Private Dancer

I honestly don’t know what to say about this book. I don’t understand what the plague that is killing people actually is. I couldn’t really dig into the characters. It didn’t seem to really lift for me. I just floated through this.

Something about the world and how it ended was not clearly defined. Since it’s a short story the POV wasn’t concise enough to get invested in it. It was laid out the way a full-sized story would be as if the author had time to dig into all the characters instead of just picking say 1 to 3 and overloading us in the short time we had with information specifically about the end of the world, about the task at hand, and allowing their relationships with each other to grow instead of just going from this thing inside their heads to this thing in the real world in the last chapter then it’s over.

Ultimately, nothing really happens.

Also, the deniability plotline is not one of my favs. I quit Lucifer the TV series after he got shot in like what the fourth episode and didn’t heal. When my google search revealed she wouldn’t find out who he was until midway through season 3, so basically over fifty episodes in the future, I quit right there. There are so many ways to deal with the supernatural without always going for the ‘they’re crazy’ or ‘this can’t be real’ route. Just being confronted with it raises so many avenues for Drama and tension it’s just overused at this point. My least favourite supernatural trope.

Also if one characters’ husband has spoken to a god before, why can’t they do it again. Why do two of them now have to give up their immortality to talk to humans when clearly it has happened before? The ending just threw so much at the reader in a rush plus expecting us to deal with the lead character disbelieving in the supernatural, and then a lovers spat the first day after they reveal their feelings to each other. Just so much to deal with and that was only the end of the story.

I just couldn’t connect with this. It needed a less is more approach to be a clean, precise and uncluttered short story, or commit to becoming an epic modern fantasy journey. As it is I finished it but it didn’t do anything for me.

So after some serious digging apparently there are two books set in this world, however, even though the very first book had a character name in the blurb I recognise this book clearly states it is the first in the Mayan epilogue series. If it isn’t the first it should say third, from what I’m seeing it isn’t and was supposed to be a new series set in a world the author had already created. All of that to say this story still reads like we are just dropped in the middle of a story instead of being part of a series, which again it can’t be because it says book one so even knowing this world exists still doesn’t magic away the truth that is this book is lacking on information and character development like more than a few readers have noted. All the bones for something good is here but it never quite makes it anywhere. Part of an established series or first of a new one there isn’t enough here for this book to stand on its own. Also it’s 2022 and there’s still no part two that I can find even after a deep dive into the net so who knows when it’s coming.