Kiss of Snow, by Nalini Singh

TITLE: Kiss of Snow
AUTHOR: Nalini Singh

COPYRIGHT: 2011
PAGES: 464
PUBLISHER: Berkley

SETTING: Alternate reality of the US in the near future
TYPE: Paranormal romance
SERIES: 10th in the Psy-Changelings series

Since the moment of her defection from the PsyNet and into the SnowDancer wolf pack, Sienna Lauren has had one weakness. Hawke. Alpha and dangerous, he compels her to madness.

Hawke is used to walking alone, having lost the woman who would’ve been his mate long ago. But Sienna fascinates the primal heart of him, even as he tells himself she is far too young to handle the wild fury of the wolf.

Then Sienna changes the rules and suddenly, there is no more distance, only the most intimate of battles between two people who were never meant to meet. Yet as they strip away each other’s secrets in a storm of raw emotion, they must also ready themselves for a far more vicious fight…

A deadly enemy is out to destroy SnowDancer, striking at everything they hold dear, but it is Sienna’s darkest secret that may yet savage the pack that is her home... and the alpha who is its heartbeat...

I confess I didn't come to this one all that well-disposed to love it. Hawke and Sienna have featured in several of the previous books, and it was pretty obvious to me that they were the couple whose story we were all supposed to be dying to read. The Sam and Alyssa of the series, if you will. I just didn't feel it. I'm not sure why, but as a couple, they didn't particularly appeal to me, and the narrative certainty that they were the most exciting couple ever quite annoyed me.

The setup is that Hawke is the leader of the SnowDancer wolf pack, a man whose mate died when they were both children. Wolves mate for life, so Hawke is condemned to spend the rest of his life alone. Sienna is Psy, part of the Lauren family, whose defection was triggered by a need to protect her. Sienna's particular Psy abilities make her incredibly dangerous, and if they'd stayed in the PsyNet, she would have been used as a most dangerous weapon. Ever since the Lauren's were accepted into SnowDancer, Sienna has been able to get under Hawke's skin, but Hawke could always keep his distance because she was so young.

Now Sienna is older, but there are still massive obstacles between them. Not to mention that they're in the midst of increasingly all-out conflict between Psy and changelings!

I'm afraid the romance was, as I feared, a complete bust for me. I found the dynamic between Sienna and Hawke (and that of the secondary romance between Sienna's brother Walker and healer Lara, for that matter) extremely tedious. Very dog-in-the-manger. I want you, but I can’t have you, but at the same time I can’t tolerate anyone else having you. On, and on, and ON. Oh, get over yourself, Hawke, and make a decision. It was especially frustrating because it felt a bit manipulative, like an authorial decision to prolong things, not like something organic.

Hawke is the pack alpha, so there is a lot of domineering behaviour. Sienna does stand up for herself, and demands that in their private interactions, Hawke leaves the alpha status out of it (that he doesn't ‘pull rank’, as she calls it, in those situations), but Hawke’s impulses are always to dominate. I understand that's consistent with his character, but it just put my back up, and I kept wanting Sienna to tell him where he could go. She, BTW, felt a bit immature, like the teenager she is, which was yet another strike against their relationship.

And then there's the bit conflicts that are keeping them apart. What I've found brilliant in so many of the books in this series is that Singh comes up with these truly impossible situations, couples where I just can’t see how they possibly could be together. The longing to be together becomes gut-wrenching, which is oh-so-satisfying, and then Singh comes up with a way to solve the conflict that makes sense, and which I never saw coming. That’s what’s made me love the series.

I just didn’t feel that here. Maybe it’s because I've read all the previous books and have seen how things have been solved before, but I never felt the angst that this was impossible, and oh, how on earth could they be together. I got the clues of how it could all be sorted out really early, and there were no surprises. In fact, the stuff I'm talking about below are my theories that I wrote down pretty early on, to see if I was guessing right. So although they should be spoilers (and you therefore might not want to read them), they're not, really.

As I mentioned earlier, we've got Hawke, who found his mate at a very young age (we’re talking when he was 5), but whose mate died only a couple of years later. Everyone knows wolves mate only once in a lifetime, so how terrible, if Sienna wants to be with him, she needs to accept they’ll never actually be mates. But very close to the beginning, Hawke himself thinks (I'm paraphrasing), “well, they’d never actually *mated*, but she had been his mate”. Ding, ding, ding! All tension fizzled. There, that's how it would be done.

As for Sienna, the problem is that she’s got this super-duper extremely rare ability, and no other X-Psy has survived past the age of 25 (and the one who did was much, much weaker than Sienna). So oh, woe, potential tragedy, how can they be together when she’s almost certain to die young? Problem is, we've already had so many Psy whose extra-special abilities are assumed to mean certain death/insanity/destruction, that it’s kind of par for the course. Of course they’ll find a way. And again, quite early in the book (so it’s not a spoiler) we get a little mention of a theory that it might be important whether X-Psy are not separated from their family’ support. Yep, again, all tension fizzled there, too.

The only element I enjoyed was the progress in the overarching storyline. This is the book where matters really come to a head, and the covert hostilities develop into war. That's excellently handled. It's complex and interesting and I have absolutely no idea how things are going to develop. It kept me reading, when if it had been just the romance, this would have been a DNF. And then it all concluded with a really satisfying, action-packed ending which surprised me. This element is what will keep me reading the next books. I just hope the romance in them is better!

MY GRADE: A C+.