2014 modern fantasy/romance. Jade Crow runs a comics-and-games shop in
Wylde, Idaho, where lots of magical creatures congregate. She's hiding
from someone. But she isn't going to be able to stay hidden.
Let's deal with the elephant, or rather mouse, in the room first:
at 24,000 words this is a short novella rather than a novel, so don't
pay full book price for it, and don't expect more than the basics;
there's no room for much in the way of character development, and the
necessary background infodumps to get the series started mean that the
plot has to be pretty simple too.
The short version: Jade Crow had really bad relationship problems,
of the potentially helping end the world sort never mind probably
dying, and has been hiding out for the last twenty years so as not to
come to the ex's attention. And she's a sorceress, which is a type of
magician that other magical creatures distrust. But now one of the
judge-jury-executioner types of the shapeshifter community has rolled
into town and is going to cause Upset.
Oh, and he's extremely hawt.
This is basically literary junk-food, but Bellet is a competent writer
and it's junk-food that tastes good. There's a serious, pivotal,
life-changing moment… that you'll miss if you blink, because we have
to get on to the next bit and words ain't free. If this were the first
section of a single novel, some of the world-building could be punted
into the rest of the book and the stuff that stayed could be expanded;
this feels more like the notes for the book.
There's only one real wrong note for me, a reference to the "Dungeons
and Dragons Player's Guide" which… no, it was always the Players'
Handbook. Especially for someone who grew up playing D&D in the
1980s. It's the sort of thing that no gamer would get wrong, and the
author's error makes the heroine's gamer credentials come over as
fake. (It's already a bit of an uphill struggle, because: why do you
need fantasy escapism in a life that already has fantasy and magic and
stuff? There are several potentially good answers to that, but we
don't get any of them here.)
It looks as though the next few books in the series get slightly
longer, but not much. Definitely not to be taken seriously. Followed
by Murder of Crows.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.