{"id":1187,"date":"2014-10-27T11:02:02","date_gmt":"2014-10-27T11:02:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/?p=1187"},"modified":"2014-10-27T11:02:02","modified_gmt":"2014-10-27T11:02:02","slug":"sci-fi-review-the-mengliad-by-jana-janeway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/2014\/10\/sci-fi-review-the-mengliad-by-jana-janeway\/","title":{"rendered":"Sci-fi (?) review: ‘The Mengliad’ by Jana Janeway"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"This has an intriguing premise: imagine that half the people you see around you everyday are not, in fact, human. Imagine they look the same, but genetically they\u2019re very different, so they avoid daylight, eat differently\u2026 No, no, come back! These are not vampires. I did get worried for a moment, I\u2019ll confess – all that preferring the dark – but these are Mengliads, and they\u2019re quite different from vampires. Instead of drinking blood, they eat \u2014 actually, I won\u2019t spoil the surprise by revealing that, but it amused me hugely.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jessica has a normal, if somewhat dull, life until something happens to revive her dormant Mengliad DNA and she becomes (more or less) a Mengliad herself. I liked that there\u2019s no halfway, blended state, you can only be one or the other. And there are no superpowers in evidence, just a somewhat different physiology. And discovering how that differentness affects her is just part of Jessica\u2019s problem. <\/span><\/p>\n

Being only the tenth accidental conversion in Mengliad history, Jessica is a target for the scientists who want to research her situation. She\u2019s also a target for the section of Mengliad society who want to keep themselves uncontaminated by mixed-blood individuals, and it\u2019s not research they\u2019re interested in. And both groups want to keep the whole thing under wraps so that regular humans never find out about Mengliads.<\/span><\/p>\n

The end result is a fast and furious chase to keep Jessica safe and avoid the many bad guys. Now the plot is wafer-thin, there\u2019s a huge amount of angsting and crying and clinging to the hot bloke for comfort, and every third <\/span>word<\/span> seems to be <\/span>italicised<\/span> for no <\/span>obvious<\/span> reason. And you know what? It didn\u2019t matter. This is a lot of fun, there are plenty of twists, the sex is hot, the action is heart-pumping between bouts of angst, and I found myself reading faster and faster to find out how it ends. Be warned, though, the ending felt more like a respite before another outbreak of chasing around.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m torn between three and four stars, but the sheer entertainment value (and the hot sex) bumps it up to four. And the opening; isn\u2019t this a great opening paragraph? How can you resist? <\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s survival of the species, and that\u2019s all it knows. Needing a blood meal, the protein necessary to its offspring, it searches the streets of New York for a victim, unremorseful.<\/span><\/p>\n

Spotting potential prey, it swoops in for the kill. Biting into warm flesh, it takes what it needs without regard to the owner, but danger presents itself, and it can\u2019t obtain all it requires. Another source is vital.<\/span><\/p>\n

From its vantage point, it doesn\u2019t take long to find. Soft flesh, warm blood, it starts to feast, the task nearly complete.<\/span><\/p>\n

Darkness.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cStupid mosquito.\u201d She slapped the insect hard, killing it, and then flicked it off her arm before continuing towards her destination.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This has an intriguing premise: imagine that half the people you see around you everyday are not, in fact, human. Imagine they look the same, but genetically they\u2019re very different, so they avoid daylight, eat differently\u2026 No, no, come back! These are not vampires. I did get worried for a moment, I\u2019ll confess – all that preferring the dark – but these are Mengliads, and they\u2019re quite different from vampires. Instead of drinking blood, they eat \u2014 actually, I won\u2019t spoil the surprise by revealing that, but it amused me hugely. Jessica has a normal, if somewhat dull, life until something happens to revive her dormant Mengliad DNA and she becomes (more or less) a Mengliad herself. I liked that there\u2019s no halfway, blended state, you can only be one or the other. And there are no superpowers in evidence, just a somewhat different physiology. And discovering how that differentness […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[63],"tags":[89],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1187"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1189,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187\/revisions\/1189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}