Full Fathom Five (The Keys Trilogy) by Anna Roberts

Blue, Gabe, Grayson, Joe, Charlie and Ruby have survived. They’re not happy, there’s the shadow of Eli’s corpse to clear up lying over Blue and Charlie and Ruby have a somewhat tumultous relationship. There’s the swamp wolves lurking over Joe and Grayson - and being a werewolf is never easy besides that

But Gloria’s last act seems to have taken Yael, the deep, dark, massive, dangerous spirit, finally out of their lives and out to sea

Until he is drawn home - and this time the depleted Keys pack is missing Gloria, their heart, their soul, their true Alpha, their wolf-witch. To face Yael there’s only Blue, brand new to this and reeling with both revelations from the past and Yael’s desperate yearning to be human

So… this book… this entire series puts me in one of those very very awkward ones to review.

I am impressed. I am deeply impressed by the writing. I am even more deeply impressed by the characterisation, their lives and how they react to the world around them. And I’m really impressed by the world.

The whole concept of werewolves and their struggle has permeated these books. These are beings from very poor backgrounds who rarely, if ever, get the chance to complete their education or get regular work (all those days off every month). Changing is painful, traumatising and hell on their bodies to the point where most of them are pretty damaged by the time they hit 30 and 40 is the far reaches of old age - 50 completely unattainable. The life of a werewolf is grim and painful and short.

And the Wolfwitches, even if not werewolves themselves, live among that. The same poverty, the same desperate, hurting people around them, and even if not directly affected, they’re the ones who clean up. They’re the ones who put the damaged, suffering wolves out of their misery when their bodies finally turn on them.

This permeates the whole story. Even when we see things like Grayson and Joe who are deeply in love and managing to carve a sense of happiness for themselves there’s still that underlying question: still the constant nag that Grayson is old for a werewolf, even his most loving moments undercut

It permeates the past of Yael as well - Yael and Gloria, their whole history laid out here needs to be seen in this context. Gloria, the poverty, the difficulty and in comes this spirit snaring her when she’s young and desperate and then being a constant shadow - adding deeper burdens but always coming with just enough power to be useful - until he’s just the burden, the predatory force

I like this in many ways because it humanises Gloria: she as the heart and soul of this series, the foundation, the one with Yael, the great evil spiritual force that everyone is afraid of - we see how it happened, how she first succumbed: and it’s such an easy, simple, human temptation. No woo-woo nothing like that - but simply a devil’s bargain offered to someone with few options

And I see a lot of great parallels for her in Ruby - a powerful, determined, intelligent woman who, nevertheless, is young a little foolish and seeking short cuts out of her grim situation. I think there’s a reason why these characters are presented next to each other. It also shows another reason why Gloria got rid of Blue - not just to save her from Yael possession but to save her from the temptation of Yael when she’s young. Because when you’re young and poor and angry in a very unfair life Yael looks very attractive. And how, even the best of us, at our worst moments, can wish for terrible terrible things.

I did wonder about West, Gloria’s son and Blue’s mother’s struggle with mental illness. Because it seems we took the damage of Yael and the desperation of the general werewolf’s lot, threw in the painful awareness of how being poor affected them all and a constant acknowledgment of how being Black added to Blue’s struggle and then just dialed it up to 11 with yet more grim darkness. I’m still kind of torn about both - especially since Blue’s mother’s mental illness is entirely a plot device rather than characterisation. But it does serve to make it clear that all the stuff they face? Not all down to Yael. There’s plenty of bad out there without deciding it’s all this spiritual nastiness

The Wolf Witch (Keys Trilogy #1) by Anna Roberts

Blue has moved to the Florida Keys following the death of her mother, in an attempt to honour her memory as well as to rebuild her life after the devastation of Katrina

But she never imagined the tourist resort she moved to would have so many surprises and that her simple life would be thrown into some very unexpected turns as she finds herself embroiled with werewolves, magic, spirits and who knows what else.

There’s a lot of fascinating elements in this book, elements I really want to see explored. The idea of the wolf witches and their shared history and cross overs of persecution between the wolf witches and the werewolves themselves. I really liked the idea of magic which was much more visceral, more organic and far less sanitised than a lot of magic depictions we see. I was really intrigued by the witches relationship with spirits, those spirits being both a threat and an asset which leads to a very complicated relationship

I also really liked the take on werewolves. The actual return to the idea of werewolves as cursed. Werewolves who don’t have super healing and super strength and vitality – werewolves who have to deal with real health issues from the sheer trauma that changing inflicts on them, how that creeps up on them and affects their attitude towards aging and health.

