A Caress of Twilight

A Caress of Twilight

Laurell K. Hamilton

Reading this series is sort of the literary equivalent of eating Annie’s boxed mac and cheese instead of the neon orange powdered stuff, or peanut butter Puffins instead of Cocoa Puffs. 

I’m perfectly aware that if you didn’t have hippie parents, that comparison means nothing.  You’ve probably never heard of Annie’s or Puffins.  I don’t so much care…I did have hippie parents, and I ate homemade yogurt and unsweetened oatmeal.  If I had to eat it, you can handle hearing about it.

My point it…it’s literary junk food.  It may have some redeeming qualities, but it’s junk food nonetheless.  Whatever.  I happen to like Annie’s mac and cheese and peanut butter Puffins.

I also like this series, for one big reason: the open, structured, functional polyamory of the Unseelie sidhe culture.

It’s very different from the open, structured, functional orgy culture found in Anne Rice’s work and in so many other fantasy-genre authors.  (Not that I’m opposed to functional orgies.  Literary porn is the bestest porn ever).  Hamilton’s work reads like it comes from a place of knowing how polyamory works in the real world.  It’s not a two guys for every girl kind of thing, it’s a tonight is my night, tomorrow is your night, and we will deal with the rest of it as it comes.

It’s unusual that fiction involving polyamory addresses jealousy.  And it’s unusual that it’s unusual, because that’s a cornerstone issue in those relationships.  “I tried to be hurt, jealous or even miffed that he might have been playing slap and tickle with Marie, and I just wasn’t.  Maybe it was because I was sleeping with the other men.  Maybe to be truly jealous you have to have some pretense of monogamy.  I didn’t know why, but it simply didn’t bother me.”

The book occasionally brushes past group sex, which it does as truthfully as possible, given that the main character, Meredith, is literally a faerie princess.  It’s not cop-out, bullshit two-on-one masquerading as group that some people cling to.  (Yeah, boys, that’s directed squarely at you.  If you want the girl+girl(s) to play in a girl+girl+guy scenario, you have to be willing to help out with the other guy when the ratios are reversed.)  I love this part, simply because the men are interacting with each other: “Doyle moved from beside me to put his back to Rhys…As if they’d arranged it, Rhys rose from the pillows to his knees and showed clearly that he was nude.  He rolled Doyle’s long braid in his arms until he came to the end and began to undo the ribbon that bound it…Rhys was working Doyle’s hair free of the braid.  I’d seen Doyle with his hair free of that braid only once.  Only once had it been like some dark living cloak to shroud his body.”