Cry Wolf
I finished Cry Wolf by Patricia Briggs yesterday. This is a spinoff book from the Mercy Thompson series and the first in the Alpha and Omega series. It features characters first introduced in the novella On the Prowl which I did not know when I picked this one up. I could not shake the feeling that I was missing a whole story here, until I discovered it was a short story I had missed. I tend to ignore the compilation books these stories normally appear in. I think I know enough from the introduction not to worry about tracking it down.
In any case, this was a book that I lost a great deal of sleep over. I could not put the darn thing down! A bit after midnight Monday night, I decided I needed to sleep more than I needed to know what happened next. The main character, Anna, is a bit of a wimp but only because she’d endured three years of torture before being rescued by Charles, the Marrock’s (head werewolf of all the packs in America) second child and enforcer (read assasin). Anna will probably come into her own as a character in the next book, but this particular book reads like a romance novel. The story is more interesting than the characters and you’re only waiting until they finally figure out that they are madly in love. I personally enjoyed the Mercy Thompson books a whole lot more. Mercy is a tough cookie, but she knows how to ask for and take help. The men in her life aren’t cowed by the chip on her shoulder.
Anna comes across as way too fragile. By the end of the book, however, she has come to accept herself and her power. As an Omega werewolf, she has all the need to protect of an Alpha wolf but none of the violent or aggressive behavior. She can calm the beast within and grant peace to the werewolves around her. This special power is essential to keeping the Marrock from becoming something worse than a rogue werewolf. When she finally accepts who and what she is, she rescues them all from the clutches of Mariposa, a two hundred year old witch responsible for the torture and death of Asil’s, a much older werewolf bent on suicide living with the Marrock’s immediate pack waiting for the Marrock to decide when he will finally kill him, mate.
I would recommend this book to fans of Ms. Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series if only to visit with some of the other characters in that world and fans of urban fantasy romance.
For an excerpt, click here.
Folk of the Air
I finally took the opportunity to read a book. I’ve been denying myself the opportunity so I wouldn’t be tempted to read when I should be working on Christmas presents. Well, Christmas is over, I have one more little girl dress to finish and some cookies to bake, but on the whole I’m finished with presents. I decided to grab a book from to my “to read” pile that I normally would’ve skipped over. I wanted something without too much commitment. I decided on Folk of the Air by Peter S. Beagle. I have only read a few books by Beagle, The Last Unicorn, Tamsin and I think I read The Innkeeper’s Song, but I can’t remember. I loved Last Unicorn, and Tamsin was pretty good. I thought I would at least enjoy Folk of the Air. I did like all the pretty language, but at the same time the pretty language was a pain the butt. I found myself so caught up in the superlatives, I lost track of the meaning. Frankly, the actual story is boring, a little weird, but mostly boring.
Farrell, the main character, arrives back to the town he went to college at to stay with a friend who is now living with a much older woman, Sia. He runs into an old girlfriend who introduces him to these Rennaissance Festival type people who basically dress up as lords and ladies in their free time. He starts getting involved with the group as a lute player. He runs into Aiffe, their pretend witch, who is summoning Nicholas Bonner. Nick Bonner is not a demon or any other kind of magical creature. He knows spells and magice, and teaches Aiffe a few things all in the hopes of using her to get back at his mother, Sia (yes the older woman that Farrell’s friend, Ben is shacked up with). Sia is a goddess who is losing her powers after millenia, and she is afraid of her son.
Aiffe is a fifteen year old girl who is only interested in power so she can be the powerful or most popular one in the Medieval recreationist group. In trying to attain that, she drives one man insane, and causes the death of another. All this seems inconsequential to the main story. Like I said, I enjoyed it. I just had a problem with the flowery language and the unsatisfying ending. Farrell does not endear himself as a character. I did not care about him or what he was going through. He felt superficial. Ben turned out to be a jerk, using the powers attained by sleeping with a goddess in ways that hurt someone. Julie, Farrell’s old flame, tends towards hystrionics and then to being more placid. Aiffe comes across as a scared child one moment, then an annoying pratt the next.
In all, I wouldn’t exactly recommend this one, but I wouldn’t stop somebody if they wanted to borrow it from the library. In all Beagle writes in varied styles. Of the few books by him I’ve read, I haven’t come across one that’s been written the same or even in the same vein.
Bring it On!
The third installment to the Retrievers series, Bring it On by Laura Anne Gilman, was in a word, nice. Frankly, the whole book is a bit of a blur. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it immensely, I just couldn’t pick out anything that truly stood out. I think it was more like reading the equivalent of comfort food. It was not boring nor unpleasant, and very comforting to lay back in my bed with the cooling night and just sip at this book. Wren is still a kick butt female character, the sub plot is still taking forever to shape, and all the factions have yet to be defined. The relationship between Sergei and Wren is not quite evolving and not standing still more like in between. I still find the death of Lee as so much useless plot fodder. Its supposed to have shaped Wren, but I just didn’t see it. I didn’t feel his death in any way. I wasn’t saddened because I just didn’t know the character all that well. If Sergei or P.B. were to die, then I would probably be just as angry and depressed as Wren. These characters, the reader gets to know. The others are just so much periphery.
However, if you have enjoyed the series thus far, I say pick this one up too. You may not even need to read the first few because of the constant reiteration about what happened before (something that pretty much killed the Potter series for my husband and made me skip over whole pages!)
From the Nightside, part deux
I finished, From the Nightside last night. I still don’t know how I feel about the book but the mystery presented in this first installment has me interested enough that I downloaded the rest of the series ebooks. I still dislike John Taylor’s penchant for long monologues and Joanna still seemed a stilted appendage to the main character, more a marionette than a fully fleshed character. SPOILER ALERT
The fact that Joanna was actually one of the Harrowing in disguise a creature made from the mind of the creature that has captured Cathy, probably explains why she seemed so artificial, but the writer would have you believe that John Taylor felt she was a complete and real human woman. A woman John Taylor has fallen in love with. I didn’t buy it. There was no chemistry between the two characters. The “tender moments” left me feeling cold. They felt contrived to me.
In any case, I have finally tracked down Path of Honor the second in Pharaoh Francis’s Path books. I have this problem where I don’t want to be alone while I’m reading but the people in the room are talking and watching TV. As many readers can probably attest, unless the book is completely gripping, this is not an environment conducive to reading. Unfortunately, for me, the first few chapters of most books are nearly gripping enough, so last night’s endeavor to read Path of Honor was pretty much a bust. I got into maybe the 3rd or 4th chapter, and I honestly don’t know if I like what I read, at least of what I remember.
I will report more on this once I’ve gotten a little further in to the story.
