Pretending to be the Myfanwy that the world already knows is no easy task. That Myfanwy has a meek personality, an unusual ability that she hates to use, and a tendency to hide in the background. She administrates a division of The Chequy, a secretive government agency made to protect the United Kingdom from supernatural threats, and she has a great memory for small details about the history and workings of the organization. The new Myfanwy knows only what she finds in the notes and files that she’s been left, and while she has similar skills and tendencies, she shows a level of assertiveness that surprises her coworkers.

The New Myfanwy / Original Recipe Myfanwy divide could have gotten confusing fast, but it was handled well. We get to know the first woman only through her letters and other people’s recollections of her. Her writing style doesn’t always mesh with the shy, retiring person we’re told about. At first that seemed inconsistent, but then it left me with the impression that Myfanwy’s new personality was similar to how she might have been without the childhood trauma that she faced. I liked that the author put real effort into exploring Myfanwy’s identity issues rather than just using it as a hook for the story.

The setting hits a great balance between the bureaucratic realities of Myfanwy’s office and the strangeness the things they deal with, which is a relief considering that the other supernatural agency books I’ve read stray predictably into ridiculous levels of weirdness or Bond-film badassery. The people of the Chequy appreciate the seriousness of their responsibility, and I liked that Myfanwy always took a moment to think about the victims that her enemies left behind. The Chequy’s traditional, chess-based structure, full of overlapping responsibilities and outdated ideas, provides good opportunity for drama. Myfanwy’s colleagues were all interesting, and I was glad we got to know them a little.

The first third feels a little uneven, probably because it starts off with some really cool action and intrigue, and then we get a lot of Myfanwy reading letters. The letters were good moments for characterization and introspection, but they did get exposition-heavy as well. Things evened out once I got further into the book, and it couldn’t have been too terrible a drag on the pace considering that I devoured the whole thing in a couple of days. The placement and specifics of one letter made a final twist too obvious, though.

There were some fun moments, but the book sometimes felt like it was trying too hard in the comedy department. Character descriptions could also have been improved, it felt like we were too often told about people based on how attractive Myfanwy thought they were (and in what way).

The only thing that seriously bothered me was Myfanwy’s nasty tendency to be snippy about the looks of other women she met, to the point of making a mental joke about hoping one woman had slept her way to the top (presumably because she shouldn’t get to be both beautiful and good at her job). That line and several similar moments stood out, especially because the book was filled with competent, proactive female characters. Do super-powered secret agents really need to be so superficial and jealous of each other? It’s unlikeable and unnecessary and just plain yicky. Those bits were also among the very few moments that made me remember I was reading a male author writing from a woman’s perspective.

Despite my few issues, I really enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone looking for an urban fantasy novel that avoids that cookie-cutter feel. I hope we get to read more about this world.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

This book was much, much better than Pike’s Whisper of Death, but there were still some aspects that disturbed me while rereading it from an adult perspective. Massive spoilers are below the break.

The teens in the story were involved in a hit-and-run in the desert nearly a year before the book begins. While sports star Tony was driving (after having a few beers), several others either had or felt some responsibility for the accident. And everyone agreed to bury the victim and go on with their lives. Just when they think that chapter of their lives is over, someone with knowledge of the accident forces them to play a series of dangerous pranks.

I liked the setup and overall story, but characterization was once again a problem. All the guys in the group have solid, genuine relationships with one another, but the girls bicker and compete. The self-assured girl who speaks her mind is branded a jerk, despite the fact that the others aren’t any nicer to each other.

“Joan the jerk” is really sexualized, and that seems to be part of the reason the heroine, Alison, dislikes her. Alison has a crush on Tony, and she hates that Tony has gone out with Joan. Of course she can’t be upset with Tony for dating a girl that she doesn’t like. No, it’s Joan’s fault for being sexy and pursuing the guy that Alison wants.

The relatively small amount of sex-related content is all really awkward. One of Joan’s tasks late in the book is to spread a rumor that she’s a lesbian, which she refuses to do even after two of her classmates disappear for failing their assignments. Having people think she might possibly be gay is apparently a fate worse than kidnapping and possible death. Alison thinks about “putting up a good fight” towards keeping her virginity on her first date, which is an amazingly creepy expression to use in that instance.

And just like in Whisper, the female protagonist takes an unfair level of blame for all the book’s drama. Alison is just as responsible as any of them for burying a dead stranger in the desert, but at the end of the book she takes on a heaping helping of extra guilt. After a fantastic chase sequence through an empty housing development, it’s revealed that Neil, a member of the group, is the mysterious, letter-mailing kidnapper.

