The Darkest Part of the Forest - Holly Black

Holly Black never fails to please.  After reading Cruel Prince earlier this year, I realized that I was missing a chunk of her faerie stories--I had the Tithe background, as well as its sequels, but there were characters in CP whom I was clearly supposed to recognize, and did not.  Obviously, I had missed The Darkest Part of the Forest.  Or, not missed it, exactly--I knew it existed.  However, I thought it was completely unconnected to the other books and had a story significantly different from what it actually is (I have no idea where I got that sense) and so I hadn't sought it out.  Which is kind of a good thing, because I got to enjoy it now!

The story takes place in the strange Pennsylvania town of Fairfold, where humans live not with the Folk, but alongside them.  Every now and then, a tourist will go missing--tourists who come to the town to get a thrill from interacting with faeries and make mistakes that "locals" would never make, except when they do.  Changeling Jack lives alongside his human "brother," whom he was supposed to replace; a jump-rope line stops one line short of drawing a monster out of the woods; and a boy sleeping in a glass coffin is the centerpiece of many a high school party.

Heroine Hazel grew up in Fairfold, with a short stint in Philadelphia while her older brother, Ben, was in music school.  Ben has music magic, a gift (or curse) from a faerie when he was a baby.  Hazel has no such gifts, but she wishes she did; she supports Ben in his magic and takes on the role of his loyal knight, the two of them hunting bad faeries as pre-teenagers in the woods.  But all that ends with the time in Philadelphia, and upon returning to Fairfold, Hazel makes a stupid mistake that puts her off hunting even longer.  But when the glass coffin is broken and Hazel has reason to suspect that she did it--even if she doesn't know why or even remember doing it--and the boy inside it is gone, a world of trouble is unleashed from the darkest part of the forest.  Hazel has to fight for her family, friends, and Fairfold itself, even though she is woefully unprepared to do so.

This was slow to get going, I will admit, and there's not a lot of real tension or action until fairly late in the book.  I also wasn't a huge fan of Ben as a main character--perhaps because he seemed to enter the role of main character fairly late in the book, where Hazel had occupied that role by herself for much of the early parts.  Ben himself was okay, but I liked him more in a supporting role; while his motivations were clear, I never felt he got the character development that a main character really needs to shine in a starring role.  Hazel, on the other hand, had much more page time; we were in her head much more, saw more of what she did and why she did it.  It just worked better for Hazel.  (Though I liked how things ended up for Ben!)

This is a different setting and a different faerie Court from Black's other books, and that aspect of this wasn't felt out as well.  However, I liked Fairfold itself.  The way that Folk and humans twined together, but with humans walking the razor's edge of danger all the time, really appealed to me.  The humans of Fairfold felt safe, until they weren't, justifying that "only tourists" were in danger, but doing some "tourist"-like things themselves.  And the way they seemed so okay with things, but quickly turned on Jack--the only faerie among them--as soon as things went wrong seemed exactly like what would happen in real life to me.

These faerie tales are Black's definite strength.  I'm so glad that she's returned to them with Cruel Prince, and I can't wait to read the next installment in that series--and luckily, I think reading this in the meantime will help bulk out my understanding of that series, too.

4 stars out of 5.

White Hot - Ilona Andrews (Hidden Legacy #2)

The second Hidden Legacy book by the Ilona Andrews team picks up about two months after the first, and takes an abrupt turn in direction: from fire to ice.  I was super excited to read this one after tearing through Burn for Me, because I wanted to see the relationship between Nevada and Rogan evolve and come into its own as well as see more of Nevada's wonderful family.  While her family continued to be wonderful and their relationship did indeed evolve, I ultimately didn't find this one as good as the first one.

Nevada is pulled back into the ring of high-stakes investigations when Cornelius, the animal mage we briefly encountered in the first book, comes to her to ask her to take on the investigation of his wife's murder.  He wants to know who killed her, and he wants revenge.  Nevada is reluctant, but agrees, for various reasons.  She's quickly re-enmeshed with Rogan (who has ignored her since the end of the last book) when it turns out that his people were the wife's security team, who were killed along with her, and Rogan wants to avenge them.

Cornelius, while not elevated to main-character status, is definitely one of the primary supporting characters in this book, and that was excellent.  His animal mage powers are vastly different from any of the other ones we've encountered in this world, and they're put to good use in several ways here.  Also, I want a Chinese ferret-badger for a pet now.  I definitely hope he'll continue to be a presence in the third book.  In the supporting character realm, Nevada's family continues to be amazing and we get a glimpse into her origins, as well as the abilities of her two younger siblings and one of her cousins.  This was awesome, and as Nevada evolves into a Prime I hope we get to see more in-depth what her equally-powerful siblings can do.

Nevada's evolution was another interesting aspect of this book.  We knew--or could infer--that she was a Prime from the events of the first book, even if she hadn't come into her own yet.  But here, she's no longer flying under the radar, as much as she might like to be.  She's gathering attention, and it's pretty clear that it's going to come to a head in the third book.  This is a good progression, and I was pretty happy with it.

What I less happy with was the relationship between Nevada and Rogan.  When we left them at the end of the first book, Nevada was attracted to Rogan but unwilling to be just his plaything, and Rogan was attracted to Nevada and determined to have her.  When we rejoin them here, it's all, "I love you!" on both parts, even if the actual words aren't said until later in the book.  Most of Nevada's reservations seem to have just up and vanished, which was very strange, and considering that Rogan's emotional attachment seemed...there, but sparse and under-developed, it seems weird that he jumped so full-on into "I must love and protect Nevada"-mode here.

There's a third book in this series (and it seems like there might potentially be more, but nothing solid so far) and I'm still interested in it, but this was something of a come-down from the first book.  I won't say it suffered from second book syndrome, because that's a plot thing and not a relationship thing, and things definitely moved in this book.  But it wasn't as amazing as the first, and I hope the third can make a come back.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Burn for Me - Ilona Andrews (Hidden Legacy #1)

I picked up Burn for Me while it was on sale a while back because another member of the Unapologetic Romance Readers group had given it a really good rating.  And Ilona Andrews does really good paranormal fantasy with romance elements, which is right up my alley, so it was perfect.  But it sat on my Kindle, unread, until I slotted it into my reading challenge for "A book by two authors," because "Ilona Andrews" is actually a pen name for a husband-wife writing team, Ilona and Andrew Gordon.  This isn't actually hard to find--they're very open with it--but it's not apparent by just looking at the book cover.

The best-known books by these two are the Kate Daniels books.  Burn for Me and the other Hidden Legacy books take place in a different world from Kate's story.  In this world, a substance called the Osiris Serum was discovered in the nineteenth century and unlocked magic in many people; the unlocked magic became genetic, and in our current time, despite the serum no longer being in use, magic is still rampant.  Heroine Nevada has magic that allows her to tell when someone is lying, though she hides it because she doesn't want to be forced to become a human lie detector for the government, military, etc.  Instead, she runs a private investigation business that brings in money for her family.  But when bad boy Adam Pierce starts burning things down in Houston, Nevada is put on the case of bringing him back to his family against her will by the man who "owns" her family for various reasons.  And to make things worse, she ends up falling with bad man Connor Rogan, aka Mad Rogan, aka the Scourge of Mexico, who can literally level cities with just the power of his mind.  Yikes.

