Blind Date with a Werewolf: a Novel in Stories

It's been awhile since I read anything by Patricia Briggs, so it seems fitting that her new book, Blind Date with a Werewolf: a Novel in Stories is the first book I read in 2026! 

In Blind Date with a Werewolf, Asil, the Moor, one of the oldest and scariest werewolves, is given the "gift" of five blind dates for Christmas (which, as he keeps repeating to his "Concerned Friends," is completely unnecessary as he doesn't celebrate Christmas). Asil has been barely controlling his wolf for a long time, after the death of their mate (and has been begging his Alpha to kill him, though the Marrock has always refused), and so thinks this is a bad idea. But his friends are betting against him (the rules are that he must stay with his date for 2 hours, no one must run screaming from the other, and Asil is not to kill anyone) and Asil likes a challenge, so he agrees. The five stories in this book tell the tales (or the aftermaths) of his five blind dates.

Prior to starting Blind Date with a Werewolf, I had been struggling my way through another book (which I put aside in order to read this). I was so happy at the speed in which I got into this book; I finished it in about three nights! Asil is a really fun character: he's full of interesting knowledge because of his age, but is still interested in the people and happenings around him. He's physically gorgeous and likes to play this up, but he never seems arrogant (he's just accepting of it as a thing, and often just wants to get past it). While a very dominant wolf, he is very protective of innocents.

His dates themselves are also very entertaining. He starts out with a vampire LARPer; while Asil isn't into men, he has no problems continuing on the date and even dancing with him. From there he meets someone who loves cats (an interesting option for his "Concerned Friends" to choose for a werewolf!), a platonic date with a fellow gardener, a ghost hunter, and a high society swinger. Of course, nothing goes as planned as vampires, witches, wyrms, fae, and other creatures make their way into his dates.

But along the way, Asil also starts to heal, and even finds his wolf talking to him once again! This is largely thanks to his fourth date, Ruby; something about her calms Asil's wolf, and even though they just go on one short date, Asil's wolf is convinced that she is "their" Ruby. I was really happy with how that all developed, and I hope to one day read more about them. :)

I absolutely loved this book. It was such a fun read and a great start to my year. :D 

Late Eclipses

After finishing An Artificial Night, I decided to jump straight into the next October Daye book, Late Eclipses.  This time around, Toby is summoned to the court of the Queen of the Mists.  After some vague warnings from Tybalt, Toby finds herself given the title of Countess of Wintergreen.  She knows it's a trap though: changlings never get titles.  But at this point there's no indication of just what the Queen is up to.

Toby's immediately pulled away to the Tea Gardens, to find something equally unsettling: Lily is sick.  As an undine and pureblood, Lily should not be able to get sick.  Toby vows to get to the bottom of it.  But before she can do much investigating, she has to make an appearance at the Torquill's Beltane Ball.  Only while there, she is the only witness to Luna fainting, possibly from being poisoned from wine.  Toby got a whiff of Oleander de Merelands' magic - Oleander is one of the ones who were responsible for turning Toby into a fish for fourteen years.  Oleander is also an assassin extraordinaire, whose weapon of choice is poisons.  But there's one problem: every time Toby seems to believe Oleander is around, no one else can see her.  Is Toby's changeling blood finally making her go mad?  Or is there a sinister plot afoot that she's tangled up in?  

I was quite interested in the story up to about this point (and was even thinking of ordering the next two books in the series because I was having so much fun with it).  But then things started to take a rather...dare I say: familiar...turn.  Rayseline, Sylvester's daughter, hates Toby.  When Luna is incapacitated, and Sylvester turns mad with grief, Raysel uses the opportunity to take control of the Knowe, naming herself in charge.  She banishes Toby, and starts spreading rumours that Toby is the one who hurt Lily and Luna.  After Lily dies, Toby returns to the Knowe, but Raysel uses it as a chance to have her arrested.  You see, having been named Countess, Toby is now no longer under Sylvester's protection, but the Queen's.  And the Queen orders her to stand trial, a sham used to convict Toby and sentence her to execution.  She's locked in an iron dungeon for a few days; her friends break her out and bring her back from the brink of death by iron poisoning.  But Toby cannot stand idly by, and insists on returning to Sylvester's Knowe in an attempt to save Luna.

While the plot trappings are different, the second half of the story was, in many ways, a repeat of An Artificial Night, and how Toby kept charging back into Blind Michael's lands.  She was even held prisoner and poisoned (although it was more a mental poisoning rather than the iron poisoning she suffered here).  But even after all that, she had to charge back into danger after barely healing to see it through.  There's nothing necessarily wrong with this plot on its own merits, but reading it right after An Artificial Night got very, very boring.

Now sure, there was some interesting things going on too. Toby got shot with Elfshot, which is deadly to Changlings.  Her mother mysterious showed up and changed her, making her far more fae.  This saved her life, but also means that iron is now a problem when it wasn't before (the change happened just before she was sentenced and thrown into the iron jail).  Her features even changed, becoming more fae.  

