Review: Great futuristic adventure & love story
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 26, 2014
Rarely Pure and Never Simple is the third book by Angel Martinez and has cemented her as a new favorite author for me.  I enjoy her writing style, the worlds she builds and the complex characters who populate those worlds.  (The other two books I also loved were Vassily the Beautiful and Gravitational Attraction.)The setting of Rarely Pure and Never Simple is a dystopian future Earth in which much of the United States is a wasteland and an engineered genetic mutation causes a small percentage of people to be born with special abilities often accompanied by neurological issues.  These people are called variants.  The two main characters are both variants who eschew authority and refuse to join The Guild.  They do, however, accept contract work from them and other organizations.Blaze and Damien are both broken in their own ways.  Blaze hides his behind anger, a sharp tongue, and a tendency to resolve conflict with his fists and guns.  Yet, he is also surprisingly empathetic and tender with Damien.  Damien is a hot mess; he does not tolerate other people well and maintains some semblance of control by isolating himself, burying his feelings and performing OCD rituals to make his environment stable. Yet, he is willing to forgo the safe environment he has created for himself in order to find a group of missing kids.  I fell in love with both of them.Shudder is a wonderful auxiliary character; he plays a bit bigger role in the story than side characters often do.  His personality is quite opposite of both Damien and Blaze.  Damien thinks of him as, "...ebullient, stubbornly cheerful..."  He is also a variant activist; Blaze calls him a terrorist.The search for the missing kids leads the reader and the characters on an exciting, dangerous adventure across the country.  (Starting in the CA town where I grew up. :-)  As their journey progresses, the relationship between Damien and Blaze grows and secrets from their past are revealed.  I found their back stories and relationship development as interesting as the adventure - truly the emotional aspects were an adventure as well.  I also loved how there was a sort of almost paranormal connections between the two MCs. Near the end of the book, Damien comes to the revelation that, "To be whole, one needed to first concede to being only half."There are only a couple of sex scenes in the book, but in this case it is all about quality over quantity.  I love the way Angel Martinez builds up to and then executes erotic scenes.  Damien's little kink adds another bit of spice.Throughout the book, Blaze and Damien play a game in which they try to use old or unusual words.  As a reader I enjoyed the game as well, looking up words on my Kindle.As this book is listed as "Variant Configurations #1," I am going to assume there are more to come.  I look forward to additional stories in this series.  I will definitely be reading them, as well as other books by Angel Martinez.