I really, really enjoyed this.  I stayed up too late reading it, which I haven't done in a long time, and immediately bought the second volume, White Hot.  Nevada is an imminently likable character.  She is smart and gorgeous and can kick butt, which is all par for the course in this genre, but her devotion to her family is something new, because most people in this genre tend to be orphans or estranged from their families, for some reason.  Her sad and quiet mother, her kooky grandmother, and her annoying-but-helpful younger siblings and cousins were all so charming and really added a lot to this book.  I have mixed feelings about Rogan--and I actually wasn't sure if he was going to be the love interest for a while (I thought maybe something would end up happening with Adam) because he and Nevada don't meet until so far into the book.  But he's a little psycho.  Nevada is keenly aware of this herself, and purposefully keeps distance between herself and Rogan because of it.  But Rogan is the very typical paranormal romance alpha male, and he is determined to have Nevada.  Which really makes her resistance of her, her shutting him down and backtalking, even though she is definitely attracted to him, even more admirable. 

Of course, the fact that this is a three-book series and this is only the first book probably helps, too.  But what's best about this is that Rogan is fucked up and brutal, yes--and Nevada doesn't let him use that as an excuse.  It's not "Oh, he's broken, he will be so sweet and perfect once I fix him!"  Instead, it's "Yes, he's sexy, but he is dangerous and probably doesn't want me for more than sex and I really cannot deal with that now, so I'm going to nope out of here as fast as I can."  This is the type of stuff that strong heroines are made of, and I really liked it.

This is a great, fun, sexy paranormal fantasy/mystery--there's no sex here (though Nevada is interested, somewhat despite herself) and the tension is really drawn out, so don't expect a resolution in that department.  But White Hot is already shaping up pretty well, so I have hopes there!

5 stars out of 5.

Nice Dragons Finish Last - Rachel Aaron (Heartstrikers #1)

I've had this book on my Kindle for ages (and I think I actually have The Legend of Eli Monpress by the same author, as well) and never really reached for it.  I'm not entirely sure why; I got it on a deal, I'm sure, but I have a bad habit of picking up sale books and then never reading them.  However, when I needed a book for my reading challenge that involved a mythical creature, this seemed like an easy one to slot in.

And it was so good!

The story is about Julius, the youngest dragon in the Heartstriker clan, whose territory covers much of the southwestern United States after magic returns to the world.  Julius is kicked out of his home by his mother, the matriarch of the plan, for not being a good dragon--not cruel enough, ambitious enough, etc.  He ends up in the Detroit Free Zone, where dragons are strictly not allowed, with a month to impress his mother before she eats him.  Yikes.  When his brother gives him a job to complete, Julius falls in with Marci, a human mage trying to make her own way after fleeing Las Vegas in the wake of her father's murder, only to find that the murderers have followed her.

I'm not totally sold on the world building here, as I didn't see any explanation of where magic went for thousands of years or why a comet smashing into Canada was what brought it back; this might have been a more convincing world if it had been presented as an alternative universe in which magic had always been there to begin with.  But the Detroit Free Zone was a great setting--one ruled by a vengeful spirit who (for some reason; again, not clear) hates dragons.  This adds an element that was really needed, because otherwise Julius would have had too easy a time of things.  Magical creatures abound, and while we never get to see Julius in full-on dragon form, we do get to see his brother at one point.  Marci, the secondary lead, is great as well.  She's a thaumaturge, a type of mage who uses spell circles for casting--and carries some of them with her in the form of plastic bracelets on her wrists, which I thought was awesome.  She also has a cat death spirit named Ghost.  Other supporting characters present themselves in the form of dragons from a rival clan and some of Julius' siblings, including Jason--who kind of falls into the "dumb jock" archetype--and Chelsie, the family's badass enforcer who I absolutely loved.

The writing is fun and engaging, though the pacing is sometimes a bit uneven.  For example, it felt like the book was going to lead to a climax several times before it actually did, and while rising action is important, this just didn't feel like it fit into a proper story pyramid; rather, it felt more like a serial that had been put together into a book form, with each segment having its own climax and denouement.  But the real climax and conclusion have a suitable impact and also set up future books in the series without leaving readers with a cliffhanger--something that I consider so important when putting out books that belong in a series.

Overall, this was a really fun read.  I already bought the second book, though I had a bunch of other library and challenge books that I need to get through before I can pick it up.  Still, I'm looking forward to continuing with this series.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Sourdough - Robin Sloan

This was an absolutely charming book.  From the author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (which I did not realize when I picked it as my Book of the Month), it's a love letter to food and technology (Mr. Penumbra, similarly, was an ode to books and technology) with its own sense of quirkiness set in San Francisco.

The main character and narrator, Lois, works on programming robotic arms.  She has a diet that consists of a nutritional gel called Slurry and little else, until one night she orders a "double spicy" combo of soup and sandwich from a place that's opened in her neighborhood.  The food is a revelation, and she orders it every night--until the two brothers who own the shop encounter visa issues and depart for Europe, leaving Lois their sourdough starter.  Lois feeds the starter and starts to bake with it, producing loaves with strange faces in the crust.  People go crazy for her bread; she tries to sell it at a farmer's market and ends up at the Marrow Fair, an underground market selling radioactive honey from Chernobyl, cookies made from crickets, all kinds of crazy stuff.  But why is the bread the way it is?  And who is Mr. Marrow?

Lois is an utterly likable heroine.  She has good intentions that sometimes go awry, though she gets herself back on track eventually.  The supporting characters here are all charming in their own ways, as well.  The Marrow Fair is an intriguing setting.  Lois' work with robots sets the tone for the story and her knack for sourdough uplifts it, and it's great to see a female character in a STEM field, because that's fairly unusual.  There are also a few nods to Mr. Penumbra in here, showing that the universe the books exist in is definitely same, though this is in no way a sequel to the first book.  Still, the tones definitely match up with each other, so if you read Mr. Penumbra and were left wanting more, this is an excellent book to pick up even if the characters and story are not the same from one to the other.

This was a book that made me want to bake, or teach a robot to bake, and browse farmers markets, and visit San Francisco, and eat cheeses with strange colors in them, and eat honey that glows in the dark, and eat bread that knows how to sing.  There's this sense of whimsy and wonder and whole-heartedness on every page of this book, and it was an absolutely fabulous read.  I'm so glad that I picked it as my book of the month.

5 stars out of 5.

Daughter of Smoke & Bone - Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #1)

Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love.

It did not end well. 

Wow.  Why did I not read this book before now?  It's so cliche, so trope-y, and yet Taylor has a way of writing and bringing everything together that turns what could have very easily been trite into something truly beautiful.

