Rilya

This book is a lot like other Mead books in may ways (for better or worse... mostly better I think). She mixes mystery, romance, and urban fantasy with a considerable amount of witticism and endearing/sexy characters to weave yet another hard to put down yarn.

Here, Mead takes on yet another urban fantasy sub-genre: The modern faery-tale.

I wish I could give this first book 3.5 stars. It's a good book. Totally love the series after reading Thorn Queen, and I bet you will too. But it lost stars for starting off really (really) dull and the narrator.


1) It took me several attempts to get into this book (especially since I am a HUGE Richelle Mead fan and very biased this is saying a lot).

2) The narrator, who is a competent reader, doesn't fit the book in my opinion. She sounds like a middle aged woman with frizzy hair and owl like features enhanced by really round glasses and thick lenses... (where I get these things, I don't know, but the image really such with me and interfered with my picture of the character... a lot). The character is a slim athletic young woman in her early to mid twenties with red head with Liz Taylor eyes and the bad-ass-ness of Jean Reno in the professional (with a fantasy twist, and 0 age inappropriate romances).

Like all Read books, the mystery is totally solvable as soon as you know what the mystery is. (well, there are a couple of books with not totally predictable story arcs... but most really, lets be frank, these plots are just to get the characters moving about and taking in the world she built).

If you can get passed the discrepency of voice and written word, and make it past the first few chapters, this series looks like it will pan out to be up to SB and VA snuff.

This story is great. This series gets better with each book. After the first book, this really ceased to be a YA series to me. I would recommend this to any Urban Fantasy lover. It is one of the better series. Those who don’t like the teen (or chick lit) genre will perhaps trudge through the first 1-2 books (though I certainly loved them) but by Book 3 this book becomes great Urban Fantasy. Though I loath to compare this series to Twilight or Harry Potter, since they couldn’t be more different, I think is much the same in this one regard – it is more YA for the first 1-3 books, and broader appeal in later, when the characters become central combatants of more world shattering dangers.

I really really wish they would bring the old narrator back. She was Rose. It’s very disjointing to have this new voice, whose personality is cooler, and whose face and figure - everything - just looks totally different to me.

Emily Shaffer is talented; my grudge is only that I want them to bring back one of my favorite narrators of all time, Khristine Hvam, who totally nailed the flippant and fiery tone of the main character. Indeed, the humor isn’t really there anymore – its written, it just doesn’t really come across as all that funny.

Maybe Emily can read for the Storm Born series? I hate that narrator - she sounds like a 50 year-old chain smoker who wears coke bottle glasses and has frizzy hair, not a young, hot athletic bad-$$ with red hair and catlike violet eyes. That choice of narrators I just don't get. But I digress.

I have to say it could be worse. They could have changed to a bad narrator, like Cassandra Norris, who seems to inherit all successful YA urban fantasy audio book franchises, and make them totally unbearable.