Divinity Circuit (Senyaza #5) by Chrysoula Tzavelas

Corbin and Marley circled around a relationship – until he disappeared without a trace for a very long time.

Now he’s back – and he’s changed. He’s consumed by rage and anger and hate against his family and the Senyaza corporation he worked for. That same corporation also wants Marley to bring him back into the fold… while quietly hiding why they may deserve his scorn

It doesn’t help that Senyaza is also suspected of shenanigans by the government organisation  Branwyn’s sister works for – which would be enough to enrage Branwyn – if it weren’t for another her creations in the hands of a potentially murderous angel which will lead to more of her morals being compromised.

This world is vast and strange and huge and original. With the celestial beings (angels and Kaiju), the fae, the various offspring of these beings and their myriad powers, a very original magic system, celestial machines with a will of their own and even sentient buildings – there’s a huge amount there

And none of it is simple. It would be easy to create a vast world and then have the good creatures and the bad creatures and the naughty organisation and the nice one. But it’s not that simple because everyone and everything is scrabbling to hold their corner while the whole world is changing with the recent revelation of the supernatural. It leaves no organisation necessarily evil and none necessarily good – but all of them doing things that are… unpleasant and dubious as they try to keep up with the newly changing world. Whether that’s the government agency that Bronwyn’s sister works for weaponising her inventions, working with dubious angels and trying to set up magical-people registers or Senyaza callously risking the life of one of their own for an advantage and, again, perverting one of Branwyn’s creations way beyond her expectations

And our protagonists aren’t immune to this – making deals with Senyaza, making deals with Kaiju, working with beings that were once their sworn enemy. It’s hard to stick to your morals when family and loved ones are involved.

Etiquette of Exiles (Senyaza #3.5) by Chrysoula Tzavelas

The Senyaza series has a very rich and detailed world with a huge number of different and complicated forces attached. We have the fae of various courts all with their own agendas. We have kaiju, we have angels, we have half-angels, we have beings I can’t even begin to label. On top of that the whole sense of the other world is one that is so alien, so creepy and spooky and surreal that it takes a lot of thought

Then we have the books to date each of which manages to cover so much of this world because every last book has a different story and a different focus with a different protagonist and segment of the world.

That means in 3 books we have had a huge cast of characters, a vast world and a whole lot of development and complexity. Which is what I love so much about this series

Except… this is an issue for me with the short story anthology, exacerbated by me not having read the books, especially the earlier books, for some time. I don’t recognise enough of the characters in the early short stories to really understand what is happening or what is relevant. I don’t mean they’re bad stories – I really liked the feel of Other Reasons – for example. In fact, not only did I love it I was desperate for more – because it felt like I had missed most of the story and came in half way. I wanted to know the rest of this story because there wasn’t enough there for it to stand alone for me. I feel much the same for Wicked Stepself, I really like this story (despite the second person format which I really hate) – a wonderful, powerful surreal session and a really powerful core for a whole new story which I really really want to follow more. But I’m just not sure how this relates to the rest of the series - can feel it, but with my fuzzy memory it feels like a new story in this world. One I really really want to read – but not one I find connected to what is currently there.

Stainless was much better at standing alone. A beautiful, surreal story of a woman in a sexist society, being abandoned and shamed for having a child – finding strength and purpose in a really creepy and terrifying setting. Surreal, powerful – but slightly disconnected from the rest of the book, and the series.  It felt like something completely separate.

I think the same can be said for Winter War – again I have to stress I liked this story and it did add so much to the surreal nature of the world and a beautiful snippet into this wild and wonderful world… but not exactly connected to anything else. I say the same about Her Daughter, Pinned to the Sky again awesomely shows off the world, the surreal nature, the amazing powers being raised. Same statement again with the Endless Silence of Forgotten Things and the Far City Cheer Squad.