The story here is about Karou, a teenage girl living in Prague and attending art school when she's not running errands collecting teeth for a chimera named Brimstone, who pays her in wishes.  Raised by Brimstone and a band of compatriots, Karou has always felt out of place both in their presence and in the human world.  But one day, while on an errand in Marrakesh, Karou is attacked by an honest-to-goodness angel--and while she escapes, she soon finds herself cut off from Brimstone and the only family she's ever known.

Overall, I found this to be an amazing book.  The magic doors that can open to different locations, Karou's background, the art, the lush descriptions of Prague, her apartment, all of it.  The sizzling chemistry between Karou and Akiva, with a dynamic of "meant to be" that I love to see in books--yes, it's basically love at first sight, but there's a reason behind it.  And I adore the idea of wishes as payment, with the different denominations and such.  For the first two-thirds of the book, I adored this story.  And then Karou found out who she really was, and...the plot just sloooowed.

The last third of the book completely changes tone and pace from the first two-thirds because Taylor suddenly jumps back in time to a "how we got to this point" perspective with Madrigal.  While the insight into chimera society was fascinating, but it just didn't seem to fit with this point in the story and read like a very well-written and rich info-dump rather than as something to propel the plot forward, which is what really should have been at this point in the book structure-wise.  I wouldn't have minded this story line about Madrigal, but I feel like it might have been better peppered throughout the rest of the book rather than dropped in a lump at the end.  It goes back to the "present day" story for the very last bit, of course, and while you can see what's coming, it's kind of this dread sense of hoping it's not what you think it is...but it is, of course.  A terrible ending but also a magnificent one because it sets up the rest of the series for plots of redemption and vengeance and romance, all of which are perfectly delicious in conjunction with each other.

So, yes.  Some pacing problems with how it was structured, but overall a wonderful book.  I can't wait to read the other two.

4 stars out of 5.

Dark Lover - J. R. Ward (Black Dagger Brotherhood #1)

Vampires are not my thing.  They never have been.  But there's a category for a vampire romance in the Unapologetic Romance Readers' 2017 reading challenge, so I perused the lists of vampire romances that people love, and Dark Lover basically topped them all.  And so off to the library I went.

This book is...interesting.  On one hand, the romance is mostly okay, so that's a plus.  On the other hand, everything else is so harebrained and way-out-there crazy that I couldn't help but giggle to myself the entire time I was reading this.  It starts on the very first page when the heroine's father, Darius, is trying to get one of his buddies to agree to help Beth (the heroine) through her upcoming change into a vampire, as she is unaware that she's half-vamp.  The buddy's name?  Wrath.  And there are more of them!  Tohrment.  Rhage.  Vishous.  Zsadist. These are really their names.  And of course they all dress in black leather and carry around an entire armory with them.  And they can teleport!  Yes.  It's true.  And they inhabit some vampire society in which females are kept out of sight, which is totally weird and very medieval.  Not cool.  And apparently vamps can only actually feed on each other for real nourishment, not humans?  But that doesn't make any sense.  (Yes, I'm talking about vampires making sense.)  Because then it's just kind of an endless circle of sucking on each others' wrists/necks/whatever, without any new nutrients actually entering the system?  How does that work?  So confusing.  So weird.  And Wrath is apparently blind but he never actually has any trouble seeing things except to cut up his meat at dinner(because vampires eat normal dinners, too).

But, as I mentioned, the romance is okay.  It's not great.  There are definitely still issues with it.  Like how Wrath is supposed to be the biggest, baddest vampire, but turns into a cuddly puppy as soon as Beth enters the picture.  And how Beth and Wrath fall in love pretty much the instant they lay eyes on each other, and instantly do the sexing.  Okay, I take it back, the romance wasn't really that good.  It had its moments, when the two of them were acting relatively normal, but the premise that their relationship is based on is just so weird that, the more that I think about it, the worse it seems in retrospect.  Like, Wrath was her dad's friend.  And he's like four hundred years old!  Why is it that beings that are centuries old are constantly falling in love with twenty-somethings?  That's just weird, y'all.  Talk about an age gap.  And Wrath acts like he's twenty-something, too, down to the way he dresses and talks, despite the fact that he's literally seen centuries go by.

Oh, and there's a subplot that revolves around a bunch of soulless and undead humans who study martial arts (yes, seriously) trying to kill all the vamps.  (Again--seriously.)

So, yeah. This book was hokey.  I enjoyed parts of it while actually reading it, but looking back on it, those parts are fading away fast, because the more I think about it the more outlandish and bizarre it all was, and I can't really say that it was good.  Overall, this reads like something a teenage goth would have written on Quizilla in the early 2000s, though this admittedly probably has better spelling and grammar and isn't written in the second person.  (Thank the stars for that.)

2 stars out of 5, and I feel like that might be me being generous.

Silvern - Christina Farley (Gilded #2)

Silvern is the second book in Christina Farley's Korean YA fantasy trilogy, which began with Gilded.  The main character is Jae Hwa, an American Korean who has moved to South Korea with her father for his work a few years after the death of her mother.  In the first book, Jae Hwa broke a curse on her family that had doomed generations of women to death at the hands of the demi-god Haemosu.  Now, just when she's starting to think that life might get back to normal, she finds out that the god of darkness, Kud, wants her to find the White Tiger Orb, one of the six that are supposed to protect Korea, and bring it to him...or he'll kill her friends and family.

This was not a good book.  This series had a lot of promise in the beginning and while the first book had its issues, the promise of a non-white MC, Korean mythology, etc. made me want to read this second volume.  I finally got around to it (despite having owned it for a long while) because it has a tiger on the cover and I needed a book to fulfill my 2017 reading challenge category of, "A book with a cat on the cover."  I went into it with high hopes, but found myself so terribly disappointed.

In theory, Jae Hwa should be an awesome heroine.  The book starts with her preparing to get her second-degree black belt in tae kwon do.  She lives in Korea and has killed a demi-god and is kind of mistress of his realm now.  So cool, right?  But her martial arts trend toward descriptions of back flips and cartwheels--which, of course, are terribly efficient modes of transport, much more so than, you know, running--and flying kicks which would be more at home in a bad martial arts movie than in any sort of efficient fighting scenario.  She can shoot a bow but she never has it with her when she needs it.  (This is probably semi-excusable, because walking around with a bow in modern Korea all the time would be a bit weird, but still.  One would think that if one was being stalked by murderous magical creatures, one would pass up being weird for being prepared, at least some of the time.)  And on top of my frustrations with Jae Hwa, the plot itself is just whack.

See, to get this mysterious orb, Jae Hwa has to go to North Korea.  Yes.  North Korea.  And she convinces her school to send her, along with her best friend, boyfriend, grandfather, and another young member of her grandfather's secret society, who, by the way, is also putting the moves on Jae.  Hmmm...  Can this possibly go well?  No.  No it cannot.  Even the thinnest veil of logic is missing here--this is a school trip, supposedly, but fully half its members do not belong to Jae's school.  And Jae's father, who believes his daughter to be mentally unstable, agrees to it.  What?  He doesn't like it, but he still lets her go.  As an American.  To North Korea.  Ugh.

