Copyright © 2009 Flaming Dog Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

This Diamond is a Little Rough, but it's a decent read.

Diamond Star
by Catherine Asaro
Baen Books, May 2009
cover art by David Mattingly

7 out of 10

THE MUSIC

The idea of a soundtrack for a book isn't a new one. Joel McNeely did it with his score inspired by Shadows of the Empire. But it seems to be catching on as a new piece of the marketing puzzle to get people to read books.

Catherine Asaro has teamed up with Baltimore City band Point Valid for the "soundtrack" to Diamond Star. And it's a decent effort. As a composer and musician myself, I can appreciate the effort it takes to put together any kind of solid song or orchestral piece. It's not something I'd do with alacrity anymore.

It's a decent effort here, but as with most bands that are just starting out, a lot of the tracks sound similar. And on this particular CD, a lot of the tracks sound more like filk than rock. Coldplay plus Simon & Garfunkel.

Given a few more years and several more albums, Point Valid might find the variety they need to be a breakout band. But in the meantime, the soundtrack to Diamond Star is a novelty. My main expectation was that this would be a collection of rock - think AC/DC or the Stones or even Green Day - but it's too tame when compared to the descriptions of the music in the book.

But when you consider this CD along with Shadows of the Empire and the new rock CD that goes with Kevin J. Anderson's Terra Incognita, there seems to be a collective consciousness out there to make book-reading a more immersive experience. It will be interesting to see if this develops into a trend.

Catherine Asaro’s Diamond Star has the distinction of being the first publication sent to SciFi4Me for a review, so I was looking forward to reading the book.

Not being familiar with Asaro's work, I wasn't sure if I could get into the book, but since she's won the Nebula, I figured she knows what she's doing, so I dove in. At the very outset, I realized that this was a story set within a series continuity, and since this wasn’t the first tale in the Ruby Dynasty collection, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to follow the plot. But that turned out to be an unfounded worry, since the story is very self-contained.

Diamond Star is the story of Prince Del, a young royal who only wants to perform as a rock musician. He pointedly avoids any political intrigue, and it’s only his psychic abilities that would make him valuable to the family’s enemies. Managed by Mac Tyler, Del manages to get signed by a major label (in a case of mistaken identity), where he soon finds himself a successful artist with songs that actually have depth and meaning. This, compared to the mainstream music that would be considered vapid and shallow (a little like what passes for music now, but I digress…).

Del finds friends, love, and finally learns to take responsibility for himself after living so many years as the heir to a galactic empire with plenty of servants. The major complication in his life is the fact that his psychic abilities channel the energy from the audience at his shows, causing him debilitating discomfort until he learns to use the energy and feed it back to his fans in a psychic symbiosis.

At the height of his success, Del gets wrapped up in a political web that involves ancient enemies, the Traders, and an Underground Railroad for psychics, who are fodder for the Traders’ appetite for psychic energy. The Traders torture psychics and feed off the negative energy.

First off, I found Diamond Star to be an easy read, but it took me a while to get into it. I found myself more interested in Mac Tyler than in Prince Del. Del seemed to be a whiny do-nothing, but he grew on me. I still like Mac better. I didn’t really get into the book until about half-way through, when Del’s family finally discovered what the prince has been doing with his time. After that, things picked up considerably because it was then that the political intrigue got more solid.

Before that, I could have done without probably three of the concert scenes, mainly because they started to feel repetitive. I didn’t gain anything new about the characters, really, except to see that Del was on a predictable arc that we usually find with spoiled rich kids – get on his own, finally decide to take care of himself, learn how to use a checkbook, yadda yadda yadda…

The one complaint I have is the way Asaro ended most of the early chapters with a portent of doom, and they were all variations on a theme of “Del could die. Dum dum dummm.” It got tired very quickly. But once the family came into the picture, all of that went away. There weren’t anymore hints at a threat to Del’s life. The threat finally showed up, and the story got interesting. I was much more interested in the political back-story over the music-centric main plot.

Overall, it’s a good read, once you get past the first ten or so chapters. Some judicious cutting could have improved the pace of the first half of the story, but it still plays out without dragging its heels. I really wondered if I could get into a story about a rock star, but I found it to be a solid “fish out of water” story. But I personally would have been more interested to read about Mac Tyler. So if his story is out there…