Tami Lund, $2.99
Fantasy Romance, 2016
Judging from the copyright notice, I believe Resist: Anya is written by Tami Lund, but Michelle Fox created the world and the canon of the series—Blood Courtesans—in which this story is part of. Also, judging from how the words are arranged on the cover, this one should have been called Anya: Resist, but hey, I’ll just follow the way this story is listed on booksellers. That way, people won’t think that I am being deliberately contrary.
The setting itself isn’t new. Vampires are hot and sexy, so there are women signing up to be “blood courtesans” for these people. Blood and sex are part of the deal, and our heroine Anya Sinclair recently lost her sister to that world. Okay, her sister believed that she would be making a lot of money doing the glamorous thing, but it turns out that True Blood is all a lie, and now the sister has gone MIA, all communication with Anya lost. Our heroine, therefore, decides that maybe entering that world herself is the best way to figure out what happened to her sister, and in the process meets Camden Devlan. You don’t expect a hot vampire to be called anything less, do you?
Hence begins this impersonation of a True Blood fanfiction, peppered with all kinds of misplaced sass and like, oh, whatever, boink me Mr Hot Vampire, ooh, because that’s all I’m supposed to be here for.
Now, imagine if I’d used this tone in a review to convince you that Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a work of unparalleled gravitas, pathos, and more, and you should really allocate a full day to read the whole thing in one sitting. How likely is it that you’ll buy what I am telling you?
Tonal dissonance is the fatal flaw of this story. Narrated from first person point of view, the chapters featuring Anya are pure cringe. As you can guess, she’s, like, so sassy and feisty, so much so that everything she says to the reader and to the people around her is begging for “YAS KWEEN! FINGER SNAPPING GODDESS, WERK GURL!” responses from the reader. The problem with this approach, the perpetual cringe aside, is that it completely dissolves all semblance of tension in the story. This setting has genuinely dangerous vampires that treat humans as cattle, but it’s hard to believe that this threat is real when the heroine displays zero ability to experience any emotion other than sassy or horny. When she’s faced with a threat, she can only note how the hero’s voice makes her wet and she’s totally digging how much he looks like Tom Hiddleston. Anya turns every dangerous situation into an opportunity to show how how witty the author imagines her to be, as well as a chance to demonstrate that the author is so totally in tune with pop culture of today.
As a result, Resist: Anya is a disaster of spectacular proportions, an otherwise unoriginal story made worse by the author taking an entirely wrong approach to her story. It’s like watching a version of Titanic that has Jack and Rose behaving like they are in a sitcom, made worse by the fact that the author’s idea of wit emanates very strong “middle-aged lady trying too hard to sound like a teenager by emulating the tone of the things she reads on her social media” vibes. I can only wonder whether I am supposed to be reading this while under the influence. The whole thing is just too excruciating to be read sober.