And then there's the pacing, which is entirely off.  There are chapters where different creatures are attacking Jae & Co. every two paragraphs, and then long stretches of chapters where she and her friends do nothing but plan parties or read books.  It's very uneven, stacked in some places and lacking in others.  I thought that an interesting love triangle might actually liven things up here, but that clearly didn't go as planned, so that ended up being a no-go, too.  Ugh.  The end of the book has a bit of promise, but honestly I can't go through another book of this stuff, so I don't think I'll be reading it.

I'll give it 2 stars out of 5, but it's more for the promise it displayed than the actual delivery.

Magic Bleeds - Ilona Andrews (Kate Daniels #4)

Magic Bleeds is the fourth Kate Daniels book by Ilona Andrews, and it takes place a few months after the third book, Magic Strikes, when Kate is supposed to cook Curran dinner naked because she lost a bet with him in the third book... Oops.  However, dinner doesn't go as planned and the timeline jumps a few weeks to Kate, being mopey but still doing her job as a supposed go-between for the Order and the Guild.  She immediately encounters trouble, of course, but this time it's in the form a guy who's spreading a plague, despite the fact that he's dead and nailed to a telephone pole.  Whaaaaat?

This is another book that had some interesting components, but the plot was a bit all over the place.  The book starts off with the problem of mysterious cloaked figures spreading various plagues across the southern US, and then suddenly changes track and goes off on a mysterious cloaked figure with seven mysterious cloaked figure henchmen, all with different abilities, and none of them actually appears to be geared at spreading plague.  So that's kind of weird.  Again, Andrews tries to tie all the mythology together (this time the "flavor of the book" appears to be Mesopotamian) but I'm not completely convinced.  Both of the plots seemed interesting on their own (I definitely thought there was going to be a Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse vibe going on, but nah) but seemed to fall apart a bit when they got tied together.  The cool part was that we get to meet Kate's (gasp) aunt!  Who we've never heard of until this point!  Okay, that seems like it was a little bit "made up in a hurry" for this but I really liked Erra despite her being, you know...evil.  I actually wish she could have stayed along longer because I loved her so much.  Other things to like are more of Dali (and is there something between Dali and Jim?!?!) and, oh yeah, the whole Kate/Curran thing finally coming to a head.

But there's something weird about the Kate/Curran thing, too, and that's that as soon as they're together, they (for the most part) stop butting heads.  Before, they were at each other's throats every two seconds, and not in a sexy way.  But they have sex and then suddenly they're all goo-goo over each other?  It didn't seem to fit, and you can't convince me that all of their previous head locked moments were due to the now-relieved sexual tension.  I just won't believe it.  I like the part at the end, with Kate at the Keep, but that seemed to work mainly because Curran wasn't really present for it.  While I appreciate there finally being movement on this front, it's also frustrating to see the dynamic of the relationship apparently change drastically just because they got naked together.  Possible?  Yes... Likely?  No.

This was another "fun" book and I did really enjoy it, but I don't think it's quite as strong as its predecessors in the actual story.  However it does make up some of that in the romance department, so I'll give it 3.5 stars out of 5.

Magic Strikes - Ilona Andrews (Kate Daniels #3)

Magic Strikes brings in basically exactly what the Kate Daniels series needed: a magical tournament.  Step right up, get your tickets here, because Kate's about to give the throw down.

So.  Following Magic Burns, Kate is off working as usual when she gets a call from shapeshifter Saiman that he has her other shapeshifter/werewolf friend, Derek, locked up at his apartment.  Saiman caught Derek trying to steal all-access tickets to something called the Midnight Games, which werewolves--and the rest of the Pack--are explicitly prohibited from attending.  As part of the deal to bail Derek out, she agrees to attend the Games and evaluate a team called the Reapers for Saiman, and then covertly agrees to deliver a note for Derek.  While, things go to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly when Kate determines that the Reaper team is not human, but she can't tell how, and Derek is found almost dead...and then a bunch of shapeshifters try to kill Kate, too, because they think she's involved.  Ultimately, it ends up with Kate and werejaguar Jim, the head of the Pack's security, and a handful of other on the run from Curran as they attempt to solve the puzzle of getting revenge for Derek and finding out exactly what's going on with the Midnight Games.

The mythological flavor of the month here is...Indian!  As in southeast Asian Indian, not Native American, of course.  Along these lines, Andrews introduces a really awesome new character named Dali that I hope we see lots more of.  Dali is an Indian mythology expert, she writes calligraphy curses, and oh yeah, she turns into a white tiger but gets short-term amnesia and goes cross-eyed when she does so, to the point that she can't figure out why she has paws.  Dali is freaking awesome.  Julie, the cool kid from the previous book, is also brought back here to some use, though honestly she can't possibly be as cool as Dali is.  (Did I mention that Dali also has a thing for street racing, even though she's legally blind?)

We get a lot of neat stuff here, including info about what, exactly, Saiman is and some more information about Roland, Kate's biological father who definitely wants to kill her.  Some of his minions come out of the woodwork and we get to know about some of the crazy weaponry he's been cooking up, and some of the reasons that Kate is both terrified of him and determined to take him down.  The relationship between Curran and Kate also evolves, like, a lot, and Andrea, Kate's new bestie who first showed up in Book 2, gets to make a return here, too!  I was so happy to see Andrea as a continuing character.  These books really needed more girl-power, and Andrews has done a wonderful job of building it up in this volume.  Kate is no longer the only woman taking on all the magical men!  Whoo hoo!  OH and we get more Unicorn Lane here which is baller.

I have two real issues with this book.  First, the Indian mythology is cool as heck but difficult for me to grasp just because I haven't had a lot of exposure to it...and I keep getting this feeling that Andrews is actually probably being really offensive in some regard with it.  This might just be me.  Second, the big gem that everyone is fighting after... It's pretty much established that it's not the same stone as in the myths (the size, etc. doesn't match) and yet it works the same way?  What was the deal with this?  I'm confused.  It seems like something that wasn't thought through all the way, or if it was, those thoughts didn't necessarily make it onto the page.  Because the stone actually ends up playing a very important part of the plot, even though it doesn't get a lot of page time, this is something I would have liked to see handled with a bit more finesse.

Again, this was a really fun read.  Was it one that I'll go back to over and over again?  Probably not.  But it was a solid installment and it sets up a lot of promise in the Kate/Curran department for Book 4 that I think was done really well, and it gets a good rating for that, and all of the awesomeness I've discussed above.

4 stars out of 5.

A Darker Shade of Magic - V. E. Schwab (Shades of Magic #1)

Wow!  What a story!  I put off reading A Darker Shade of Magic for what feels like forever because people were going so gaga over it.  The last fantasy book that I read that people went so crazy over was The Name of the Wind, which left me less than impressed.  I'd been burned; I didn't want to be so again with this.  But the library had it available for Kindle, so I finally though, "Why not?"  And man, all those people who I doubted so much?

