Sometimes I wonder what an author or publisher is thinking when they assign titles. Other times I wonder what they could be thinking when they assign labels - for instance "romance." By the time I'd finished reading Melanie Jackson's latest release, Dominion, I realized that both these decisions had to have been completely arbitrary.

The book opens with a pair of annoying and supercilious (not to mention misogynistic) angels chatting about The Way The World Works (for the purpose of this book, anyway). The setup is that a certain soul wandering around the ether, named Domitien, has been frustrating the "Great One" with his inability to fall in love, since that is what all souls are put on earth to do (except when it's convenient to the storyline). Lifetime after lifetime, he gets women to fall madly in love with him, via his charm and vast sexual expertise, but never lets his heart be touched. Now, one of the angels tells us, they've taken a soul from his past, revamped it, and put it on earth to await Dom's arrival and eventual affections. The Great One is even breaking the rules, we're told. Instead of requiring him to be born and grow up as usual, he allows Dom to go down in fully matured form, retaining all of his memories of past lives. He already possesses certain, conveniently shifting supernatural powers that allow him to influence this newly remade mate. Now he has to go and make her fall in love with him, and somehow manage to fall in love in return.

Laris Thiessen, as she's known in this life, is an opera star of immense, almost inhuman talent who somehow manages nevertheless to exist in an amazingly isolated state, untouched by any of the opera subculture or "scene," except for the fact that she hopes to be invited to join the San Francisco Opera Company. All of a sudden, her dreams become haunted by a fantasy lover who seems to be almost real. And then one day, she sees him walking toward her. Does she faint? Demand to know what's going on? Offer any resistance when he whisks her off to lunch? Nope. She just goes along, and hops into bed with him shortly afterward. Well, to her credit, I guess there's no protocol to this sort of thing. But then again, there's always common sense.

Most unfortunately, this implausible story features a triangle, and it's not a happy one. The third member of our little drama is a madman named Rychard who's just basically mean and evil for the sake of being mean and evil. Contrary to the exposition at the beginning of the book, this soul is definately not around to fall in love and die happy. No, he's just there to try to kill Dom and occasionally Laris, and ends up dead at Dom's hands roughly half the time. And despite the premise, he just keeps getting sent back in different incarnations to make life hell for the leading couple.

My problems with this book are multitudinous, as you can probably tell. The premise is as faulty and at least as one-dimensional as the characters. Descriptions of the "Great One" (i.e. God, Allah, Yahweh, etc) are more analagous to Eros or Cupid than to an actual monotheistic deity; He's described as being concerned solely with getting His children to fall in love. Apparently war in the Middle East, the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and hunger, poverty and suffering worldwide just aren't as important, comparatively speaking.

And then there's the whole reincarnation issue. Like the God problem, reincarnation is based solely on the ability of the souls involved to find love. Except, of course, when it's not, as with Rychard. But more than that, how does one identify a soul from lifetime to lifetime? Some deep spiritual marking or ingrained personality trait? Nope, too much work. Instead, you know who's who because a soul keeps two things: hair color, and the first letter of their name (this one has exceptions, too, at least for Laris; Rychard and Dom are consistent, however). Whoa, deep.

As for the characters themselves, well, there's not much there to work with. Two-dimensional may actually be a compliment. Laris is a doormat who pretends to be assertive on occasion, but lets Dom do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and never protests. Dom, for his part, is arrogant, patronizing, and obnoxious. Both characters suddenly metamorphosize into different people late in the book, becoming an empowered heroine (actually, she's still pretty much a doormat), and a tortured hero, but this doesn't salvage anything. And Rychard we've already covered. He's just missing the wax mustache. Hey, maybe he made silent movies in one of those incarnations....

The biggest problem here, though, bigger even than the issue of flatter-than-flat characters, is that there is no romance. Oh, they talk the talk, alright. But that's it. It's all wild sex and unflattering character portraits, as she acts befuddled and malleable, and he acts condescending and superior. As part of the amorphous supernatural qualities of the world the book is set in, there is some time traveling involved (although this is not a time-travel romance), which starts out interesting, but gets tedious. Toward the end, though, it instigates the presto-change-o character swap I mentioned, and there's some actual romance hinted at briefly, but it's "too little too late", not to mention too hard to reconcile with the rest of the plot and character description/action throughout the book.

Oh, and back to the title. It doesn't mean anything. There's some blather in the blurb about "their love would rule", but there's no actual connection to the plot, such as it is. Annoying as this is, the fact that this book is marketed as romance is much worse as it's simply false advertising.

As you can guess, I'm going to have to tell you not to bother with Dominion. Author Jackson has a very spotty record with us; my grade gives her two F's, but one of my colleagues enjoyed her enough to give her a B for Night Visitor, her 2001 time travel romance. Let's hope she can do better the next time.