Review: Seduced by Crimson by Jade Lee

[megwrites]

Title: Seduced by Crimson (Crimson City #5)
Author: Jade Lee (jadeleeauthor.com)
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Page Count: 339
Publisher: LoveSpell (Dorchester Publishing)





Basic Plotline: Xiao Fei Finney is the last Phoenix Tear left on Earth. Her blood is powerful, powerful enough to close the demon gate that's just opened, letting demons from Orcus into Crimson City, the catch is that she's a hemophiliac. Patrick is a druid and the Draig Uisge, a powerful warrior among the druids charged with guarding the Earth, and that includes keeping it safe from demons. When demons murder his parents, Patrick finds that it's Xiao Fei is the one that close the gate, he seeks her out immediately. But closing the gate might just cost Xiao Fei her life and Patrick the love of his life.


The Positives: The best positive of this book was that I didn't need to read any of the other previous books to understand it. I started with this one and went along just fine. I might pick up other Crimson City books sometime, but given that I knew nothing about the series and just picked up the book because it was a used copy for a dollar that intrigued me, I had no problem diving right in.

The author's website categorizes this as an "action" paranormal romance, and I very much agree with that assessment. Like a good action movie, it's entertaining if not particularly deep or layered. Which is what I wanted when I picked this up, so that's good. If you're looking for something a little more challenging or with more meat on the bones, go elsewhere, but for a quick, entertaining read this might be a good choice (if you can get past the major trigger factor which I'll talk about later).

Lee knows how to write, and the story moves along at a very tight pace that, for all the intense action, doesn't get too speedy or too slowed down between bouts of violence. I didn't feel like the book lagged anywhere in particular, even with the interspersing of entries from Patrick's journal as a teenager (which, actually, read like something a teenage boy more interested in surfing and girls than his druidic studies might write). The only time it got excessive was in describing the battle between Patrick and Jason. I skimmed a bit on that part, though I will admit that it did give a little more importance to the final showdown between Patrick and Jason at the end.

Both the characters are vivid, though I liked Xiao Fei a lot more than I liked Patrick. I'll discuss why in the negatives. Xiao Fei came across very vividly in the chapters that were through her point of view. Straightforward and survival-minded, I liked her and sympathized with her struggles. She was a very strong character. Given what she had been given in life to deal with - hemophilia, being the last Phoenix Tear, living in an area that was quickly becoming a hotspot of vampire and werewolf activity, but she dealt well, she didn't dwell, she tried to move on and keep going. I especially loved the scenes with her adopted sister, who may have been the most memorable supporting character in the entire novel.

Patrick is sympathetic enough at most points in the novel, and he does acknowledge some of what he did wrong, which helped, but it was hard not to wince at later points in the novel.

The worldbuilding is fairly good, and I did appreciate that Lee mixed together two separate cultural magics and philosophies of magic to make this work and that she sets most of her tale in Chinatown and shows that even with vampires, werewolves and demons in the mix, racial and ethnic tensions between good old mortal humans has not changed, that these things didn't instantly disappear. I also appreciated that a lot of this came from Xiao Fei's point of view and centered on her experience of it rather than Patrick's. Though, as with most paranormal romance and urban fantasy, the book is so focused on the main characters and their interpersonal struggles or personal battles that there's not much of a wider view of how the world works and how communities fare in Crimson City. Most of what we do see comes from Xiao Fei and Chinatown. I would have loved to have seen more of that version of Chinatown and it's people and community.

The Negatives: The biggest negative for me was the rape scene in this book. I will give the author credit for at least having both characters acknowledge that it was a rape, that tying a woman to a bed, using magic to get her to feel affection for you, and then having sex with her after she says "no, stop, I don't want this" is rape. Lee names the act as rape, literally, and that helped (somewhat). But it was still an extremely queasy making scene and I felt very uncomfortable with how quickly a reconciliation happened between Xiao Fei and Patrick afterwards. As a reader it might have helped if Xiao Fei could have held onto and processed those feeling of violation and anger, because a lot of it went straight to questions that I was asking myself.

