It was urban fantasy that brought me back to science fiction after a very long period of reading fantasy and mystery. Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series hook me like nothing else had done for several years. After reading one book, I immediately ordered the other ten that were published at the time.
But the series took a strange turn for me as a reader with Narcissus in Chains and I haven't found a great replacement yet. I tried Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden, especially since I was familiar with Butcher's posts on the now defunct LKH yahoo group. I liked it but I didn't love it. (My eldest son, 17, does, however. Now I wish I'd saved all of Butcher's old posts to win some cool mom points.)
I started Rachel Caine's The Revivalist series and loved it but two books are hardly satisfying to a voracious reader. But when I saw HarperCollins offering reviews copies of Kim Harrison's 11th book inThe Hollows series, Ever After, I seized the chance to start at the beginning. The publisher sent me the full set.
I hope to be reporting on that series soon. I started one on the train to New York City last week, loved the beginning but put it down when I realized I'd picked up book four, not book one. Oops.
In the meantime, I handed off my review copy of Ever After to my friend and fellow romance author, Kate Rothwell, who nearly tore it out of my hand, so happy was she to find a copy before it was officially released. The only condition was that she write a review. The following is from her. I'll quote from the last part of it, since it initially reads somewhat negative:
"I ended up loving the book."
Be warned. There be all kinds of spoilers after the cut.
From Kate:
I am a Harrison fan girl. I’ve read every book in The Hallows series, a few of them more than once. I look for short stories. So I seized Ever After from its rightful owner before she had a chance to so much as read the jacket copy.
I ran away with it. I settled down in my favorite chair.
I fell asleep.
If I wasn’t a drooly fan-girl I wouldn’t have lasted. In the first few pages, there were a couple of annoying things: Rachel holds her purse as fig-leaf twice–a vivid image but having it mentioned twice felt like someone didn’t edit right. There’s mention that “Ivy” is off with “Glenn and Daryl.” That fact is brought up twice, and only the second time there’s a passing mention that Glenn is an ex-FIB officer. I, the major fan-girl, had forgotten the other character and didn’t even remember if Daryl was male or female, until I looked at past books.
Any author writing a series trouble with the balance. People who’ve read the other books will skim what you say about the past and you don’t want to clutter up a new book, but when you mention a name, it’s nice to remind us why we give a damn about that character. As far as new readers go – don’t start with this one. Jump in with an earlier book. Go on, you’ll have fun.
I got annoyed for other reasons. We haven’t liked Rachel’s ex, Nick the thief, for a while. But really is it necessary to have him convert from a character we were fond of to an utter worthless spider? We’ve had two complete turn-arounds since the book in which we met Nick. He went from a brave, sort of goofy student to a worthless piece of trash, with no redeeming features, scum in appearance and personality. And Trent, the ruthless, lying, attractive drug-lord from that book, is now a complete saint. Still attractive, of course.
Can’t these people get a bit of a break and be sort of …human? I think that black and white reading fits Rachel’s view of people though. So I suppose it’s consistent with her character. Fine, fine, grumbles the reader. I’ll let that one go. And it’s true that there are hints to their conversions in previous books.
Hey, our girl has grown up. For once, Rachel’s not the fool who goes running off to the rescue after agreeing to wait for a better plan.
My other whines are perhaps more legit. Two major characters die. Pppfht. Like that. Off-screen, no build up to it, they are suddenly dead. Everyone in the book mourns them, but it’s an abstract sorrow. Their deaths are there so Rachel can be pumped up to do hard stuff and make hard choices. That later part of the book works well. But her response to those deaths reminded me of an annoyance I’d felt when Kisten, a main character, died in an earlier book. The loss was all about Rachel.
Here’s what I mean: Mourning one of the deaths in this book, she cries, “I could have loved him!” (Even though she had made it very clear a couple of chapters earlier that she never could have loved him.) Sure, we all think of our dead in terms of what they meant to us. But Rachel doesn’t seem to get much past that.
There’s a lot of description of messing with the purple ever-after issues demon world issues. Some of it was vivid and clever. But a lot of it put me to sleep—though to be honest, I was tired. Still when I get a book I love, sleep is not going to happen. The descriptions of magic issues seemed longer than usual.
Okay, so does that mean we’ve gotten my whiney complaints out of the way? Yes?
Final analysis time:
Speaking of turn-arounds I didn’t expect – I ended up loving the book. The last part, maybe the last third, made up for the rest. The way Rachel and her friends end up working together made the book, much of the series come together. The fight with the bad guy demon was good. (Ku’ Sox was more cartoony in this book. Nasty, but not as purely terrifying). A lot of what had happened in previous books had been leading up to this confrontation and it worked for me.
The smaller patterns of the book that had been annoying me were swallowed up by the last third of the story and it turned into the usual Kim Harrison experience for me: I couldn’t put it down. And the last scene, the aftermath as several characters sat around, getting drunk, was lovely. I wish the books were all about the demon Algaliarept. Harrison wrote a short story called The “Bespelled,” about Al and his familiar, Ceri. If you haven’t read that story, read it first. It’s in the Into The Woods collection of short stories. With that history in mind, the ending of Ever After is even more touching.
So maybe if you’re reading this review, ignore the first two thirds of it. And don’t give up on the first chunk of the book either.
