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Aerulan

Aerulan

Dark Revenge

Dark Revenge - Jennifer Leeland

I'm liking this one so far, decent worldbuilding, and it's hot.

One problem I'm having is the names for the main characters. One of my pet peeves is gender neutral/ambiguous names in romance novels, I'm fine when one character has a name that could work for a man or a woman but when both do it's just irritating, it takes too long to get it fixed in my mind who is which and it just comes off as a bad choice.

 

The H in this one is Tory which I guess is masculine? But it makes me think Tori as in short for Victoria  which makes it read as feminine and is what I'm more used to seeing.

The h is Alex -short for Alexandra- but that one sounds masculine and when paired with a H with a name that reads as feminine it just...

It's not a huge deal but it's a little irritation that keeps me from really getting lost in the story. It's like when you have multiple characters with similar names, it just forces you to stop and think about who is in the scene and then you're out of the story for a second.

I'll get over it as I read more but I wish she had picked a different name for one of them. Either one.

 

~ Having another name related issue. The plot revolves around machinations -involving a biological weapon- amongst the governments of several neighboring planets in a starsystem. Which have the most unimaginative names ever, Teran One, Teran Two, Teran Three, Teran Four, and Teran Five. And that's how they are written each time. Now I don't know, but it seems to me that the people of these planets would have come up with some other names for their homes, rather than it always being "Hi I'm from Teran Five!" Even just shortening it to T5 maybe?

 People like naming things, we name everything. Except for newly colonized planets we're living on apparently. I have a hard time believing all these different cultures/worlds are happy with being numbers. You're a group of colonists escaping from a plague ravaged Earth and desperately hoping for a new home and new beginnings, are you really going to be saying "our world should be called Five!"? Or would you be choosing a name that embodies all that hope? That celebrates what you've accomplished in surviving to reach this new beginning?

 

The main problem is each world -or their interests and influence- has a part in the story and it's constantly "Teran Two is this, Teran Four does that, Teran One will be" keeping it straight is a pain in the ass. And it makes the conversations sound so boring. The planets are often discussed together so you have a paragraphs peppered with Teran 1-5 over and over and over.