That naturally leads to some personal conflicts based on that and on being risk averse. I’m also intrigued by the different paths to Alphadom that are presented – the easygoing, friendly, health alpha on one side and the brutal, vicious Alpha who rules by fear we see so often in the genre – but the book is nuanced enough to present flaws with both which in turn leads to more personal conflicts as people deal with the politics and repercussions of both. On top of that we have our own personal conflicts from other issues – like Blue being a Katrina survivor as well as the child of a parent with a severe mental illness and the repercussions of that and how that builds to her character.

This also all supports a number of storylines. We have Gloria, the elderly woman with potentially high ability, struggling with dementia with lots of difficulty of discerning if what she says and does is due to mystical insight or just because of her illness. There’s the power of what she means to everyone around her

We have the young wolf just realising what he is and coming in to his own. We have a power struggle, a conflict over how to hold a territory going through transition with the difficulty of following a very difficult reign and trying to hold the territory afterwards. And we have Blue and Gabe building a romance, in between Blue learning about the world and Gabe trying to juggle the many demands on him, trying not to resent them, trying not to be overwhelmed by them

These are all very excellent storylines, carried by some really good characters with a rather different world setting

Year of the Tiger (Changeling Sisters #2) By Heather Heffner

The war between the weres and the vampires grows in intensity and Citlalli is torn in how to proceed – does she obediently follow the were alpha’s plans, even as he keeps her in the dark? Does she join Rafael on his destructive quest for vengeance- but how many will die following his path? Or does she take a chance and run for her own priority – saving her sisters – even if it means meeting the vampire queen on her own turf?

While Raina continues her precarious existence in the vampire court. She has few – and decreasing – allies and an ever growing amount of enemies. She has forged an alliance with Khyber, the queen’s oldest son, but how sure can she be that she can trust him? But her own awareness of herself and her past may be giving her a whole new weapon to fight with

I don’t know whether it’s because of the gap between reading this book and the last book, but I found some elements of this book lost me. It’s just so huge, we have the supernatural world, the back story of the vampires, the nature of Citlalli’s many divided soul, different shapeshifter groups, magic and spirits and Uma and dark spirits and the Fox and the man’s lantern… it’s rare for me to want a recap but I would have appreciated here  - a recap or more detailed explanation. Or maybe just a slightly slower pace

Because while the first book took a long time to get started, this book felt like we were plunged into the deep end and expected to run. In almost no time we go from reeling and adapting to the last book to throwing ourselves into the action of this one. The war is here, the plot against the vampires is coming to a head. Fights! Drama! High emotion! Conflict! It’s an excellent roller coaster of action and tension which just doesn’t give me much time to catch my breath and get my bearing as we’re pulled along. Just little things like the nature of spirit world, the identity of various ghosts, a reminder of the shapeshifter hierarchy, the nature of Maya’s many forms, Una’s role, maybe even a little time to get used to Raina and Citlalli’s differing POVs since Rain is changing so much.

At the same time there are elements of the plot that are distracted. Citlalli takes some time to spend with the lantern seller and I,m not entirely sure what it achieves (or how she’s able to magically divine his cure after such a brief meeting). We have the fox running around causing chaos that could probably be better served in a series of short stories – though it does serve to remind us that just because the vampires and Maya are the main enemy doesn’t mean they’re the only problem.

I think this rapid pacing, large number of characters and lots of action confuses me a little because the world is so wide and rich. There’s a lot of research, a lot of legends and a lot of work gone into building this world and incorporating so many different elements of mythology that we so rarely see incorporated into Urban Fantasy stories, making it very different from anything I’ve read before

I did like to see some humanising of Citlali’s mother – she’s often the harsh authority figure to be railed against and blamed. It’s nice to see more of her – her strictness covers her concern and genuine love. And her compassion – refusing to let Una live alone when she realises she has no parents. She’s strict, she has rules, but she also has a lot of love and a lot of hard history behind her

The Witching Hour (Mayfair Witches #1) by Anne Rice

There’s a house in New Orleans, in the Garden district that has slowly fallen into disrepair. It’s the residence of the core of the Mayfair family – the Mayfair witches

For generations the Talamasca has watched the Mayfair witches since their distant ancestor was burned at the stake in Scotland. Her descendants since then have passed on her dangerous legacy – a magical gift and the Lasher. A spirit of ever increasing power and dangerous, unknown motives – a creature that definitely has blood on its hands even as it put gold in the Mayfair pockets

And now, reaching the 13^th generation of Mayfair witches, all that knowledge over the centuries may finally be needed to reveal the Lasher’s eventual plan.