Neil is shy and had a history of illness. He’d used a series of other, imaginary ailments to cover up the fact that he had terminal cancer, because he didn’t want his friends to feel sorry for him. The cancer caused mental problems, which made him identify with the dead stranger in the desert and seek to punish his friends for their crime. Neil also had feelings for Alison.

Once Alison finds out that Neil had a thing for her, she remembers what she thought was a casual offer from Neil to go to the movies several months earlier. After Neil’s death, she feels a sense of crushing guilt over not going out with him. Alison actually says that, because he was so nice, it was bitchy of her to reject that date with him. Alison never suggests that she was attracted to Neil in that way, but apparently that shouldn’t matter.

In the world of Chain Letter, a girl should understand that an invitation to hang out is a date, that a nice guy deserves that date no matter what your own level of romantic interest, and that not going along with it means you’re a bitch (and therefore partly to blame when that nice guy starts hurting your friends).

Sheesh.

(Some sentences from this post are from my much shorter Goodreads review of the book.)

[This post includes major spoilers for those who haven't seen the show at all, and minor spoilers for last Sunday's episode.]

The show begins when a young boy, Henry, shows up unexpectedly on Emma Swan’s doorstep and announces that he’s the child she gave up for adoption. Emma returns Henry to his home, and learns that he believes everyone in his town is a storybook character under the influence of an evil spell that made them forget their true selves. Emma sees Henry’s fairy tale fantasy as a sign that he’s deeply unhappy, and she decides to move to the town to be near him.

In doing so, she ignores the wishes of Henry’s adoptive mom, Regina. The show presents that as totally okay,  because Regina is a controlling, emotionally distant woman who, by the way, is secretly the evil queen who cast the spell that trapped all the storybook characters in the real world in the first place. Regina also has a history of bad parenting, since she’s Snow White’s wicked stepmother.

Instead of giving the main characters of Once Upon A Time some level of nuance, Regina and Emma’s dueling moms routine is portrayed as a struggle of good against evil. The audience is told that Regina can’t truly care about Henry, because the curse that she used to doom the town has literally made her incapable of love. There are a few times when Regina feels like a more realistic woman whose obsession with revenge has just carried her too far into darkness, but then the show has her go and do something cartoonishly evil like kill her own father or rape a huntsman.

Henry thinks that Emma is the key to fixing the curse and helping his friends and neighbors remember their storybook selves. Emma doesn’t believe in Henry’s other world, but sometimes indulges his stories anyway. Emma and Regina clash over everything, especially when it comes to Emma’s relationship with Henry or her growing role in the community. Regina makes cutting remarks over Emma’s fitness to be a mother, while multiple characters make references to Emma being Henry’s “real” mother. At one point there’s even a suggestion that Emma might be able to challenge Regina for custody.

The last few episodes before the break seemed to have moved away from such directly crummy portrayal of adoption. But then on the most recent episode, Mr. Gold (who is fairytale’s Rumplestilskin) told Regina that her claim to be Henry’s mom was just a technicality.

Seriously, ABC? I want to like this show, but you aren’t helping matters. Adoptive families are real families, and you need to stop suggesting otherwise. I get it, Regina is evil. That doesn’t excuse the constant undercurrent of scorn heaped on her in the name of being an adoptive parent. I may check out the rest of the season in hopes that they find a way to move around that unpleasantness, but the idea of the good birth mother swooping in to save the town from the evil adoptive mom is such a major part of the show that I don’t have much hope of that happening.

Get it here:

http://www.ilona-andrews.com/magic-gifts/

Whisper of Death is about Rox, a young woman who takes a stressful out-of-town trip with her boyfriend, Pepper. The pair return home to find that their town is empty. Their family, friends, and neighbors have disappeared. The radio and television play only static. Even long distance phone calls go unanswered. Rox and Pepper eventually find three other teens, and the group starts to wonder if their predicament can really be related to a dead classmate who seemed to have the power to control those around her.

I’ve got hazy, nostalgic memories about all the Pike books I’ve read, but rereading this as an adult was troubling. A lot of things about the book were creepy (in a bad way). A plot summary and my full spoiler-filled reactions are under the break.

Some parts of the story make no damn sense at all. Rox goes to get an abortion, but changes her mind after being given anesthesia. On the way back to her town, she catches a glimpse of a figure who looks like Betty Sue, a local girl who committed suicide a few weeks earlier. As the other characters share what they know about Betty Sue, it becomes clear that she’s got the vague supernatural ability to change or compel people by writing about them. The teens start dying one by one, in ways that match Betty Sue’s stories about them, and everyone’s connections to Betty Sue are revealed. Rox is especially upset to learn that Betty Sue had also been pregnant before she died, and that Pepper was the father of that unborn child as well.

