I normally include cover art with my reviews, but I find that as embarrassed as I am that I even read this book, I would manage to be more embarrassed still were I to share the cover art. I read this book on audio (through the library for the blind), so I didn’t see the cover art until I set out to write this review, and then…well, let’s just say if I’d been browsing paperbacks instead of electronic files, I never would have read this. Or if I did, I would have gotten one of those slip covers some people use to hide what they’re reading. 🙂
This book was unequivocally awful. Painful. Wrong. So are all of Lindsey Johanna’s books, for that matter. Sometimes the wrongness works for me, and other times it doesn’t. This time, it didn’t.
The trouble? I’m a science fiction writer. Johanna Lindsey isn’t. She’s a romance writer. This was a bodice-ripper in space.
We meet Tedra, incubated on a world where babies are no longer born. All right…I’ll give you that. Brave New World did much the same thing. Here’s where you lost me: Tedra is a virgin on a world where sex is required by law. If she doesn’t lose it to someone soon, a computer will select a man for her, and he will rape her. Um….
She’s in security, tall and strong, and is apparently reluctant to “sex share” with the puny men on her planet who she could probably beat in a fight. Or so her very attractive male friend explains to her even as he tells her how good he would make it for her.
Enter some really contrived takeover of her planet, led by giant warriors armed with swords. Tedra escapes, and travels to the original homeworld of the warriors, in search of backup.
Challen finds Tedra dressed as a man and carrying weapons, two things that bother him very much. Women on his world are protected by men. They do not carry weapons. They wear their man’s color, unless they want some other man to come along and take them. They have never met anyone from another world, and he does not believe her stories.
Okay, backwards male-superior society. Check. You knew it was going there, right? And Challen can beat Tedra in a fight — go hormones!
Oh, but she needs punishing. For her own good, of course. Men punish women so that the women will not endanger themselves. They so hate to do it, because they’re honorable, and don’t like to hurt their women, but it must be done. And how, might you ask, is it done? With fists or sticks? Oh no, nothing like that. Women are punished by men who drink a potion to dampen their lust, then they are driven insane with unfulfilled desire. Challen felt unbelievably bad the next morning.
No, seriously. Unbelievably bad.
Aside from that, there was this incredibly annoying sentient computer who I wanted to unplug. She never shut up. Never.
So yeah, I read what? And why didn’t I put it down? Now, there’s the question to ask…because many of Johanna Lindsey’s books are this way for me. Some of them, I even love to hate. I can’t honestly say that about this one, possibly because the science fiction writer in me couldn’t handle it.
If you’d like to read a bodice-ripper set in cheese, I mean space, and you can turn off you brain for a while, you might like this.
On second thought, I do mean cheese. And there are green fuzzy things growing in it.
Rating: 2/5
Title: Warrior’s Woman
Author: Johanna Lindsey
Genre: Romance/Science Fiction
ISBN: 0380753014
Published: June 1st, 1990