Some books are long

Some books are very long

Some books are very very long indeed

Some books are “ye gods WHYYY?!” long

And then there’s Witching Hour which is much much longer than that.

It’s not just the length of the book – and it is a mammoth 1,200 pages – it’s how long the book feels as well. Some books can be really wrong and you still dive through them because they’re awesome – they feel short. And some short books drag on because they feel long with dense, awful writing and lack of any real pacing. Well, this was an incredibly long book THAT FELT EVEN LONGER!

The writing is so dense and so boring and so repetitive that it is an achievement to get through. It has to be said about Anne Rice that she is good at establishing time and place with evocative description – and she certainly does that in this book. But she doesn’t do it once – every place needs this description dozens of times, over and over the same points, the same places, the same times are described again and again in really long winded terms. Any evocative sense of setting is lost in the sheer overwhelming wave of unnecessary verbiage.

There’s a lot of grossly unnecessary detail. I struggled to start this book because we were treated to such a long winded, unnecessary analysis of Michael’s life before we were ever given any reason to connect to this man that I nearly gave up right there. I have no idea why we need the best part of 100 pages to describe Michael’s past or what it added to the book. But the same thing happens several times – Petyr can’t just be an agent of the Talamasca, we need to know his life story first. Some random agent in the 20s couldn’t just be a Talamasca agent, no, we needed to know his childhood, his history, how he joined the Talamasca, who he worked with… so much information for so little purpose. We can’t just get the story of Rita Mae, childhood friend of Deidre – no, we need to include far too many details about Rita Mae as well and I have absolutely no idea why I should care, why this is relevant or why I am having to read this.

To make it worse, the repetitiveness comes in as well. Rita Mae tells her story, then we have it repeated in Aaron’s narrative. A doctor tells his story about Deidre – which doesn’t really add anything unique – and then that gets repeated by Aaron. A priest tells his story, a nun tells her story – and then all these stories get repeated again. And these stories themselves are an exercise in redundancy. To show us how meticulous and creepy the Talastalkers are, we get the same information from several different sources to really drive home just how assiduously the Talastalkers have left no stone unturned in their quest to be the creepiest of creepers. So, yet MORE repetition!

And let’s have a swipe at the Talamasca here – because I’m still somewhat at a loss as to what exactly they’re doing? Trying to stop the Lasher? Well you’ve had 3 centuries of doing absolutely nothing towards that goal. The mere thought of the Lasher makes them cower in their beds. Ok, is it to help the family? Well you had evidence of generations of incest and multiple murders and didn’t feel the need to intervene. So is it just curiosity? Because that seems like a really dubious justification for centuries of riffling through someone’s rubbish and stealing their medical records. It’s not that curiosity isn’t a real motive – it is a very reasonable motive. But if that is the motive then the Talamasca are severely creepy, entitled and unethical people who feel they can intrude on someone’s life to this degree for the sake of their own nosiness. Hence my reference to Talastalkers.

Living Violet (Cambion Chronicles #1) by Jaime Reed

Sam knows what she wants and needs – she needs money for a new car, she has plans to go to college. She studies and she works. She doesn’t have the time or, frankly, the inclination for a hot romance.

Caleb would also rather like to avoid them – but you wouldn’t know it by the women constantly throwing themselves at him. Something that becomes only more sinister as they start dropping around him, unusual victims of heart attacks and worse. Sam seems to be one of the few immune to his allure, but is drawn into his world and its secrets anyway

I love that this is a YA paranormal romance that rewrites so many of the tropes we’ve seen so many times in one long delicious subversion.

We have a magical sexy power that causes the person to literally starve without sex (and other alternatives, but sex is definitely a big one). He needs sexual contact! And his power means nearly all women find him utterly irresistible to a point where the particularly lonely and broken hearted are driven to assault him in desperation.