At the end of the book, we learn that the demented Betty Sue is Rox and Pepper’s child. But we can’t be too hasty to add “evil time travel” and “having sex with her own father” to Betty Sue’s list of crimes. It turns out that Rox, who thinks she left the clinic in time to stop the abortion, suddenly finds herself back there dying from an unexpected surgical complication. Rox realizes that she can go to Pepper and restart the cycle of Betty Sue’s revenge, but she stays in her body and lets herself die, presumably in order to spare Pepper and the others a second horrible death. So was any of Rox’s experience real, or was it all just the dream of a dying woman? Who knows? And honestly, who cares?

Betty Sue tells Rox that the abortion gave her the power to trap and kill the people who had hurt her. Thinking about that too much makes my head hurt, so I’m not even touching the logic of it. The upsetting part of that idea was that the book warped around the responsibility for Betty Sue’s killing spree back to Rox rather than focusing all the blame on, for example, the crazy time-traveling witch who killed people with her writing. Rather than just letting Betty Sue be a troubled teen with a cool power, Pike centers everything around an unnecessary abortion plot and makes the entire experience a massive guilt-trip. It was squicky, especially when you throw in the incest angle that nobody in the book commented on at all.

The other big “oh no you didn’t” moment for me was when it came out that one of the characters had raped Betty Sue. This was followed by a nasty little suggestion that she had magically coerced her own assault. This repeated point didn’t come from Betty Sue’s diary or anything, the other characters just thought it was likely because, hey, you know how freaky she was. She was a strange girl, and she had the power to make people do things, so she must have made him rape her.

Yes, this book actually used “she was asking for it” to provoke sympathy for an admitted rapist. It went there.

The misogyny of blaming a rape victim for her attack and telling a young woman that her abortion caused the murder of her boyfriend (and several others) went completely over my head as a teen. And Rox and Pepper’s relationship also had some moments that I found disturbing, like their interactions after she backed out of the abortion. Rox said he didn’t need to help raise their baby or even pay child support, and the dialogue made it sound like this was somehow a noble offer that she’d bear all the responsibility alone. Pepper said he’d be there for her, but he didn’t treat her very well during or after that conversation.

All this makes me really apprehensive about what else I’ll find as I read back through my other old Pike books, and now I’m even more determined to do that. I want to see what else I missed when I was younger.

(Some sentences from this post were taken from my much shorter Goodreads review of the book.)

After the story, there’s a “Timeline” section presenting the events of each book in condensed form. I guess it’s intended as a reference for those who are trying to remember specific details without re-reading, but it’s entirely skippable. Each book’s entry does include transcripts of written exchanges or phone calls between Eric and Bill, but they’re pretty dull with only a few exceptions. The Timeline is credited to the woman who wrote the summaries, and the text doesn’t make it clear if these little Bill/Eric bits were written by the same person or were provided by Harris.

The next section, written by Harris, is about the short stories. She mentions the events of “One Word Answer,” but those were also considered significant enough to include in the preceding timeline. Each story has a short description of its events and a mention of where it fits between the books, there are also descriptions of stories that focus on other Sookieverse characters.

Then there’s a Sookie-perspective chapter, also by Harris, about the various types of supernatural creatures in the world. It includes a family tree for any who are confused about the details of Sookie’s fairy lineage. That’s followed by a trivia quiz filled with laughably specific questions about the names of people or places that were mentioned once and the colors of various characters’ cars. The cookbook portion includes one series-relevant tidbit about Caroline Bellfleur’s famous chocolate cake that made it worth a skim.

The book is rounded out by Q&As with both Harris and Alan Ball, the creator of HBO’s “True Blood” adaptation. There’s also a section about Harris’s career and a personal essay from a fan club organizer that will mostly be of interest to other early fan club members. The final, largest section is an exhaustive A-Z listing of characters, places, things, and references from the books and short stories. Like the Timeline, I guess this could be an interesting reference, but I’m not sure when I’d ever personally use it.

A surprising omission was a complete bibliography of works by Charlaine Harris. All her books and stories are mentioned, but they’re in non-skimmable paragraphs and separated out into three different chapters. I’d like to have had a couple of pages in list form of all the books in each series, especially one that includes the short stories in the reading order and has a reminder of which anthologies those are found in.

This book was kind of a strange mix for me, and I’d recommend that even fans of the series check it out from the library before buying. I’m glad that I did.

