Skin Dive (Berkley Sensation) [Mass Market Paperback]

STORY BRIEF:
The Foundation takes human prisoners and experiments with them - creating special powers. Gillie was kidnapped when she was 12. She was a prisoner for the next 12 years. Her ability is healing others. Her captors link her blood to someone with cancer. The cancer patient is healed, and Gillie's body takes on the disease. Then they use kidney dialysis to cure Gillie. Taye can channel electricity from power sources through his body to burn and kill others. He can also open locks and used magnetism to move metal. There are several characters in this story with a variety of powers.

Taye and Gillie met while they were prisoners. Taye orchestrated their escape by modifying surveillance equipment, starting fires, and opening locks. They and other patients escaped. The Foundation wants them back and has hired thugs and a mercenary to get them. Mockingbird is the organizer of former patients who now work together to help other patients and fight the Foundation.

Taye and Gillie were on the run together for ten months. But it was getting too dangerous so they agreed to work for Mockingbird in return for his help.

REVIEWER'S OPINION:
I assume the author was under pressure to churn out another book with a too-soon-deadline. Things were not well thought out. Some events did not have enough details. The major conflicts in the story were Taye keeping secrets from Gillie for no rational reason. Taye's ability created a cancer in his body. Each time he used electricity, the cancer grew worse. He was unable to eat and was wasting away. The more he used his power the sooner he would die. He and Gillie were in love, but he kept this a secret from her. If he had told her, she could easily cure him. She would feel some pain for a few hours until kidney dialysis could clean her blood. Then she would be fine. But would Taye tell her he was sick? No. He planned to die without telling her. His reason was he didn't want her to feel any pain. Big deal. That was her role in all of this. She would heal others, feel their pain for a while, and then be ok. Taye kept this secret for far too long. It was not a good plot.

Taye also created another conflict that I could not understand. Taye and Gillie loved each other and hungered for each other sexually. But for some stupid reason Taye refused to have sex with Gillie. This was the main conflict for ten months. I didn't enjoy that part of the story which was the first 110 pages of the book. I still don't know why he wouldn't have sex with her. He didn't want to hurt her, but his rejection hurt her.

At the end of the book Taye again does something illogical and unnecessary that hurt Gillie. I won't say more so as to avoid a spoiler. It was unreasonable and artificial.

Examples of other things not thought out or lacking details: (1) Mockingbird's past and present. (2) Not enough told about the leak in Mockingbird's organization. We learn who did what, but it felt superficial. (3) Toward the end Gillie sort of knows Taye is sick, but we don't get to see how she learned it or her conversations with Taye about it. (4) Gillie is part of a team to fight some bad guys, but she takes no weapon. She had been taking lessons and shooting at a shooting range for a while. Why didn't she take a gun? She waited until Taye killed a guard, and then she took the guard's gun to use. (5) Tanager had in interesting ability. When she used it she was required to have sex with any man afterwards (to balance things out somehow). I wanted to see some of her pay-the-piper sex scenes. None of them were shown.

At times I was confused with the bird names. Taye's code name was Crow. Silas' code name was Hawk. During the story the author went back and forth calling various characters the different names. Several times I was asking myself - now who is Hawk? Or which one is Taye?

The suspense and action were pretty good. The major flaw in this book was the relationship and story between the main couple - not good since this is a romance novel. Part of the problem was that they loved each other from the beginning so there was no room for relationship development. It's much easier to see a couple start out NOT liking each other and then watch things change. Here, it was one person refusing to have sex and also keeping a secret. I think the author should have done something very different for them.

I did enjoy a side story relationship between the mercenary and Kestrel. But their story was a very minor part of the book. I would have enjoyed more about them.

DATA:
Story length: 280 pages. Swearing language: strong, including religious swear words. Sexual language: strong. Number of sex scenes: 7. Total number of sex scene pages: 18. Setting: current day mostly various places in the U.S. Copyright: 2011. Genre: paranormal romantic suspense.

THE SKIN SERIES:
You do NOT need to read them in order. The reason for the following is because I felt a need to read my reviews of earlier books before starting this book. Seeing these notes would satisfy that.

