When I was a child, I spoke as a child. I wrote and read about sweet sixteen year-olds in the first blush of medieval love. However, time passed, pages in my life turned, and the heroines I related to got a bit older and a heck of a lot smarter. The older I got, the older my heroines got--both the ones I wrote and the ones I read. And then something happened--just as a watched pot never boils, a reader never ages--until suddenly he/she...does. One day I woke up, picked up a book with a starry eyed young heroine, and those starry eyes just looked vacant to me. I put it down in shock and I've never gone back.

So it is with mixed feelings that I must report that the heroine of Breeder is young. She's young enough to call her elders "The Old Ones." Of course, the Old Ones lived in "the time before" which pre-dates living memory; it is a time no one remembers. Of course, our heroine only has the vaguest idea and mostly wrong-headed concept of what "the time before" could actually have been like. In pure science fiction this ingenuousness would not make me pause, because there's a benefit to the ignorance of youth. We--along with the still-wet-behind-the-ears--protagonists get the explanations of all things complex, things that we might not otherwise understand. It's a device to bring us up to speed in a world not our own. We have the opportunity to grow with the protagonists, watch them develop. That's fine with me.

But I have to admit that when it's frankly carnal erotica, I do NOT want to look behind closed doors with the very young protagonist. Call me too much a parent. Call me Puritanical. Call me whatever you like, even a prude. Even though I know she's a character of fantasy without flesh and blood, with no actual possibility of AIDS, unplanned pregnancy, exploitation or rape, a young heroine inevitably makes my skin crawl, and I want to give her a lecture, an invitation to a Health Education seminar and a short course by someone commonsensical like Dr. Ruth. Of course ignorance can make a young person seem that much younger; and that is what happens with Lyssa Hart's protagonist Mali.

Mali lives in a time after civilization has fallen--not that she has much of an idea what civilization is. Her life to date has been spent in a primitive fort under the grimmest of conditions, under the harshest of directives, in a world of hardship and infertility. In fact, infertility is one of the disfigurements of her damaged society. A rare young and fertile woman's most honored office is to use male "breeders"--if such a viable creature can be found--and as this book opens, a party of hunters brings such a captured male from the barrens. As Mali is both young and fertile, this captured, chained, (macho, strong, sexy, agile, powerful, magnificent, I could go on and on) male is expected to impregnate her; she is expected to receive him; but Mali is not only completely (almost amusingly) inexperienced, she also is too soft-hearted to deal with this strange male's unwarranted imprisonment. Her soft heart leads to her releasing this male, which leads to consequences she never imagined.

It's not surprising she doesn't imagine the consequences. She does spend much of this story in a youthful daze, confused, bedazzled and at a complete loss. In spite of her befuddlement, the story weaved by Lyssa Hart has more meat to it than most "carnal" romances. Between Willifa and Adama and old Naja, the difficulties of her life are only a backdrop to what is about to come next as the wild male Mali frees turns her world upside down.

At moments in her peak rebelliousness, at her best, Mali reminds me of Molly Ringwald's Nicky in 1983 Scifi movie Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. That's a positive comment because I really like the ballsy bravado-filled Nicky. At the very least, at a crucial moment in the story, Mali could have made good use of that Doctor Ruth manual I mentioned earlier. I was torn between compassion and laughing out loud. Mali engages me in spite of her glassy-eyed youthfulness and rusticating stupidity. (If I were being nice, I could call this good characterization, if that ingenuousness weren't over the top for my taste. Lyssa Hart writes well and has no limit to her imagination, or at times, her humor.) In spite of being sorely used by Mali's people and exercising his revenge, Jaegar of Pendrakin (the captured male) is certainly hero material. Mali feels about Jaegar: "Except that he had fought so magnificently, against such odds, that exhilaration and admiration had filled her and the feeling had taken hold of her that he deserved freedom." I feel the same way about Lyssa Hart's writing. Hart is deserving of better commentary than I have granted here, while picking on Mali.

Breeder is not a book to be savored, but one, surely, to be enjoyed, and probably enjoyed more than once.

Reviewed by Maîtresse
© Dec 2006