Which sounds like another recipe for woo-woo justifying sexual coercion and forcing a relationship based on magic rather than genuine connection… but it doesn’t because Sam is immune. Yes, I was shocked too – they bring in a love interest with super sexy magic power then make the protagonist immune to them – completely immune to his coercive sexy magic, unswayed by his magnetism. Not only that but she doesn’t even think he’s all that hot. Oh he’s cute and all, in his way, but super-smoking, she-can’t-stop-thinking-about-him? Nope. Not at all, besides she’s not really in the market for a boyfriend anyway; partly it’s her parents fear of her following in their teenaged-pregnancy footsteps and partly her own disinterest and focus on other things in her life right now. Boys just don’t have to be her priority.

At which point I look at the author and wonder if they’ve got the right genre.

This leaves Sam and Caleb to become a couple through music and spending time together and mutual interests. It means that, while they do fall in love, they do so in a more organic, natural fashion after getting to know each other. There’s even one point when he asks how much she likes him and Sam says:

“You a’ight”
“Sam”
“What do you want me to say? We’ve just started talking” – I check my invisible watch – “a few weeks ago. We’re still in the introductory stage.”

Yes, I want to frame it and hang it in a museum for its sheer rarity. There’s no insta-love, there’s a slowly developed love. There’s no overwhelming, obsessive attraction – it’s just 2 people who get to know each other well and come to love each other.

In terms of plot, well I think this book is more an introduction of the concept, the world and characters. The plot of Sam just learning about this world and slowly growing closer to Caleb is a surprisingly solid plot that holds most of the first half together. It’s not exciting or riveting, but it’s not boring and introduces characters who are interesting enough in their own right to keep the book worth reading. Towards the end the plot of Caleb’s dad is brought in which is just right for that moment – the world and characters have been revealed, it’s time to get some meat on the bones and do something with them; it added both excitement and action as well as a cliffhanger to make the book more than just “and Caleb met Sam”, an ideal addition.

After Expenses (Slayer of Evil (Prices Negotiable)) by Andrew Moczulski

Eric Margrave is a Monster Hunter ($200 per hour for standard jobs, $250 for non-standard, $300 for Ichor-covered slimy tentacle beasts plus expenses. And he doesn’t do demons, dragons, liches, demon-dragons, no dragon-liches, no demon-dragon-liches and absolutely no sentient bread). He’s one of the best in the business. And he can go on a five hour tangent if someone mentions the word “gelatin.”

After picking up Lydia (a 19^th century society lady), a Guardian spirit in a confusing haunting in one of his safe houses and new base of operations, Eric is ready to hit the road to help those in need (so long as they can pay. And if they can’t pay, he reminds you that the other victims of the monster probably left some stuff behind you can loot – hint hint), from angry ghosts, to furious nature spirits, werewolves, zombie armies, evil witches and annoying gremlins, Eric’s seen it all and is more than capable of bring it down. With Lydia to help and point out the many many many things he does wrong.

And he can look cool while doing it. Always essential.

This book is a series of short stories. And when I reached the end I was deeply disappointed that there wasn’t more. And this is from someone who doesn’t like short stories. I generally find they lack meta, they lack overarching epicness and they’re just not long enough to develop the characters and the themes and the story.

This collection worked because the themes and characters continue throughout all the short stories – and they’re really well maintained. You can tell that they were written at different times and their voices and personalities definitely develop from the first to the last as the author finds his writing style, but it is really well maintained and works to make the book feel like one, solid, continued work rather than a series of short stories.

It doesn’t have an epic overarching story – but it doesn’t need one. That’s not what this book is about. This is about the often dangerous, often exciting, usually weird and complicated life of a monster hunter. There are no epic overarching plots because usually hunting the monsters doesn’t involve that – he shows up, finds the gribbly thing, whatever it is, kills the gribbly thing, collects his fee and goes home. There’s no need to have a big overarching plot because that’s not what the monsters do. Most of them are happy to terrorise a local village without bringing an apocalypse to the whole world.

So what fills the gap, how does it still work? Firstly, the stories themselves are original and fun. The take on the ghosts (feeding on fear and getting more dangerous), various nature spirits, werewolves, demons et al is original and interesting with some immensely fun twists. Like werewolves not being considered a threat because EVERYONE knows how to kill a werewolf! Or Eric’s utter contempt for zombie apocalypses and how little chance they’d have to really take over the nation. Or his very original take on killing zombies. Each story is novel enough, different enough and twisty enough not to need an overarching plot to keep it interesting – they’re all interesting in their own right.