They were right.

A Darker Shade of Magic is the story of Kell and Lila.  Kell is Antari, a user of blood-magic who can travel between three different worlds, all of which happen to have a city called London, though the city itself is very different in each.  Kell hails from Red London, a land of magic (obviously) that apparently smells like flowers, where the Isle (aka the Thames) is a source of power, and people in general can use elemental magics.  He also has a very neat coat that is actually a bunch of coats and must have some sort of inter-dimensionality charm attached to it for it to function as it does.  As one of only two living Antari, Kell works as a messenger passing letters between the monarchs of the three Londons.  Oh, and he also smuggles items between the worlds, something that is strictly forbidden, because he has a bit of a fascination for items from the other Londons.  He's basically a male, land-based, world-traveling version of Ariel.  He's got gadgets and gizmos aplenty, he's got whosits and whatsits galore.  You want thingamabobs?  He's got twenty.  But who cares?  No big deal...

And then there's Lila.  Lila is from Grey London, our own London.  She's a thief who wants nothing more than to be a pirate.  Basically, Lila is awesome.  She has her own code of honor and she dreams of getting away, doing more.  Basically, if Kell is Ariel, Lila is Belle.

She wants it more than she can tell.  And for once it might be grand to have someone understand she wants so much more than they've got planned.

When Kell winds up in Grey London with a mysterious artifact from the fallen Black London, he ends up on a collision course with Lila--literally.  And when he decides that he has to take the item back to Black London and seal it away, even it means that he won't be able to make it back, he finds out that he's not going to be able to go without Lila tagging along.  Of course nothing goes smoothly, everything gets messed up, and now it's up to these two to save the world(s).

I loved this.  Schwab has a great writing style, not too ornate or too simplistic, just enough to draw you in without drowning you in unnecessary details and without trying to hide things away for the sake of being clever.  The world building here was awesome.  It has strong elements of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, with the way that worlds can overlay each other and what's in one place might be in another, but be different, but Schwab makes this concept (which is certainly in use in other places, as well) her own.  Red London was absolutely breathtaking and I want to live there.  White London was coldly terrifying, just alien enough to put you on edge.  And Black London...  Well, call me crazy, but I would love to see Black London.  The way the mythology is set up here makes Black London seem like a place that could be beautiful or terrible, or both at once, and those are the sorts of settings I love the most.  I hope that we get to actually see it in future books.  And while I usually immediately start shipping people in this book, I liked that Lila and Kell remained somewhat friendly, somewhat exasperate partners for this.  Might that evolve into something more in the future?  Maybe.  I can't really tell from this, though there are a couple of instances that hint it might.  I could go either way on this part; I think they could be good together, but I'm just as content to see them remain friends, which is honestly pretty rare in books, and even more rarely done well.

This was, overall, a beautiful, riveting fantasy.  I absolutely loved it, and I'm already thinking of how I can get it into the hands of some other people I know would really enjoy it.

5 stars out of 5.

Magic Burns - Ilona Andrews (Kate Daniels #2)

Guys, let me tell you, I am tearing through this series.  I read 3 of them in one weekend!  No joke!  I'm not sure what exactly it is about them that has me reading them so quickly, because while they're enjoyable, they're definitely not on a list of "best books I've ever read."  Kate is an okay main character, but she's not super, and there's definitely not enough Curran to keep my occupied on that note.  Maybe it's something about the way that Andrews keeps bringing in new mythologies and building up her magic-assaulted world.  Maybe it's just that they're written in a very readable style.  I don't know.  But I'm going through them pretty quickly.  (Though now that I'v reached the point that Kate and Curran finally got together, I might slow down some!)

Magic Burns starts not long after Magic Bites ended.  The magic waves are still hitting Atlanta, and they're getting stronger and closer together, leading up to a flare.  And things really get messed up when Kate finds herself as the guardian of a thirteen-year-old girl named Julie whose mother has gone missing in the magical mayhem.  Oh and there are some undead mermaids tormenting her, too.  And a guy who keeps appearing, stealing a bunch of maps from the Pack, and then disappearing--literally.  He can teleport.  This all starts to add up to something very bad, and Kate is, of course, stuck smack dab in the middle of it.

In this book, Andrews starts to bring in some Irish mythology and also touches on a couple of other points.  She also introduces the concept that location-related mythological things seem to happen in bunches--aka, if one Greek thing shows up, a bunch more are likely to.  This is a neat sort of internal logic that allows her to "theme" her books with each along a different mythological line, without it seeming too scattered.  The idea here is that anything than occur but belief makes things stronger, and that the magic really means that anything can be brought into existence given the right circumstances.  That is definitely the case in this book, and while I kind of think it's just a matter of convenience, I also find it a good way to structure the world to give Andrews the type of freedom of mythology she clearly desires.  My one worry here, though, is that, while Kate appears to do her research, that Andrews is really going to butcher something one of these days.  There's just really no way to be an expert on so many different mythologies and I think some day that's going to come around to bite her.

I also really liked the introduction of Julie as a character, though Kate seems to start referring to her as "my kid" pretty darn quickly.  Let me tell you, I am the same age as Kate, and I would not immediately assume that I was going to be the long-term guardian of a thirteen-year-old I found wandering around.  No way, no how.  Julie's abilities are interesting, and definitely useful for Kate.  I do hope that Andrews continues to integrate Julie in a meaningful way into the future books, because it's super annoying to introduce an interesting kid as a character and then just ship them off somewhere because it becomes inconvenient to the plot to have a kid hanging around.

One thing I find curious about this series is that, despite Kate apparently being a go-between for the Order and the Guild (aka the knights and the mercenaries) she doesn't actually appear to work in that function and instead seems to do whatever it is she wants at the moment.  While this is a job that I think all of us would like to have, I don't think it's one that's particularly well thought-out, not even for a world that's ravaged by magical waves.

Overall, this is a fun read.  I think Andrews does some interesting things here but it's nothing that I'm dying to see.  What keeps me reading is the evolving relationship between Kate and Curran--which was a bit lacking in this book, honestly, but hey, I've read up to the point that it happens now, so I'm over it.  Not a series that's really going to make you think, but definitely a good weekend book!

4 stars out of 5.

Magic Bites - Ilona Andrews (Kate Daniels #1)

Magic Bites was a book that repeatedly came up on lists of paranormal romances that I was perusing, along with a ton of Patricia Briggs books.  It's also apparently won some sort of online tournament for best romance book.  This confuses me, because while this is a fun paranormal mystery, it's not really a romance.  The main character goes on a few dates, but they're half-hearted at best and don't really involve any actual romance.  Because I was specifically looking for paranormal romance, this disappointed me, but I enjoyed the book as a whole all the same.