Wolf Interval (Senyaza #3) by Chrysoula Tzavelas

AT is stuck with her father – it’s where she belongs and no matter how much she hates him, where else would she go? She already ruined her one chance to escape and betrayed where she truly belonged

Until the demon Tia pulls her into a new quest – the Wild Hunt is free and hunting souls. Long since corrupted from its original goal, the hunt will not hunt and destroy any free soul it finds – and with the breaking of the chains that held the fae captive, the hunt is also free to roam – or will be after Hallowe’en

AT has a short time and a few allies she daren’t let herself trust to try and remove the hunt before it’s too late. This is something she can’t do alone – but can she bring herself to work with others?ss

The world of this series has always been fantastical. The other world quite literally a realm of imagination and dreams where anything goes; this always creates this wonderful surreal feeling that has really made the whole series to date. The non-humans aren’t just people with fangs or claws or magic – they’re truly alien and strange beings, they don’t think like us, they don’t resemble us in any fundamental fashion, they can be anything we can imagine and more. I don’t think I’ve come across many books that have carried off this sense of the alien nearly half so well

And for most of the series – certainly for the past two books – it has really worked. And it works in this one as well… but the characters also spend the majority of their time in the Otherworld in this book with nearly everyone being something completely alien to any real reference points. AT with her hounds, her shadow and her parentage, Brynn with the shadows on her arm and Yejuen with his alien, unknown magic that confuses even them are all outside of any frame of reference I have – throw in the completely unknown Cat, the odd Jen and the truly alien and unexplained Fiddler all combine to throw in a lot of alien and a lot of confusing. Even Tia, Alastor and Hunter confuse me because I’m not sure where the distinctions lie between them, what this distinctions are and what they mean

In previous books we looked at the alien or focused on part of the alien. Here we’re plunged into the middle of many many kinds of alien and I felt a little lost. I fell through the Looking Glass and didn’t even have a Cheshire Cat as a guide so I was left with a truly powerful sense of the surreal that has permeate this series, more than ever before, but I was also more last than I care to be. I wanted some explanatory notes or for my surreal, mystical confusion to be rationed to a smaller quota.

Infinity Key (Senyaza Series #2) by Chrysoula Tzavelas

Branwyn is human. A nice, normal human – which isn’t a great thing to be when magical shenanigans, monsters, fae and wizards are running around. There can be no greater evidence of this than her best friend, Penny, slowly dying in a hospital bed. A fate that could have been Branwyn’s if Marley hadn’t worked so hard to keep her out of the supernatural drama that had consumed her life.

Branwyn doesn’t want to be protected, she doesn’t want to be a tool, a victim or something to be sheltered and she certainly doesn’t want to sit and watch her best friend die. Against all advice and all established knowledge, she reaches out to Tarn, a fae noble, in his imprisonment in the fae world. He’s definitely using her for his own devices but he is the only one who offers even flimsy hope of saving Penny’s life – and, perhaps, of Branwyn learning some human skills that will allow her to protect herself in the magical world she has been plunged into.

When I started reading this book I was very worried I would hate Branwyn because in many ways she does exactly what I hate human characters in Urban Fantasy to do. She seeks out danger, she gets in way over her head, she doesn’t listen to warnings, she takes massive risks and she doesn’t know nearly enough to be safe. That is usually a recipe for me to be cursing a character and the magical luck that allows her to somehow exist and breathe through.

But Branwyn works. She works because she is extremely, painfully, aware of how vulnerable she is in fact the core of everything she does is because she is so vulnerable – she’s trying to reduce that vulnerability. She’s an aware human in the supernatural world – she’s inherently vulnerable. She’s tired of having to rely on the (sometimes dubious) protection of others and she can’t bring herself to pretend she isn’t aware of the supernatural around her. She needs to take these risks or spend the rest of her life being at risk or dependent on other people which is most definitely not her nor something she could endure.

