Review: Absolutely saturated with love...
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 23, 2014
Love.  I wax poetic about it often.  Especially in my reviews.  It's one of my favorite topics.  Being the hopeless romantic that I am, I've plumbed deep the thesaurus for all of the variety of ways to discuss love and everything that goes with it.  It's a concept with which I am thoroughly enthralled.  And one of my favorite contexts within which to talk about love in a perfectly told love story.Solomon Nememiah is one of my all-time favorite characters.  I've had a huge crush on this man for a long, long time.  Since My Familiar Stranger in fact.  His dry wit, absolute control and ability to see straight to a person's soul has had me wrapped around his little finger for 6 books now.  This book cemented him into my heart forever.  This man gives definition to the idea of an alpha male.  He is strong, he goes after what he wants, he's kind, he's tender, he's absolutely unmoving in his devotion and integrity.  And we get to see so much more of him throughout this book.  We get to see him learning from his mistakes, realigning his priorities while still keeping his strongest character traits in tact at his core.Raif Nightsong is an enigma.  An enigma I thoroughly enjoyed figuring out as the story progressed.  An enigma who met his match in Mercy Renaux, who is a bit of an enigma in and of herself.  A gorgeous, brilliant enigma fully equipped to go toe to toe with Raif.  And that is a show no one wants to miss.  These two come at each other with claws fully extended only to end up wrapped in a lover's embrace.  And their journey to get there is harrowing and just flat fun to watch.Black Swan has always had a feeling of family about it.  Especially within B Team.  But this book expands that feeling to the entire organization.  Through the failing of the vampire virus cure, the entire organization has to come together to survive and continue to keep the human race safe.  Watching the stages of that happening was akin to watching someone grieve - shock, anger, disbelief, bargaining, acceptance.  No one wants to recall the retired Knights.  No one wants to put kids in the field before they're ready.  No one wants to fight a newly mutated virus that is bigger and badder than before.  But they do.  They figure it out and they get back to work.  Because that is what Knights do.  They band even tighter to protect those who are still learning and reconfigure to ensure only strength is issued forth into the streets of war.Solomon's Sieve is a perfectly told love story.  This book is a big thumping heart wrapped in a song.  With each contraction, intake of breath, you can feel the anticipation, the wonder, the whimsy start to catch fire.  With each release, each exhalation, there is a flood of joy, sorrow and hope.  And throughout it all is the lyrical mastery that Victoria Danann weaves throughout each of her books.I both started and ended this book with sobbing.  Joyful, sorrowful, uncontrolled sobbing.  Because of tremendous loss, growth, family and love.  All of which happens in overwhelming quantities in this extraordinary book.Victoria Danann continues to display her mastery and in fact furthers it several more steps.  Integrating everything she does so very well into one book is a display of such tremendous perfection that I'm quickly running out of new ways to tell you about it.  Suffice it to say, she's brilliant and I think she's just getting started.