And at least this time the character had a better motive for rape than just "but we are soulmates we must be together!", and he did legitimately have reason to believe that sex with Xiao Fei would close the demon gate, but it was still difficult to read and I teetered on the edge of putting the book away. It is somewhat graphic and definitely troubling, and if you're someone for whom these things are triggering or they take you right out of your Happy Place, avoid this book.

Knowing that Patrick would do that to close the gate without first working a little harder to make Xiao Fei more comfortable so she could voluntarily consent or trying all this other options made me really go sour on the character, especially since it was clear that he was just as motivated by closing the gate to avenge his parents as to save the world. This is where the book really failed for me, because I think that if the author really wanted to put Patrick in a bind, there needed to be more conclusive exploration of why he had every good reason to think that it's either tie Xiao Fei up and do what he has to or watch the world go down in flames. So much of this part of the book felt like a handwave, a "well, the world's gonna end if they don't" - and maybe that works in other situations, but if you're going to use that as your reason for motivating rape, you need to really, really work harder than that. At least for me as a reader.

Overall, I found Patrick rather boring as a character, as I did most of the Druidic mythos inserted into the book.

The romance between them didn't really appeal to me. Partly because of the rape and partly because there wasn't a lot of time for any real bond to develop between them that wasn't about trauma, magic, or demons - and because it didn't seem like either of them had that much in common besides, maybe, being interested in plants. I didn't quite buy that they were a functional couple or that they were even romantically in love. It seemed more like they were bound by bouts of lust and magic and danger - which can be it's own book and be interesting enough - but then the book ends with Xiao Fei gleefully proclaiming that they'll have so many babies so they can continue on the Phoenix Tear line, which is also in and of itself rather problematic.

Mythos-wise, kind of sad to see that the majority of creatures featured were vampires, werewolves, demons - all rather Western. Chinese and Cambodian cultures have a wide array of their own supernatural creatures to select from and I don't see any reason why they couldn't have made an appearance here, or at least a showing of how the meshing of those creatures with the culture and communities in Chinatown would work. Unless there's something explained in earlier books, it seemed a little more one sided than I liked. Patrick's side of the equation and the druidic magic is more fleshed out that Xiao Fei's - and we're given relatively little background or information on the Phoenix Tears. In fact, most of what we know about them centers on their slaughter rather than their origins. Why does their blood fight demons? Why were they all little girls in Cambodia? How did they come to be? I think the book had both the room and the need to answer these questions more fully than it did.



CoC Score: 10/10. Chinatown in Crimson City and it's residents are vivid and interesting and take most of the forefront of this book. Lee definitely doesn't forget that L.A. is a very diverse city (despite what TV shows and other books seem to think!).

Gender Score: 9.5/10. I take out a half a point for a book that contains both the slaughter of many innocent young girls to save the world and then the rape of Xiao Fei to save it again, because there are too many threads there that harken back to so many other tales in which the sacrificing of a woman, the violation of a woman are the ways to power. I might have taken more points, but Lee did make sure to give Xiao Fei plenty of agency, and the decision to keep going along with the plan and to put herself at risk is ultimately hers and when it comes down to the spell itself, she's very much an active part of it. Women in this book have agency a plenty and despite the rape and events in her past, Xiao Fei is definitely her own person and very much capable of helping herself.

GLBT Score: 0/10. As usual, paranormal romance is heterocentric and that seems to mean that there can't be queer characters anywhere in sight and that, of course, nobody is trans or nonbinary or genderqueer or anything but straight and cis. Sadly, not unusual or uncommon in this genre.

PWD Score: 5/10. Lee didn't go into great detail exploring Xiao Fei dealing with having hemophilia, besides providing that she had a special chant that could seal up any wounds that she had, and I think the story might have benefitted from that sort of detail. While having hemophilia does affect Xiao Fei, it isn't the sole focus of her life or her story. Overall, I felt it wasn't the best but wasn't the worst portrayal of it, either.