Joanne has relationship issues. There’s her boss who she
still has a lot of unresolved feelings for and he seems to have a new
girlfriend. And she wakes up with a heavy hang over and a naked man next to her.
Definitely some issues to examine
But she’s in high demand, her good friend and co-worker
is asleep and won’t wake up. And by her senses the problem is magical, not
medical, something is draining his essence. While trying to work through the
problem, it rapidly spreads consuming not only her friend’s family, but running
rampant through the police force.
The hospitals become strained and the police themselves
are reduced to a skeleton crew – and Joanne has only the slightest idea how to
fix this, relying on cobbled together research from the internet. Worse, her
mentor, coyote, is unavailable and may even be prey to the entity himself.
Every time she accesses her abilities, the thing swoops in, seeking to drag her
down into unwaking sleep
And the more she learns, the higher the stakes are.
This world is incredibly deep and amazingly fascinating.
Joanne’s shamanic power and need to visualise her magic working around her and
how that reflects in how she imagines and sees things. I’m glad she’s embracing
her powers and her life and beginning to move out, into the world as a shaman.
And this book we saw a lot more of Joanne’s story, who
she was as a child and why and why it took her so long to finally come into her
shamanic heritage. We saw her grow and learn and learnt about the path it took
to develop Joanne from the child she was to the woman she became. In terms of
realism and depth it’s really well done.
We learn more on the nature of Coyote and have a lot of
information about different realms. This series never just decides to raid
Native American culture for concepts so we have a lot of n
The investigation is… difficult. It lags because there’s
a lot of dead ends and Joanne is usually on the run. We get to see more people
are open to the supernatural but it does feel like a lot of the time Joanne is
flailing around not going anywhere or achieving anything. Or even making it
worse as she keeps poking at her opponent and getting slapped down and others
get caught in the web. There is a sense of frustration and desperation, but I
think it dances on the line between portraying frustration and causing it. And towards
the end of the book I was past ready for it to be over – it dragged, I’m
afraid.
Unfortunately, the problems of the previous books are
present in this one in spades. As a shaman, Joanne spends a lot of time in
different planes of reality, switching between many many different ones. She
also has prophetic dreams which can be surreal, show her the past and show her,
again, different planes of reality. And she has visions in the middle of the
day, also plunging her into different realms, into the past or various other supernatural,
mysterious and magical places.
She can enter any of these places with almost no warning
at all. You’ll be reading along then
vision, no plane shifting, wait is this a dream? Is it a memory? Is it a past
life? Is this a nightmare? Is this real? Is this a vision of the future? Did
this happen or that and where are we now? Is this image metaphorical? Literal?
What am I even reading?
I re-read several time. I scratched my head. I frowned. I
made sure I was alone and in silence because I could concentrate. It’s very easy to get lost, very easy to be
confused and there’s a lot of times when something happens that has absolutely
no relevance to anything. Maybe it gets explained at the end of the book – but that
doesn’t stop you being floundering and confused in the meantime.
