Deadlocked Book Twelve

May simply cannot arrive fast enough!

Renee

Okay everyone, read away and keep it under your hat till Saturday at 8 pm and meet me in the chat room to cuss and discuss....

Sounds great! Remind me on Saturday. Ding me, wing me, whatever

Added the summary of the novel

I think the thing the book suffers from the most is a lack of organization and a lazy plot line. Once again, Charlaine Harris does not fail to disappoint.

But before I bash this book entirely, I have to give a slight nod to what I like about the story:

Hummmmm....Give me a moment.....

I liked the font....Okay, enough being a smart ass....

I liked the way she attempts to tie up some loose ends for some of the minor characters. Terry has a girl friend, and Quinn has a lady tiger, and Tara had her babies and a few others seem to be getting on with their happily ever after. The mystery was good, if a little meandering and pointless at times. (Again, I liked the font...and did I add I liked the texture of the paper?)

Now to what I really think.

Of all the novels, this is the weakest in my opinion. It has more red herrings in it than you could cast a line for and it meanders into pointless and uninteresting side stories which tend to only add to the thickness of the novel. If you did some creative editing, Deadlocked may have been just about the right size for a short story in one of those anthologies she likes contributing and editing so much.

Of course the one thing I knew would likely happen was the break up of Eric and Sookie. And though I am a Bill girl, I really felt bad for the way Charlaine treated Eric. She has taken Eric from a confident and competent 1000 year old Viking whose watchword is "Control" to a just fledged Vampire with nothing but desire to eat everything he can sink his fangs into. I think someone must have cast a spell over Eric because he is now the poster child for indecision. This simply is a dishonest way to treat a character she has spent many books developing into a hard as nails leader. It feels like a cheat.

The thing with the fae too was a let down. Before, Niall was a loving if remote great grandfather who loved Sookie and called her his 'kin' and extolled her instinctive fae self and her strength. Not so this time. Perhaps it is because he has not been back to Humanity in a long while, and he has forgotten how much he loved her. Dermot is a very loveable character and he is a wonderful member of Sookie's dwindling family. Claude seemed to be sleepwalking through this book. He disappears into Faery at the beginning of the book and reappears in time to confess to all his crimes.....That reminds me of all those Nancy Drew stories where one of the extraneous characters are sent to Antarctica til near the end of the book after everything is figured out. Whatever it is Charlaine Harris is reading, I think she needs to stop.

Bill seems better than he usually is. He is not quite as moony and he actually goes to work to solve the mystery of the woman killed in Eric's yard. I wished Bill would move on and find someone else he could love....Just you wait, Charlaine Harris, I will fix it....

But back to my cussin'.

I am a little diffident about Sam. I always have been. I never thought about Sookie and Sam together. I like Sam, don't get me wrong, but I always thought of Sookie with either Eric or Bill, and was resolved to even accept she would be with Eric. But now we see a lot of things tilting in Sam's favor. In the beginning of the book, he has made Sookie a manager and given her a raise and by the time the story ends, he gives Sookie 1/3 interest in the bar. Sookie takes a lot of note about the way Sam is working on his trailer planting flowers and trimming his boxwood hedges. Then of course she saves his life.

I have no trouble with Sookie saving Sam's life. I like Sam, but the thing is she has two things she can do with her Cluviel Dor...she can either use it to keep her and Eric together or she can save Sam's life. I don't know that using the Cluviel Dor to save Sam was the best way to use it. It just seemed like a cheap way to finish up her possession of the powerful Fae charm.

I also hated the anticlimatic way she got rid of the fae in North America. It just didn't make that much sense and it just seemed like CH was the kid in a messy room and was wanting to shove as much as she could under the bed, out of sight, giving the semblance of things being cleaned up....It doesn't work...someone always looks under the dust ruffle.

I get the feeling that if you take Dead Reckoning and Deadlocked and cut away the access and mash these two together, you would have the root of a decent story you could work with. I really fear for the last story. I think maybe it will be one of those stories that will be relentless in pace until the very end and then you will have Sookie just turn around and shoot it in the head. The end...

I just finished reading Deadlocked last night. I thought Sookie would use her the Cluviel Dor on Eric,but she used it to save Sam. Which makes me think she really loves Sam,but doesn't realize it.

I thought the book was okay,but I wasn't blow away by it.