sex and violence to semi-porn level with witchcraft as excuse, couldn't finish

Herculine is only six-years-old when she watches her mother die horribly and inexplicably. A child alone in the nineteenth-century French countryside, she makes her way to the secluded convent, where she is taken in as a foundling orphan and raised by nuns who teach the children of the privileged to fear a wrathful God. But shy, unworldly Herculine is not like the others in this cold, forebidding place. And when she is led down a dark path by a rebellious fellow student, she soon finds herself convicted of crimes unimaginable. But death at the hands of the ignorant and falsely pious is not to be Herculine's lot. Held captive in the convent library, she is visited by four unexpected saviors with timeless needs of their own: the incubus priest Father Louis; the tragic, damned beauty Madeleine; the demonic Asmodei; and Sebastiana d'Azur, a witch. By dawn, Herculine is free yet forever changed as she follows her liberators into a world of sensuous pleasures and great mysteries both wondrous and strange. Secreted away in Sebastiana's once-grand manor high above the Breton sands, Herculine sets out to find out why she has been "chosen" and for what purpose. Her quest - ripe with erotic discovery, dark magic, heresy, and blood - propels her headlong through the perils of the age, across borders between the living and the dead, and back through a time when hysteria and madness reigned, when noble heads were impaled and paraded through the streets of Paris. For only when her mysterious mission is completed - and the terrible, otherworldly roots of a gruesome Revolution are finally revealed - can she understand who and what she truly is. Until then, she must simply trust...and learn.

Well written but boring. ( )

Mixed feeling about this one... it had potential to be several good things. In the end, however, I feel that it pretty much missed the mark on all of them.
In the "positive" column: Blasphemy! Witches! A priest-incubus! A bloody revenant! A hermaphrodite schoolgirl!
In the "negative" column... a slow-as-molasses plot that suffers from ADHD, and an inexplicable middle-of-the-road approach to the outrageous subject material.
OK, our protagonist is intersex - but this is no "Middlesex." This is not a literary fiction book at all, although the writing style isn't half bad. It's a trashy novel, at heart - but it's not nearly trashy ENOUGH. And when a trashy novel doesn't go all the way it just gets boring. It took me a ridiculously long time to finish this book; it just didn't keep my interest and I kept reading something else instead.

A good part of this was the plot's lack of focus. Nearly nothing actually happens in the story proper. Our protagonist, on a sort-of journey of self-discovery, meets various other characters - and then the book tangents off wildly and spends so much time talking about whichever other character's back story that you pretty much forget where you were in the original plot... which wasn't going much of anywhere, anyway.

More explicit sex with incubi, more perversion, and maybe a few orgy scenes thrown in could have elevated this book to a certain status... but the opportunity was missed. Reading this sort of felt like watching the R-rated cut of "Pirates." (There's no point, really.) ( )

The story line drew me in and kept me interested, however it did drag a bit. Overall a good read. ( )