Somehow I have managed to be SBTB’s Resident Geek Reviewer for almost six years without every reading Sweet Starfire by Jayne Ann Krentz, and let me tell you, this book is simply delightful. There are giant bugs and snakes and river monsters. There is fashion. There’s a dingy spaceship and futuristic gambling. There’s a brooding bad boy who isn’t too bad and a very sweet ingénue who totally kicks ass. There’s a fluffy alien pet with three rows of teeth – like a super snuggly, deadly cat. The cover has pink AND fuchsia. You can’t ask for much more from life than this.

The hero of this story is named Teague Severance, because of course he is, and he is a Wolf (not literally). Wolves are basically regular human beings, although Severance really plays up the “Wolf” moniker – he’s a loner with a lot of aggression. He’s very rugged and cynical; you know the type. Cidra, the heroine, wants Severance to let her earn her passage on his cargo ship. Cidra was born to two Harmonics – people who, in contrast to Wolves, achieve great serenity and perfect telepathic communication. Cidra has the cultural traits of Harmonics, but lacks the telepathic skills. She hopes that if she travels enough, she’ll find a key to unlocking those skills so that she can become a true Harmonic. Commence intergalactic road trip and romance between opposites!

I had great fears about this book because the 1986 edition features an inside front page blurb from the publisher with these inspiring words, “I didn’t rape you, Cidra.” Good heavens. I can’t think of worse words with which to advertise a book. In my experience, generally when someone says, “I didn’t rape you” what they mean is “I totally raped you I’m just choosing not to think of it that way because I’m an asshole.”

It is with vast relief that I inform you all that all the sex in this book is consensual. Severance’s comment has to do with his fear that Cidra might not be able to handle the intensity of sex after the fact, and that she might be blaming him for the sex, but Cidra is always quite sex-positive, to Severance’s mingled delight and chagrin:

Harmonics in general don’t seem very interested in sex, as we both know. Once I am one, I will also probably lose interest. In the meantime, there is something to be learned, and last night I had a sudden, unexpected interest in learning.

Oh, Cidra, how I adore you. Cidra could be an impossible character, too good for this saintly earth, if not for the fact that she’s so funny and so tough. Cidra comes from an incredibly sheltered environment, one almost devoid of conflict. The Harmonic ideal is one of calm, formality, and mental communion as opposed to physical intimacy (of any kind – even her parents never hug her). As soon as she leaves home she finds herself in the middle of bar fights, and searching through abandoned temples, and learning to gamble, and hunting small animals when necessary for survival (although she never stops being vegetarian under normal circumstances).

The very first time someone attacks Cidra, she knocks the guy out. It’s her first fight. Severance rushes in to save her and finds her standing over the unconscious body of her foe:

“What, exactly, did you do?”

“It’s called Moonlight and Mirrors. It’s a kind of dance. An exercise, really. But it’s based on a very old self-defense technique. My instructors always said I had a unique style of interpretation,” she added lamely.

The scene sums up a lot of the tone of the book – it’s funny, but there’s real menace in the attack. Cidra and Severance both assume that she’s going to be dependent on him, given his expertise in the Wolf culture, but Cidra can actually stand up for herself very efficiently.

This book has a fun pulp science fiction quality to it when Cidra and Severance crash land on a hostile jungle planet. I loved the action and the mystery and the humor, and the scenes of Cidra and Severance hanging out on the spaceship. The pacing is excellent – there are enough action scenes to keep the book moving, and enough quiet scenes to allow for believable character development. Cidra is a more complex and compelling character than Severance, but the two characters play off each other in an incredibly entertaining way.

By the end of the book, not only did I want these two crazy kids to wind up together, but I could picture their future lives. Sometimes in romance there’s so much keeping two characters apart that the couple’s resolution seems overly optimistic. In this book, I understood the conflict, but by the end Cidra in particular had become such a tough, shrewd spacefarer, without losing her core values and personality, that I could totally picture her and Severance flying side by side. And while Cidra will keep pants and a shirt handy (she found them very helpful for jungle hiking), I’m sure for the most part she’ll be wearing fantastic clothes of “delicate yellow-gold fabric spun of the finest crystal moss.”

You just can’t beat crystal moss for fashion and style, or so I hear from the Harmonics.

This book is available from:

1986
