BW Media Spotlight

Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.

In our previous chapter they actually got the murder investigation going after I thought we were going to get more character moments. We have 10 chapter left after this so we really need to get the mental drama done before we do more emotional drama.

Of course we’re at the point in the book where I run out of things to say and I want to keep spoilers off the frontpage. So I have to repeat myself. I have nothing against the character parts. They’ve been fascinating as we explore the differences in human and Vulcan society and approaches to marriage. It’s just I wish the investigation had been better spaced out through the story. We’ve had two murders and then everyone all but forgot about it while Amanda is still in danger. If the story went back and forth between the emotional moments (or what passes for it with Vulcans) and the murder plot, even have the two plots intertwined so that our suspects either became more or less suspicious depending on what happened, that would have been better. Or don’t do the murder plot. Have it a story about defending the new practice, old ways versus new, and tie that into the romance plot and the flashbacks to previous episodes and previously untold tales of the characters’ life. Then the title event, the murders in the Vulcan Academy, would feel like less of an afterthought to the story the author really wanted to tell.

Plus now we’re getting to the obligatory “Kirk meets T’Pau and discusses the pon farr” event. As I said before, so many authors feel the need to go into this every time Kirk ends up on Vulcan. T’Pau doesn’t like humans because they disrespect our ways so on and so forth. I’ve never gotten that from the source material, the movies and TV shows, but there hasn’t been a lot of interaction with T’Pau and the humans in those stories. Maybe this author can do it properly, given how well she’s done so far with this book besides the plot/subplot issue. Let’s read up and see…wait, it looks like chapter 25 runs into chapter 26, which is only four pages. So I guess we read two chapters today after all.

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