Review: A Mess
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 10 26, 2013
It would be faster to tell you what I like about this book.  Maybe my problems are because I enjoyed the first book so much and had set expectations for book 2.  This book starts a couple months after the end of book 1.  Beri and Blythe are handicapped.  Beri has wounds that won't heal and Blythe's magic is all screwed up.This is the first problem I had with this book.  In book 1, Beri kicked butt.  If you read urban fantasy you have read this book before.  This is the book where the author handicaps the heroine to show her determination, intellect, and toughness.  There is very little actual action in this book and Beri pretty much gets beat up in everything.  I kept waiting for things to get better and the book ended with me waiting.The story is a small picture story.  Its very predictable with no surprises. Even the twist at the ending is really obvious.  Another thing that bothered me is that nothing gets resolved in this book.  You get no answers, Beri is worse off at the end than at the beginning.  One bright spot is the interaction with Beri and Aphrodite.There are so many question from book 1 and they barely get addressed.  No answers abut Beri, why Aphrodite is following her, why she's so different from her twin, what happened to her so called spirit guide.  None of it mattered enough to be addressed.  The only thing that mattered was getting Nikolos back.At this point I would rate the book a 3.  The author does set up the future for possibly better books.  The author hints of a rich, more traditional supernatural world.  I really wanted to see Beri as a hunter of supernatural monsters and I still hope to see it.  Integrating mythology the way the author does is a nice touch.  Why I rated the book a 2 has a lot to do with the ending.  This is a minor spoiler.  The three months or so that Nikolos was gone turned out to be 14 months.  Beri was in the lower plane for a day or two and that turned out to be three months.WTF?!Time moving differently in other places is a standard in fantasy books.  Except making it exactly the opposite of what has been established for a predictable plot twist is frigin terrible.  I can already see the next book being overfilled with stuff and the things you would expect to get done, will linger on.  I will wait and read the reviews for the next book before I purchase it.  If the next book is written like this one I will be done with the series.  At just over halfway through this book I skipped pages just to get this book over with.I just want people to be clear that most of the book is set up, you'll know what will happen, and there is little action.