, oral sex with dragons, or kiddie sex. The main character is 9-13 during this disgusting, degrading, over-written, turgid disaster.

Oh, wait--my favorite books in general don't include that stuff, either! Ick!

I held the opinion that the level of misogyny in this piece of c**p was a strong indication that the perp--uh--writer was male. The obsession with penises, brutality against women, blah-blah-blah led me to conclude that he knew he could make more money writing this drek instead of letters to Penthouse.

However, Ms. Cross is female and responsible for this badly executed and poorly edited attempt at fantasy. She is not breaking new ground, she has hit bottom and begun to tunnel.

Give it a skip, folks. The writer clearly has a deep rooted contempt not only for women, but for the fantasy genre itself, and thus its readers. If you must read it, get a used copy. Getting it new will only encourage the publisher to buy more disasters from the jerk.

Why couldn't Cross have sent this to Publish America instead of Roc? Then we'd have all been spared from ever hearing from her again.

Oh, how I weep, weep, I say, for the dead trees....

I put the book down after the description of the female circumcision.

I've read real life accounts of this barbaric practice and the horrors it does to a woman. But to see it eroticized, really disgusted me.

Why? Because I found myself getting aroused by her word choice. She didn't just describe it being done, she gave an account of the pain, then the pleasure of the healing salve.

I will not be reading any others in the series.

Janine Cross, Touched by Venom (Roc, 2005)

I have had the misfortune, by the end of the second month of 2006, to have come across some truly awful books. And yet not a single one of them has managed to cause me quite as much gastrointestinal distress as has Touched by Venom.

There are some books whose authors decide that the message that those books carry is more important than the way those books are written. They're wrong; how you tell the story is at least as important, in the most conservative estimate, as what you say. (I tend to take the more liberal view; I think how you tell the story is at least 90% of what's important. Obviously, at least a few people agree with me; look at the number of Academy Awards taken home by Peter Jackson's version of The Lord of the Rings as compared to that filmed by Ralph Bakshi. It's the same story; what makes one telling of it better than the other?) It's quite unfortunate that so many people can't seem to grasp this viewpoint, because until the public starts demanding quality writing, they're not going to get it. But I digress. There are some authors who understand this, and work on their style and the technical proficiencies that make reading great writing such a pleasure. What they have to say always manages to come out. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan told us so many years ago, accurately.

Then there are writers who believe that you, dear reader, are a [...] moron. They believe that if they don't hit you in the face with their message like it was a week-old dead haddock, you won't get it. And so the message is more important than the medium to these folks, and what you end up with is a manuscript that stinks like, well, you know. Authors like this should spring to mind immediately for everyone in the room, hopefully with shudders of dismay that you ever wasted your life reading such dreck.

And then, at the bottom of the heap, there is the singular talent of Janine Cross. I say it is a singular talent because, though she obviously belongs to the "message is more important than medium" camp, I'm relatively sure that even she had no idea what her message was when she was writing this novel. I have heard a few fans, critics, and blurbers refer to this as a work of feminist fiction. Tentatively, of course, because I don't think any of them know what Cross is on about, either. And I did see a few embryonic moves toward something that might have coalesced into a piece of feminist political screed masquerading as fiction, but those pieces never materialized into a whole. Or, for that matter, recognizable parts.

To put the cherry on top of this maggot and leech sundae, the jacket copy is a horrible travesty of jacket copy, breaking the one rule of ethics, morality, and etiquette in jacket copy: in order to find a hook in the novel, it had to travel way, way into the bowels of the novel. It tells you so much about what's going to happen in the novel that any flimsy attempts at foreshadowing Cross made in the first two hundred pages of this novel are shot by some copywriter making minimum wage who skimmed the novel while plastered one night. If you find that you must attempt to read this horrible miscarriage of a book, whatever you do, don't read the jacket copy until after you've decided to abandon it.

Because if you make it all the way through, you will be one of the very few people who has. Most of the rest are professional reviewers, and they get paid for it. What's your excuse? (zero)

I think the author has talent, and I hope will one day write an interesting story really well. But this one isn't - even with dragons and sexuality and so on, it's boring. I would try another book of hers, outside this trilogy.