Kate Daniels is a semi-broke young woman working for the Guild, a sort of mercenary society, and living outside of Atlanta, Georgia in a time when technology is quickly losing ground to magic, which does things like make tech unusable and devours skyscrapers in addition to making things, well, magical.  Vampires and shapeshifters are real--and actually some of the strong parts of the book.  Vampires here were interesting in that they're completely mindless, possessing only a blind bloodlust, unless they're piloted by a Master of the Dead, who is a human with necromantic magic that trends toward the control of vampires.  And shapeshifters come in many, many varieties, not just wolves.  There are also other magical creatures out and about that I haven't encountered in fantasy before, which was interesting and I think a nice touch to make this book stand out--it reminded me of Liz Copen's Guilty by Association and its sequel more than anything else, which was good because I really liked the Judah Black books (and am looking forward to more).  When Kate's long-time guardian is murdered, she takes on the investigation on a pro-bono basis for the Order, a group of magical knights, in an effort to find out what actually happened.  Along the way she finds herself dating a plastic surgeon who does reconstruction on cadavers, and tangled up with the Beast Lord, Curran, who is a lion shapeshifter (hello, cover!) and rules over the rest of Atlanta's shifters, known collectively as the Pack.

Atlanta is a setting I haven't seen used a lot in paranormal fantasy, so that was interesting, and so was the use of a world in which technology is on a slow slide into obscurity while magic reigns supreme.  Andrews puts out some interesting explanations for why magic affects certain things as it does, which shows me that she put some thought into her world building.  And Kate is a cool heroine, armed with a magical sword called Slayer and trying to take on the world on her own, though she's smart enough to not turn down help when it's offered.  One thing that I did find a little eye-roll worthy here is that, ultimately, the plot does revolve around Kate being The Best (because no heroine can only be average, right?) and someone wanting to impregnate her for that reason, which seems like a bit of a tired trope to integrate into what was otherwise a very interesting plot and world.  Curran was very cool and I was disappointed that this didn't turn into the romance that I'd thought it would; I guess Andrews draws it out over the course of the series?  This partly makes sense (you want to keep up the romantic tensions) but is also frustrating because I've seen how well a romance can be played out over the course of a lengthy series even though the characters get together in the first book and stay together throughout (Rachel Caine's Weather Warden series comes immediately to mind in this regard).

Still, I think this was a good book; it kept me reading a little later than I would have normally stayed up, and I think it sets up the rest of the series well.  The unusual elements combined with a solid main character are a good premise, and I'm looking forward to reading at least the next book, Magic Burns, though I can see myself losing patience with this "oh it's a romance but there are NO ROMANTIC ELEMENTS" mentality eventually if it continues.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Angels' Blood - Nalini Singh (Guild Hunter #1)

Angels' Blood was the choice for July for the Unapologetic Romance Readers group on Goodreads.  Yes, we went paranormal!  There are a few paranormal nominations up for August, too, but nothing has been decided yet in that front.  The story here follows Elena, the best vampire hunter in the world.  (It seems to be a thing in books like this that, if a woman has a vocation, she has to be the absolute best at it.  Apparently us women who are not the best at what we do will never feel the elemental force of a love such as this.)  In Elena's world, vampires are common knowledge, and while most of them aren't a problem, sometimes one decides to go rogue and slip the leash of its master--an angel.  In this universe, angels not only control vampires, they create them, through a means that isn't common knowledge to the human part of the populace.  Elena is a human...but she's also a born vampire hunter, meaning that she can scent vampires and hunt them down, and return them to their masters.  Or kill them.  Whichever skill is demanded.  She works for a Guild, which is run by her best friend, Sara, and which handles all vampire-hunting contracts.  There is no rogue hunting here, or at least if there is, we don't see any mention of it in this book.

Elena's skills are truly put to the test when she's summoned by Raphael, the archangel of New York, and commissioned to hunt not a vampire, but another archangel.  She doesn't know why, and she doesn't know how, because she can't sniff out angels...or can she?  (She can, clearly, but it's a bit more complicated than that.)

This is supposed to be a paranormal romance, but I didn't see anything really romantic about it.  There is no romantic chemistry between Elena and Raphael.  Pure, animal lust?  Yes.  But no romance.  They're pretty much constantly pawing at each other, but without any real emotion other than rage involved, until they're about to sleep together, at which point Singh decides to have them catch feelings so it's not meaningless sex, which I guess is frowned upon in romance.  It felt weird, this sudden twitching of hearts and such, when there had been no build up to it before.  I mean, I love a good "kiss me/kill me" dynamic, but this just didn't have a romance dynamic at all so it was really weird that suddenly Raphael "loved" Elena enough for the end of the book to come about as it did.

There were two other things that bothered here.  First, that Elena clearly has a traumatic past, and yet it's never laid out.  Singh spends much of the novel dropping little hints about Elena's background, but even though Raphael asks (He doesn't just know?  What kind of an archangel is he?  Shouldn't he have done this research on her before hiring her?) Elena doesn't spill.  This felt really weird, like it was a component that was just missing from the book.  Another URR group member has read more of this series and says that it comes out in the second book, but I honestly think it would have fit properly in this one and would have made some of Elena's PTSD-like symptoms fit in a bit better context with the horrors she was witnessing.  Second, the ending just felt sloppy.  A few other people had issues with Singh's writing in general, but I found it pretty much in line with what I've come to expect with paranormal fantasy and romance, except for the end.  To me, the ending felt hackneyed and rushed, like Singh just got sick of writing and decided to just tie things up as quickly as possible.  And Elena actually have very little to do with the end of the book, both the conflict and what came after, considering that she was the main character.

Some things I did like about this: the world and the physical aspects of Raphael and Elena's relationship...up to the point until they start having sex.  I think the world was neat, with angels not being religious figures and instead just being a sort of supernatural species (I might not have found this as neat if I wasn't currently reading another paranormal fantasy in which angels are still religious figures) and their dynamic with vamps was one I haven't seen before.  The part that an angel could become a psychopathic serial killer was also one I haven't encountered before.  I liked how angels, vampires, and the guilds that work with and against them were integrated into society, with some of the complications they entail.  On the "relationship" aspect, I think while Elena and Raphael were still at odds but making out, there was some really hot writing going on.  But then, as soon as they catch feelings and go to have sex, Singh totally skimped out and just faded to black, which was very strange given the actions and language the two had been using beforehand.

Overall, I think I liked this, but not enough to continue the series.  I'm gonna give it 3 stars, but for the interesting angel/vampire/hunter dynamics and some of the making out rather than the actual plot and romance, or lack thereof.

Angel in Training - C. L. Coffey (Louisiangel #1)

Angel in Training is the first book in the Lousiangel paranormal fantasy stories.  I'm not sure how to classify it, other than as just "paranormal."  It's not paranormal romance, which is where the paranormal genre tends to go.  It involves angels who roam the streets of New Orleans, delivering messages (mostly) or protecting charges (in a few cases) and converting "potentials" into angels (sometimes).  Our main character here is actually named Angelina, aka (you guessed it) Angel.  This is the subject of some joking in the book, but honestly it just made me grind my teeth because I hated it.  Luckily, the book is written in first person.  I'm usually not a huge first-person fan, but in this case it kept me from having to read "Angel the angel" or something every few lines.