We get to explore a new area of faerie this time, one that Toby doesn’t know much about. A couple of the established characters have connections to the Undersea, though, which brings up some interesting complications. There are plenty of twists that involve purely land-based drama as well, including several major shocks to both Toby’s surroundings and her personal life.

Toby’s had a lot of roles over the course of these books, and we see her move through most of them here. She often seems to feel out of her depth, but she compensates for that by really putting thought into how to act like the mentor or the countess or the friend that the people around her deserve. It’s nice to see a heroine making that level of effort towards caring for other characters, because sometimes novels get so caught up in saving everyone that the actual relationships fall through the cracks. I read too many books where I’m told how the characters feel about each other without really getting it on a gut level. But in this book, it’s easy to understand why Sylvester would be concerned about Toby even while he’s sick with worry over his daughter. It’s easy to understand why Tybalt is willing to stand up for her.

I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: this is the best urban fantasy series going. The mix of episodic action and ongoing story is spot on, and best of all, the longer-term arcs are really starting to pay off. It’s rare for me to find books that match my ideal pace so consistently. The stakes keep getting raised for Toby, but it happens in a smooth, natural way that doesn’t feel like the author’s just shaking things up without purpose.

This book has some really great emotional moments. It answers some questions and closes the door on a few chapters in October’s life. And like my very favorite series books, it leaves me immediately wanting more.

Death Valley premieres tonight on MTV at 10:30.

I often end up with mixed feelings about novels based on fairy tales, and this retelling of one my old favorites, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, is no exception.

I liked Azalea’s interactions with her sisters, and I especially liked that she seemed to mature as the story went on. Unfortunately the story was so packed with princesses and suitors that only the heroine got much attention. One of the secondary relationships was adorable, but the main romance felt tacked on.

The princesses got caught up in a cycle of sneaking away, being tired, and getting into trouble with little other movement in the plot. It all started to feel like “dance, rinse, repeat.” The antagonist took a turn for the menacing in the end, but that mostly managed to make me wish he’d managed more than blandly creepy earlier.

The setting was interesting and well-described, and the author did a good job of revealing details slowly. Certain other aspects of the writing didn’t work for me, though. Moments of pretty fairy-tale prose kept clashing up against modern slang, and things tended to get muddy during the action scenes.

I guess I like it best when adaptations go deep into the characters or add an unexpected twist to a classic story, and despite its promise, this one really didn’t do either of those things.

Here’s the list of romance elements that bug me.

• The Eternal Love Triangle
  Nothing makes me want to smack a heroine faster than when she spends six books trying to decide between suitors. No, honey, you can’t have them both, and if you try to then it kind of makes me think you’re a bad person. A love triangle needs to be resolved in a reasonable amount of time.
• Sudden Asshole Syndrome
  Don’t you hate it when an established love interest suddenly turns into a total jerk just to provoke a breakup or inject some drama? I hate it. I hate it a lot. Don’t spend a couple of books getting the main character to fall for someone only to have that person go from hero to jerk without warning.
• Speed Dating
  Heroines who establish a pattern of changing their boyfriend more often than I clean out my fridge bother me. At some point it starts to feel like the author values the sexual tension more than the characters. The need to explode existing relationships also tends to lead to Sudden Asshole Syndrome.
• Unnecessary Couple Fights
  Once a hero and heroine have settled into a relationship, they don’t need to constantly snipe at each other to keep things exciting. They can work towards different goals or argue over strategy, but conflict for conflict’s sake makes them both seem petty.
• Supernaturally-Mandated Sex
  If the characters need to get their power-up from getting it on or develop some kind of mating urge, that tends to mean there’s some target number of bangs per book. Predictable, mechanical love scenes aren’t hot, and neither are the disturbing consent issues that often accompany sex magic. Stop making me worry that the protagonist is a rapist.

My final issue with romance in a UF series is trickier than all of those put together: it’s not uncommon that I just don’t like the turns a protagonist’s love life has taken. Maybe he ended a relationship that I wish he’d have continued, or she took back someone who did her wrong far too easily. Maybe the author wrote my favorite suitor out of the plot, or even worse, killed him off. Maybe I think someone involved in a love triangle picked the wrong person to be with.

As a reader, I love surprises. New obstacles, new antagonists, and new challenges are all great things. But there’s something to be said for not throwing a wrench into every romance. My favorite series novels, the ones that keep me eager for every new entry, are the ones that, in addition to exciting plots and compelling characters, also manage a sense of balance among the lives of their protagonists. If a heroine or a hero’s love life is constantly as chaotic as the danger they’re often in, it eventually makes them stressful to hear about, and that makes me less enthusiastic about spending my limited reading time with them.