Seaborn: Chris Howard

Corina Lairsey is diving off the California coast when she is possessed by Aleximor, a three-hundred year old bone-gatherer, charged by the King of the Seaborn to gather the drowned dead off the ocean's floor. Kassandra, the king's granddaughter comes from the sea, but has spent her whole life in exile on the surface, struggling to control frightening powers she doesn't understands Aleximor intends to use her to carry out his revenge against the entire Seaborn royal line. Corina must scheme for control of her own body, fighting against time as Aleximor trades pieces of her life away in exchange for power over the path between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Angela Longstreet: 4 1/2 stars

Seaborn is a mix of The Little Mermaid story tossed with a limb or two of zombies and entranced with a crimson droplet of ‘I see dead people’. It is a refreshing step away from the cliché vampire or werewolf book; after all who really writes about things that go bump in the sea? In a tale of two worlds colliding, humans and the Seaborn battle for the control of Poseidon’s regime of the ocean, while bits of environmental controversy ooze through the pages like a hidden agenda.

The collision of two women’s lives is told with pieces of wisdom from an ancient Michael Henderson who is apparently a journalist turned merman by a process that is explained as ‘the drowning’ though we never quite get the true story out of him. One is a Seaborn who was mutilated by her grandfather; the other is a scuba diver who is just trying to get away from the raw pain of a broken relationship. A good ol’ fashioned possession by a very old necromancer of the undead and undersea skeletons is just what a love doctor ordered.

Through regal rigmarole and having to listen to inner dialogues of several ‘bleeds’, which is basically a past life stuck in your head that gives you the powers of the one who passed before you, mixed with the screaming of the poor ‘surfacer’ trying to get out of her subconscious and into her head, somehow the two meet up and try to save the underwater world.

The ending was rushed, and needed more battle scenes! I threw a hissy fit while begging for more gore and swords-clashing. I now wait in anxious glee for the next volume from Chris Howard because there are just enough character goodies that make me search for a cookie jar to stick my nosy hand into.

------------------------------

Kurt Noll: 2 stars

My major gripe is the names. This book bombards you with names and familial relations pretty much from square one; Kassandra has four voices in her head, the identities of the people who gave her each of her bleeds, but you get slapped with so much information so often that I swear if I had a four question pop quiz and the answers were the names of each of the voices Kassandra has in her head, I would get a zero because I honestly could not keep all these names straight.

Plus, there are undercurrents of which houses are loyal, which are at war and which nobles did which other nobles and then remarried these nobles...reading this is like being a first day transfer student in a Greek high school and trying to figure out the social pecking order. This book needs one of those handy 'Cast of Character' prefaces for both the people and the Houses of the Seaborn; something like Pournelle and Niven team-ups have, or Hubbard's Mission Earth (and on a side note, Mission Earth was a ten novel series and I think it had less characters than Seaborn.) I swear Seaborn is like the Lord of the Rings for merfolk with all the 'daughter of this guy and that chick, granddaughter of this dude who married this chick then remarried that chick' stuff going on and no, that wasn't a compliment.

Add in the fact that the chick on the cover looks like one of my exes. I even disliked this book when it was closed.

In all fairness, I did enjoy the sequences where Cornia and Aleximor were aboard the Maria Draughn. After a few chapters I found myself looking forward to them, and if the book was just about the two of them and there was no Kassandra stuff going on, I would have found myself quite fond of it. But no, there was too much story and too much backstory going on and not enough novel to give the story the space it needed to develop. It's open-ended, which means there'll be more books in which to expound, but I really have no interest exploring the continuation of things. Chris Howard can write, I give him that, but he needs to ease up on the throttle and give the reader a chance to start caring about his characters; otherwise, nobody's going to care if he keeps producing books. Two stars, strictly on my enjoyment of the Corina/Aleximor chapters.

Sorry, Charlie, wrong tuna.

----------------------------
Publisher: Juno Books (August 3, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0809572818
ISBN-13: 978-0809572816