Angel is stabbed during a night out with her friends, and when a shadowy figure asks if she'd like eternal life or eternal happiness, she says that she doesn't want to die, without quite reading the fine print.  She wakes up six months later as an angel in training, sort of "possessing" her old body, which was never found.  She's essentially been missing ever since that night.  Now, as an angel in training, she should have enhanced strength and speed, but keeps being told she's too hung up on still being mortal to actually use them.  Her new boss is the archangel Michael, and there's another archangel in residence at the convent where she now lives, too: Cupid.  Yes, that Cupid.  Angel also happens to be the only female non-cherubim (who are apparently like angsty teenagers who do housework, but heavenly) in the place.  There's really no good reason given for this.  She's also the only angel in training, and the only person who might be on track to some day become an archangel.  She is, indeed, a #specialsnowflake.

Now, I know, I'm complaining.  But honestly, I think it's warranted.  I almost dropped this book because the whole setup was just so hokey.  Once the plot actually gets going, it does improve somewhat, but I'm not sure it ever recovered from the eye-rolling at the beginning.  Angel has a sassy personality, which is cool but not necessarily atypical for female characters in books like this.  And her side job, aside from training, is where I think the strengths of the book are.  Her side job?  Protecting a detective in training, Joshua, who is investigating a murder that looks strangely like Angel's own.  Of course, Joshua doesn't believe Angel is an angel.  (Do you see why this got annoying quickly?)  In order to win his trust, she decides to help him investigate the murder, which ends up being not one murder, but a string, all of them different on the surface but with an underlying commonality.  As Angel and Joshua follow the leads, Joshua continues to hit on Angel, which she both likes, because he's super hot, and doesn't like, because she's not allowed to get involved with anyone, let alone her own charge.

There's also something floating around the background here about different types of supernatural beings derived from angels, like the Fallen and the Nephilim, but that's another thing that's not fully developed, and I don't feel like the good main plot ever reached a really good conclusion again--the tie-up felt a little half-baked.  And then there's the Angel/Michael thing... I'm not sure why it was included, because there's no indication that it's actually going to develop into something.  Very strange.  I'm also struggling with why they use swords and bows in a modern, urban context...even though bows made of wood from trees in the Garden of Eden is a cool concept.  And why the heck didn't Angel have a cell phone?  This seems like a terrible oversight on everyone's part that was just to contrive the plot.

Overall, I think this book, and this series, have potential.  Maybe the future books, once Angel is out of training, will be a little stronger in plot and a little lighter in running on treadmills.  I liked Angel as a character, though she had her whiny moments and I do hate her name.  Joshua was cool, and I really actually like Michael; I would love to see him play a more prominent role.  But I'm not convinced that this book, on its own, was great.  With the contrivances and some really awkward sentence structures throughout, I think it could have used another re-think and polish before going out.  Still, I have hopes for the future books and haven't written this series, or this author, off.

3 stars out of 5.

Dream Stalker - Amy Hopkins (Talented #1)

Dream Stalker is Amy Hopkins' first book, and is also the first in a series focusing on witches and wizards, collectively known as the Talented, who live in London.  The main character is half-blood Emma, who has minor Talent due to her mixed ancestry and runs a tea shop where she sells teas both normal and enchanted along with the help of her inherited boggart, Gibble, and her dog, Lenny.  But Emma's peaceful, tea-filled existence is jeopardized when a dream stalker begins targeting half-bloods with the goal of stealing their Talent and gifts for himself.  When Emma becomes his next target, she finds herself teamed up with full-blood Talent Harrod and his fully mortal brother Martin in order to figure out who's doing the killing and stop him.

I think this was a great world and a story that had really good bones, but it needs a lot more polish to be a good book overall.  Emma's tea shop is charming, Harrod and Martin were enjoyable characters, and Gibble turned out to be one of the most interesting "people" in the book once more information about him came out.  The world itself is interesting; it's Earth as we kind-of know it, but witches, wizards, and supernatural creatures collectively known as Otherworlders (like boggards, fae, giants, and so on) live some-what integrated lives.  Everyone is aware of everyone else's existence, even if they don't necessarily like them.  Half-bloods like Emma get the short end of the stick in it all, because they're kind of caught between the mortals and the Talented, which is a neat way to approach prejudice and discrimination (for example, if half-bloods want to visit the walled-in area of London where full-blooded Talents live, they need to show paperwork and their movements are tracked) but didn't really seem to make sense because, while people were campaigning for mortal inclusion, it didn't seem like any half-bloods had really bothered to speak up for themselves.  The Otherworld and the dream worlds were very well-done, with laws and happenings of their own that the story obeyed rather consistently.

But overall, consistency is something that's lacking in this book.  At one point, it's five half-bloods who have been targeted before Emma; at another it's six.  Harrod's last name changes from Passar in the early chapters to Umbers in a later one.  Emma says that two of the victims were her close friends, and yet there's not really any evidence of her having real friends other than possibly Harrod and Martin, once they meet; she seems to have many acquaintances, but no one she regularly talks to or involves in her life other than Gibble and her dog.  There's also a desperate need for an editor with an eye to the use of grammar, particularly in regards to dialogue.  Problems with punctuation in regards to dialogue abound in this book--and I'm not talking about general comma usage, which people are horribly divided on in general.  I'm talking about improper use of periods and commas at the end of people speaking, before the dialogue tag, like "Blah blah blah." Harrod said, which should be "Blah blah blah," Harrod said.  This is extremely standard and I have to think that, to some degree, Hopkins knows it, because in some places it's correct.  In others, not so much.  Some dialogue is missing ending punctuation entirely.  Hyphens are used where em- and en-dashes should be; there's not a real "dash" used properly anywhere in this book.  Things like Talent, various races, and the Otherworld are capitalized at some points and not at others, as if Hopkins couldn't decide if she wanted them to be proper nouns or just regular nouns.  After I finished reading, I did a quick re-run through of the book's first five chapters, just scanning to see what jumped out at me, and highlighted twenty-five instances of these errors.  There were probably more I missed.  They were all so obvious that really just one more quick line edit would have fixed them and made the book appear much more polished as a whole.  Sure, professionally-published books put out by the Big Four houses sometimes contain mistakes, but not on a scale even similar to this.

I also think that, lovely as the plot was, parts of it could have used fleshing out.  There are two parts where I really would have liked to see more of this: in regards to the "big reveal" about who the villain was, and in regards to what happened in the dream world.  First, though the villain does appear at one point earlier in the book, he is not really woven into the story as a whole until it's revealed what he's up to.  It seems like Hopkins wanted us to be feel betrayed by this person, but Emma didn't really have enough of a relationship with him for that to happen.  Seeing him worked a little more fully into the plot would have gone a long way toward maximizing the "twist" factor when the time for the reveal came.  Second, though I think the dream world at the end was overall very well done, possessing that sort of weird and disjointed logic that so often occurs in dreams, the part with the rat didn't feel fleshed out to me.  Was it a real rat or not?  That was never made clear, and it seemed like something more was going to be made of him, but it never was.  It just kind of fell off, and Emma let it go as if nothing had ever really happened.  Like the villain, I would have liked to see this worked in a bit more; a little more fleshing out on those two things would have made the story as a whole feel a bit more consistent and cohesive.

