ISBN: 0812511271Have no real idea why I bothered to buy this book. I picked it up, read the blurb and knew it wouldn’t be good. After all on the front cover is an extract from a Locus review:
A historical romance, a Dickensian chronicle, of the American West, and a brutally violent werewolf epic… Moon Dance is simply one of the finest fantasy novels of the year
Yea, I read that and the first thought I had: bound to be rubbish. Yet the werewolf aspect appealed. So I told myself not to judge a book by its cover.
Shoulda gone with my first instinct.
Maybe all those words of praise were what the author was aiming for, instead the book is a jumble of scenes and a mess of time frames, none of which actually lead anywhere apart towards werewolves pissing on things, or women having random sex.
I’ve said elsewhere that I’m a character-reader. Characters are what I really love, well here there aren’t any apart from 2-D outlines where the characters should be. The narrator starts out in 1963 telling us that this was not the book she had set out to write. I for one wish the author had agreed with that, and not written it.
It takes in werewolves, native Americans, aristocratic Europeans, frontier americans, town drunks, and even Freud gets a look in. But always in the most obvious of guises, they are all pretty much stereotypes, from the cavalry commander who lives for slaughtering injuns, to the crooked gambler. Don’t bother with it, it doesn’t even end, just comes to a halt.
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