It works, it fits her personality – she’s irrepressible, irreverent, fun loving, passionate and defiant – not in a constantly angry kind of way, but in her insistence that she will walk her own path and do her own thing and isn’t going to accept what others lay down as “the way things are.” This also makes her very determined and completely unwilling to accept the inevitable fatalism about Penny’s slow death, nor accept that her vulnerability or lesser status is just something she has to put up with. She’s also, unlike Marley, not willing to take the word of Senyaza for anything –neither assuming they know everything or assuming that they have her best interests in mind (especially since they’re more than a little condescending when it comes to humans anyway)

This makes her an excellent, caring, challenging character – if I had any criticism at al, it’s that her “irreverence” often comes across as brash or even outright rude with little justification for it – and seems more like showing off bravado than appropriateness of the situation. But then, when the only power you have in a situation is confidence and bluff – and making it abundantly clear to all concerned that you will NOT be playing by their rules then you have to spin it well.

Matchbox Girls (Senyaza Series #1) by Chrysoula Tzavelas

Marley is a young woman in LA, struggling with anxiety and depression and barely getting by with the help of her friends Branwyn and Penny. When she gets a phone call from 2 4 year old girls, twins under the care of their uncle, her friend Zachariah. Zachariah has disappeared without a trace leaving them alone with instructions to call Marley if they need help.

Simple babysitting quickly gets out of hand when it seems there are some powerful forces out to get the twins – and not just powerful with wealth and influence, but with abilities she cannot understand. But even they seem to weak compared to the twins themselves.

Marley ends up trying to protect the child with powers she doesn’t understand, from forces she doesn’t understand, with potential allies she neither understands nor trusts and in the process she learns things about herself she never imagined.

But it’s not just Marley dragged into a world with Angels, Demons, faeries and Nephilim – her friends are in the firing line as well, targeted to get at her

Marley spends much of this book lost and confused. And, since we’re only watching through her lens, then we spend most of the book in the same state. It manages to pull it back just in time before I reach the point of putting the book down in frustration. But up until about 40% into the book I feel lost. There are pieces of the puzzle but none of it first together and a whole lot is missing. I like questions and mysteries and investigation – but if the questions don’t come together and at least begin to form a pattern it just becomes confusing and a little lost. For so much of the book we know something is after the twins, but we don’t know who or why. there are people who seem to be trying to help but we don’t know why or who or what or whether they can be trusted. There are strange things happening but we don’t know how. And Marley spends much of the time running away – including from potential explanations (reasonably, since why should she trust these people, but still).

However, once we’re past that 40% the story starts to come together and we can follow along much easier – which means the plot picks up in a way that makes sense and the main characters can start engaging with the plot more rather than reacting to it in confusion. After that, Marley starts forging her own path, speaking to the beings she wants to, working her own way and coming up with her own ideas and plans. Once we know about the world, Marley tackles it and we start to dive into it more solidly. She follows ideas and clues, learns why the twins are so targeted, actively seeks Zachery and confronting the enemies rather than running, hiding and being confused. Then we get a lot more excitement, a lot more fascinating world building and I can start cheering and rooting for Marley rather than being confused along with her.

Some of the mystery remains right to the end – the exact nature of the twins and Marley for that matter, remains unknown – but some questions leading into the next book are great to have. It’s too many unknowns for the plot to handle that loses me.

The world itself is fascinating and unique. In a genre where we see the same patterns and the same creatures repeated often in very similar ways (but with many interesting twists), a completely new take on things is a refreshing breeze. We have the Nephilim, children of immortal, celestial beings. And we’re way beyond simple angels and demons – and even the angels and demons aren’t like we expect. In theory we have the potential for a vast variety of beings based on which celestial being created the Nephilim and how the Nephilim adapt (we even had a griffin, that’s a new one on me for Urban Fantasy) to the world and what powers they have. Even the villain is certainly an unusual choice but it all fits the world setting with humanity (and their cousins, the Nephilim) living in a world where the celestial beings have been limited and contained – held away to preserve humanity’s independence. It’s, frankly, a brilliant world and I want to see much much much more of it.