Overall, this was a good story but not a good book.  The world and characters have so much potential but sloppy formatting and editing and a poor eye to detail left me wanting more and wondering if I should bother with the second book, Barrow Fiend.  I'll probably try the sample to see if these problems have been resolved, because it should be apparent within that sample range.  There's so much potential here, it was somewhat disappointing to see it so roughly finished.

3 stars out of 5, but if it gets an update to resolve some of its finishing issues I would revise that upward.

Welcome to Nightvale - Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

As many people know, Welcome to Nightvale is a popular podcast about a town, called Nightvale, that is weird, and where weird things happen.  Unlike many people, I have not ever listened to this podcast.  I struggle with podcasts in general because I start thinking about something else and then realize I've missed everything that's going on and have no idea what's happening.  But the idea of Nightvale appealed to me, so when I saw this book at the library, I snapped it up!

This Welcome to Nightvale focuses on two main characters: Jackie, the nineteen-year-old owner of a pawnshop that sells back everything for eleven dollars, but offers payments like a good night's sleep, and Diane, a mother working at a marketing firm and who moonlights as a PTA member even though her son finished elementary school years ago.  Diane's son, Josh, is a typical teenager who doesn't know who his dad is, except that he's also a shapeshifter.

Trouble stars for Jackie when a guy shows up at her shop, gives her a piece of paper that says "King City" on it, and then vanishes.  Jackie would have forgotten him right away, except that she literally cannot get rid of the piece of paper.  No matter what she does to it, it reappears in her hand moments later.  Her obsession with the paper and how to get rid of it begins to devour her life.  Meanwhile, two of Diane's coworkers go missing, and only one comes back--and no one remembers the other at all.  And then, of course, Diane's ex and Josh's father, Troy, has begun appearing around town in a variety of occupations.  Diane, knowing that Josh wants to meet his father, is determined to do something about this, but she doesn't quite know what and so resorts to stalking Troy for lack of any better plan of attack.  Diane and Jackie's paths begin to criss-cross and they eventually decide to work together to decipher the mystery devouring their lives.

The plot of this book isn't really anything to write home about, getting dragged to and fro by random occurrences that have no real explanation as to why and how they happen.  It's Nightvale itself that holds the real appeal here.  It's a place where the diner serves invisible pie, where writing utensils have been outlawed and you need a permit to turn on a computer at home, and where the City Council and librarians are the two most terrifying forces around.  Meanwhile, King City lingers at the edge of some people's awareness, but all they really know about it is that it's bad news for whoever goes looking for it.  These things were all, on their own, quite cool, especially the library sequences.  That said, I think this book relies a little bit too much on Nightvale's weirdness to carry the plot, such as it is.  Too many plot points existed as "Oh, that's just the way it is."  I do not favor this sort of explanation in storytelling.  Building a compelling world is difficult, but it has to be done and done well.  Worlds don't have to adhere to our own world's logic, but they should contain a logic of their own.  I didn't feel that Nightvale had any internal logic at all.  All of its aspects, from City Hall to the diner to the library to the taco stand to, well, everything, worked alone, but very few of them worked in conjunction with each other.  It means that Nightvale is a cool veneer to look at but there's nothing really driving it underneath.  This might, of course, be the point, but it's hard to say for sure, and I really didn't like it that much at all.

2 stars out of 5.

The Sorcerer Heir - Cinda Williams Chima (Heir Chronicles #5)

The Sorcerer Heir is supposedly the last book in Cinda Williams Chima's Heir Chronicles.  I say supposedly because The Dragon Heir was supposed to be the last book, but then she went on and wrote two more, so I don't think we can really say that she's done with this series completely and certainly.  She could always come back with a new one years down the road--after all, she hasn't really touched on the seer guild yet, and The Seer Heir has such a ring to it, don't you think?

The Sorcerer Heir is also the most direct sequel in the series.  The other books all had related storylines, but with new main characters in each.  The Sorcerer Heir, in comparison, picks up with the same story and same characters as The Enchanter Heir, the book before it.  It continues to follow Jonah Kinlock, the boy with the deadly touch, and Emma Lee Greenwood, the girl with the gift of music, in the wake of the events that ended The Enchanter Heir.  Shades and murder continue to plague the Weir community, and it's completely unclear who is behind it all.  Williams Chima does a good job keeping us chasing our own tails as the characters run hither and yon, all blaming each other for what happened, but I think the "twist" is pretty apparent to a savvy reader if you just poke at it enough.  That said, it wasn't so blatantly obvious that I thought the characters were morons for not figuring it out; they didn't have the same information available to them, after all, or at least not individually, and they didn't know enough to ask the right questions of each other for the vast majority of the book.

Williams Chima also re-integrates Leesha as a semi-main character here.  She gets a number of chapters to herself, which seem superfluous at the beginning but build interest and importance as the story goes on.  I don't remember Leesha enough from the earlier books to say if this is something I would have wanted, but I did like it, at least towards the middle and end.  Leesha's story is really one of redemption, probably more than any other character, and it was neat to see her finally get some resolution in that respect, especially because so few of the other characters got any real sense of resolution.  The end of the book in general is very open, which is one of the things that makes me think that we might see a sixth Heir book sometime in the future.  A lot of things are left up in the air, with the attitude of "Well, if they become problems, then we'll deal with them then," which seems both like not a good attitude to take toward the undead roaming your city who potentially want to kill you, and also like a cop-out so that the storyline can be continued in a future book if reader demand is great enough.

That said, with author ploys aside, I did like this.  It certainly gets going faster than The Enchanter Heir did, probably because Enchanter did all of the set-up for it.  There is action, conflict, and tension pretty much from the beginning.  I wish that there had been a bit more interaction between our two main characters; there's such tension between Emma and Jonah that I thought it had to be going somewhere every time they were in the same room, and yet it never really did.  They had such build-up in the first book, but it never really matured into anything in this one.  Again, I suspect this is because Williams Chima is leaving herself open for another volume.  After all, Seph and Madison, Jack and Ellen, Leesha and Fitch...all of their romantic plots (which Jonah and Emma were certainly made out to have) resolved themselves fully in books following the ones in which they originally appeared.  I wouldn't be surprised to see something similar happen here.

So, that's basically it: I liked this book, I think it had much better pacing than the one preceding it, but I'm not buying that it's the final book in the series.  There was too much left open for me to really believe that it's the final end.  I think even The Dragon Heir had a more concrete ending than this, and that was supposed to be the end, too, so I would not be one bit surprised if another book--like, as I said, The Seer Heir--hit the shelves within a few years.  That said, I'm still eager to read Williams Chima's other series, The Seven Realms, and will probably move onto that in the near future.

4 stars out of 5.