4 stars. Skin Game (Book 1): Kyra can gain abilities from people for a short time. Foster works for her enemy and hires hitman Rey to kill her. Foster has special abilities from being experimented on as a child by Micor Technologies. Foster is a minor character in this book. The main story is Kyra and Rey.

3 ½ stars. Skin Tight (Book 2): Foster gets a job with Micor. He wants revenge. He interacts with Mia. Micor held several people as prisoners - doing medical and genetic research. At the end of this book a group of victims escape.

3 ½ stars. Skin Heat (Book 3): Zeke is one of the escaped victims from Book 2. He can mentally communicate with animals. He can hear and smell things other humans can't. He has lost the ability to read. He gets a job with a vet.

2 stars. Skin Dive (Book 4): Gillie (whose blood can cure cancer and other illnesses) and Taye (who has electrical powers) are two of the escaped victims from Book 2.

The character of Gillie, introduced in Skin Tight, really flowers in this novel. She's a great character who has been through a lot - and continues to go through a lot - and comes out the other side strong and whole.

But the more she blossoms, the more her male lead Taye seems to wilt. He could be fascinating but instead he shifts into an all-too-typical 'I live only for you' romance hero.

You can feel the love between Gillie and Taye ... but the repetitive themes, emotions, even conversations, render the relationship somewhat tedious. Taye is being a dumb ass and Gillie is too patient and you rather wish something would happen.

In addition, I found the two secondary romantic threads of the book involving Mockingbird and Kestrel to be unsatisfying in the extreme. I was especially disappointed that the Kestrel thread didn't go further.

Meanwhile the action pieces of the story have become odd and disconnected. The end of the book - and if I read rightly this is the end of the series as well - caught me unawares. Too much of the important plot action happened off-screen.

Keeping the romance front and center is one thing; having the viewpoint characters so distracted that you only get snippets until - boom! - you are at the finale is something else again.

[Originally posted at DarkUrbanFantasy.]

Ava Gray's 'Skin' series is a must read for fans of an alternate paranormal romance. Instead of vampires, witches and the like, we have humans with extra abilities, kinda like Heroes or the X Men. What made the series stand out though, was the fact that Gray didn't try to recreate Heroes or the Xmen, but rather show the lives of these special people and how they intersect with normal humans and the backstory of how they came to be that way.

Now as the series devoloped, I understood that eventually it would become more detailed in the paranormal action, however I think it was executed poorly in the book and made for a mind numbing read.Let me clarify that I love anything sci-fi/paranormal/action whether in books or in movies. I think that when it gets mixed in with romance though, things can get tricky.

I loved how the book started out, then by midway to the end, it sorta went downhill from there.
My main issues with Skin Dive are :

1. Gillie. After reading about Gillie in previous books, I had conjured up an image of a very precious, very strong and innocent girl. In this book, IMO, her innocence came across as naivetee, and her strength as being whiny. There is a scene towards the end, where Taye is grovelling to Gillie and he sends her every day a stuffed animal to make up for the one's Rowan took away from her on her 16th birthday. This reflects the issues I have with Gillie's characterization. On one hand she wants to be the dirty talking sexy girl but yet she still pined for her stuffed toys.
The other issue I had with her, was WHY she was mad at Taye. For the most part he was trying to protect her knowing that he was dying and KNOWING that she would try to find a way to heal him (and that can hurt HER). I don't like the way he did it, but Gillie overreacted and came across as being spoiled and whiny. I mean Taye is sacrificing for her (joining the Mocking Birds etc) and all she can think is 'He's treating me like a child'. It's because you act like one ma'am.

2. The new 'team' - Ok- I'm not a bird enthusiast, and I was irritated by the Crow/Gull/Hawk yadda yadda yadda. That would translate better in a movie than reading. I had to think to myself 'wait, was that Silas?'

3. The action scenes were boring to me and I had to force myself to read them. But that deficiency could be with me, and not the author :)

What I did like though, was the fact that we got to see the mastermind behind 'the Resistance' against the Foundation. I sorta wished we got some cameos from old characters.It's a definite must read for fans of the series though!