Lizzie was living a
perfectly ordinary life when a demon appeared in her bathroom. And her dog
started talking to her
Turns out she has
inherited the legacy of the Demon Slayers and her guide to this new world is
her long estranged grandmother, witch, biker and expert in the many uses of
road kill.
She and a handesome
shapeshifting griffin need to train her in this new world - especially since
there’s a very powerful demon looking for her
There’s some elements
of this book I really like, especially Lizzie’s origin. Lizzie was a nice,
normal, school teacher. She has a nice, safe, mundane life and she’s dragged to
her supernatural legacy by her grandma
And I love the grandma. Her grandma is part of a rather elderly coven who have managed to survive, alone of all the covens, in the face of a demon hunting them because they’re gloriously unconventional. They’re nomadic, bikers and their Earth Magic draws upon a whole lot of scavenging and road kill. And I kind of love this - I love this take on magic not being pretty or nice. I love how it’s by being so unorthodox that the biker granny witches have survived and I like that we have this really excellent collection of kick arse older women each doing their own thing and being decidedly indecorous about it. The coven rocks.
And I really like how
Lizzie fits in with granny and this coven - i.e. not at all. She’s a nice
conventional, a little boring, school teacher. She doesn’t ride motorbikes. She
doesn’t fight demons. She doesn’t get dirty. She doesn’t eat road kill. And I
like how her rejection of this kind of screws up Lizzie and the coven for a
while with Lizzie making a major mistake because she IS human. I love how it
sets up this conflict of Lizzie trying to adapt to this new life - while slowly
learning to embrace it (I especially love the ending here).
There’s also a
magical companion dog but meh, doesn’t mean a lot, manages not to be annoying
or intriguing which is kind of weird for magical companion animals but does
manage to make Lizzie look a bit of a dick for caring more about this dog than
various people.
Anyone who has read
my reviews knows the review is now going to take a negative turn as I talk
about THE ROMANCE. I hate the romance in this story.
We have Dmitri, a
Griffin (of course) who is… ambiguously secretive for no damn good reason for
most of the book. I mean we get the answers right near the end for some
pointless romance conflict but there’s no reason he couldn’t have been
introduced with all of this. I mean he appears and Granny is all “we can’t
trust him even though all he’s done is help us and we’d all be dead” but
there’s never any reason why Granny doesn’t trust him or can’t explain a little
about why she’s suspicious. Or even say he’s a Griffin! I mean, sort of
relevant? Instead we have this convoluted mystery so Dmitri and Lizzie can fast
forward themselves into a “romance” (if your only criteria for falling for
someone is “he’s hot” is it even a romance? Because we know nothing else about
him) and Lizzie can continually bounce between “zomg he’s so hot” and “Granny
said not to trust him”. I mean this whole unnecessary mystery is there JUST so
Lizzie can be conflicted about the relationship. And then when the inevitable
happens and we find out that *GASP* Dmitri was looking for a Demon Slayer to
take down the big bad for his own reasons and Lizzie is super offended by this
because… reasons? It feels like another romance trope that is just shoe-horned
in there because this is what romances are supposed to look like: mysterious
hot guy, convoluted misunderstanding, etc etc conflict because conflict
And while these kinds
of romances are fairly typical in a lot of Urban Fantasy, it stands out as
especially annoying to me because it’s not the only unnecessary-conflict
introduced to the book which is then dealt with annoyingly quickly: it’s like,
to that core of an interesting story and original plot we needed some filler to
make up the page numbers. Another example is Dmitri deciding to badmouth
grandma to create more conflict and it turns out to be a weird misunderstanding
with absolutely no bearing on the plot. Or there’s Lizzie’s mother dropping in
for like, three pages, to drop some angst bombs and then huff away because
Lizzie isn’t playing. Or there’s the werewolves who they stay with for a while
and who have their own issues but Lizzie & the Biker Grannies just kind of
hang around, nod at the problems, them leave. Ok like any of these could have
been decent plot twists but none of them were developed in any significant way
or even finished properly (beyond the convoluted misunderstandings which are
kind of just mehd away) which leaves me questioning why they are there. But if
you remove them you realise there isn’t much of a plot there.
In fact the pacing is
kind of off odd towards the end. We start with the awesome - this poor school
teacher dragged into the world of the supernatural by her very odd
Granny-Witch-Biker and having to deal with demons, monsters and road kill. We
drop in to a kind of training montage where Lizzie learns what it means to be a
demon slayer (and this is a decent part of the book but somewhat shaky because
no-one can actually train her and her powers don’t require any skill and it all
kind of resolves into “just do it” and then just being able to do it which, I
think could have worked so much better if we didn’t have all the filler plot
lines) and then suddenly we’re on the last battle. And it’s testament to how
much of an excellent job this book did of setting up the big bad as a big bad
that I was surprised that she even confronted him this book. Surely this
confrontation would happen around book 6 and lead to a huge reboot of the
series? It just feels kind of jarring - we have this awesome beginning then we
don’t get to the middle part where Lizzie learns her powers in any concrete way
but is instead distracted by lots of random tropes and then confronts the big
bad by virtue of the fact she’s just that special and just needs to accept this
rather than, y’know, learn or train or master anything.
I feel that the core
story - Lizzie learning about the supernatural, Lizzie rejecting this new world
that is dropped onto her normal life because it’s not just dangerous but also
difficult, comes with powers she doesn’t understand and, under all that, a
lifestyle that she really doesn’t want to embrace with it full of discomfort,
road kill, travel etc. All developed as Lizzie learns more, embraces this new
weird family and comes into her own. These parts of the book are excellent -
seeing Lizzie spar with the various magical biker grandmas, clash with them,
not understand them and slowly develop mutual respect and understanding really
really works well and I love it. But then we have random werewolves, hot
griffin guy with lots of really unnecessary misunderstandings and general
distractions which don’t go anywhere
Some of the
werewolves are POC including the most prominent of them which would be decent
if they were, as I said, relevant to the plot a bit more. There are no LGBTQ
characters, but this book is full of female characters, barring one elderly
disabled man and the hot Dmitri, all the important people are Lizzie are women
with some very different personalities and different ways of being them as
rough and ready as they come