What also works are the characters. Eric and Lydia. Individually they’re excellent – Eric is one of the funniest, most ridiculous, zany, more than a little eccentric but still lethal monster hunters you could ever hope to read. He’s such immense fun, takes nothing seriously while, at the same time, never losing that sense of just how dangerous he is. In fact, his being so blasé is worked well into showing just how dangerous the man is – he’s seen most of it before, he’s confident in his ability to kill things, he can afford to have fun at it. He can afford to be a little silly. And… when it’s really necessary, all that fun and joy and silliness will just fall away and that lethal steel will peek out, reminding you that this man is, at the root, a contract killer with lethal skills. He doesn’t have to show them off, because he’s that good.

Lydia frequently asks him if he’s quite sane – and I think part of his portrayal is that Eric isn’t, not entirely. We’ve seen his childhood heavily hinted at in one of the short stories, we’ve had frequent references to his past experiences as a hunter, fighting for his life against everything he can including demons (which is why he won’t fight them any more) and his general lonely, unsupported existence all adds up to be a strong indication that he isn’t exactly neuro-typical any more. But all of this is shown rather than told, through both his erratic behaviour and showing the experiences that we would expect to lead Eric to this state. It doesn’t need long speeches of his pain, his terrible experiences or how it has damaged him – the end result is shown through

Does it work? Usually. Sometimes I think it falls flat. Eric goes from being hilariously eccentric to a desperate clown who is trying too hard. It gets too contrived, too convoluted, too childish to work and the suspension of disbelief shatters. It happens more towards the beginning of the book than the end and I suspect it is the author getting used to Eric’s voice and developing him as a character, but even in the last story there are moments when Eric just pushes a little too far to be believable. I think it’s an issue that is getting better and I hope in future books Eric will stay on this side of the believable.

Review: Thunderbird Falls, by C.E Murphy, book 2 of the Walker Papers.

Joanne Walker, or Siobhan Walking Stick and reluctant shaman, returns to face her powers that she can’t keep running from. After the vast events of Urban Shaman, she is intimidated by the power and the responsibility that comes with it – but she can’t deny the damage she did in saving the city last time, nor can she deny her urge to heal. After months of neglect, she’s finally acknowledges she needs to learn more, she needs to explore her powers and she needs to use them – to heal, to help and to fix what has been broken.

Thankfully, she finds a teacher who is willing to pull her stubbornly through the nature of her powers, allow her to explore them further and develop them to their potential regardless of Joanne’s reluctance; though Joanne still has a lot of trouble accepting – her power and her teacher.

And she can hardly focus on her power alone. Her friend, Gary, is in the hospital after a heart attack, giving her more impetus to learn to heal. There’s a mysterious murder in her gym which, her boss is thrilled to learn, has a supernatural element; and she is approached by a local witch coven who are uniting their powers to try and help fix the damage to the city and summon an ancient shaman from the spirit world

But the witches may be in over their heads, things are moving too fast for Joanne to keep up and she’s not sure who to trust or what to do as more and more demands are put on her, not all of which she is comfortable with. But is this reasonable or her own reluctance to accept the supernatural getting in the way?

Storywise I had a little bit of a genre-savvy moment that almost detracted a fair bit from the book for me. I basically pegged the villain long before the villain was supposed to be obvious. As I saw Joanne become ever more involved in the villain’s plans it was frustrating to me because the villainous intent was pretty obvious to me.

I can’t say it was unrealistic storywise, though. Joanne, because of her interactions with Coyote, had reason to trust the people she did. I think she threw herself too quickly and too deeply into the plans of the coven, but even then she did some basic fact checking before. There was no reason for Joanne to not do what she did, her every action was reasonable, even if mistaken, and it didn’t require foolishness or spunkiness for her to do what she did. Though, it did require a little naivety. I’m torn because I’m not sure how much of my objection is based on, as I say, genre-savviness and pattern recognition because internally, within the book, there is no real reason to be suspicious.

Other than that, the story is excellently well paced, perhaps a little rushed, again there’s the sense that Joanne has 100 things to do and not enough time to do it in – I wonder sometimes when she finds the time to sleep (she hardly does). But the number of plot lines going on sometimes feel like when Joanne takes some time to do something important, like visit Gary or look after Melinda’s kids, there’s a sense that she doesn’t have time for it. I think the author did an excellent job of conveying a sense of urgency – but the sense of urgency was so emphasised that it felt like Joanne should be running everywhere – and if she weren’t, what was she doing?