Another thing that was interesting (though sad) was Lily's death.  Lily's subjects were able to mourn, but Toby never was (she was just a crazy exhausted mess running from one fire to the next trying to put them all out).  I would have loved if the book slowed down a bit to deal with (and really show) some of this stuff.  But Toby herself even says that there's no time to deal with it now.

I'm also a fan of the relationship she's developing with Tybalt.  Somewhere along the lines she's started trusting him.  And while he's still very aloof, you can tell he cares for her.  That's all going to get complicated in the coming books because Connor, her one-time crush and Rayseline's husband, is freed from the marriage at the end of the book (Raysel did some unforgivable things, and his Selkie clan dissolved their political marriage immediately).

So all in all, this ended up just an okay read.  I do wish I had waited awhile before reading it, rather than starting it immediately after An Artificial Night.  But thanks to all the repetition in the plot, I'm done with the series for now - if I go back to it, it won't be for a long while.

An Artificial Night

I finally got around to reading An Artificial Night, the third book in Seanan McGuire's October Daye series.  I've been looking forward to it since reading A Local Habitation (and hearing it was much better than that book was)...it just took me a few years to actually get around to reading it.  :/

This time around, Toby starts off by having a really bad day - her Fetch arrives, which means that Toby's death is immanent.  That's followed by frantic calls from one of her best friends, Stacy, because two of Stacy's five children are missing and one is now in an un-wakeable slumber.   Toby goes to investigate, finding clues but nothing definite that points to what happened to the children.  With Stacy's permission, she brings the slumbering Karen to Lily's Tea Gardens in the hope that the undine can wake her.  Along the way, Tybalt finds her and asks for her help, because several of the children from his Court of Cats have gone missing as well.  Though a great healer, Lily is unable to help Karen.  But she sends Toby to "speak to the moon" - which brings her to Luna, Sylvester's wife.  While figuring out that riddle, she finds Quentin at her place - his human girlfriend has gone missing as well.  

Luna is the one who fills in the missing pieces.  The culprit is Blind Michael, one of the Firstborn Fae, and master of the Hunt.  No one would ever willingly join him and his hunt, so every hundred years he takes the unwilling: the children.  He takes faerie children to be his riders, and human children to be their steeds.  He twists them all and binds them to himself.  And he has taken all of the missing children that Toby is looking for.

To find him, Toby needs the help of the Luidaeg, the Firstborn Seawitch.  The Luidaeg can send Toby to Blind Michael's realm on one of the few roads that are open.  First Toby takes the Child's Road, which involves Toby being transformed into a child.  She manages to bargain with Blind Michael for the children - if she's able to get them out undetected, she can take them home.  But Toby takes more children than were bargained for, and so the Hunt pursues her outside of Blind Michael's realm.  Next she takes the Rose Road, care of Luna, to try to stop the Hunt from pursuing her (and to save Karen, whose soul was taken by Blind Michael while she slept).  Blind Michael agrees only if Toby stays in Karen's place.  He begins to bind Toby to him, but before the final binding can finish, Toby's friends manage to save her (along with some of the other children who were taken).  But Blind Michael has already done some major damage to Toby's mind, and she is determined to end things with him.  Which leads her back using the final road, the Blood Road, which demands a tithe be paid in blood, either Toby's or Blind Michael's.

I wish I had read An Artificial Night a bit closer to A Local Habitation.  It's been a few years, and I forgot who many of the characters were (like Quentin).  Yes, the book kind of explained things well enough so I could follow it alright, but it would have been a lot nicer had I actually remembered people!  But I did enjoy An Artificial Night.  It was a really interesting story and I didn't want to put it down (I read almost the entire book yesterday afternoon).  My biggest complaint (other than some weird things that were repetitive and should have been caught in editing, like how the book explained who Lily was both times Toby went to the Tea Gardens in almost exactly the same words) was that it wasn't scary enough.  When a story is dealing with childhood bogeymen and the main character gets turned into a child, that's a story that's ripe for some creepiness and (childhood) horror!  Unfortunately I just never felt that during the book - Toby went on treating everything kind of just like business as usual.  

Other than that though, I really enjoyed An Artificial Night.  I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series, Late Eclipses (and without letting several years pass before I pick it up!)

Good Omens

I first read Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett years ago (before I started this blog - I'm guessing the early 2000's).  I don't remember much about it except that I really enjoyed it (I was actually talking to my mom earlier today and she said I tried to get her to read it.  I don't remember that, but it's a testament to how much I liked the book if I tried to get her to read it, especially since it isn't remotely her kind of book).

So a friend of mine suggested that a group of us read it as a sort of book club book.  Since we're not able to see each other right now thanks to the pandemic, she thought a book club on Goodreads would be a great way to hang out, so to speak.  She suggested either Good Omens or another book; consensus was Good Omens (even by the people like me who would be rereading it).

So Good Omens is the story of the Antichrist, Adam Young.  He is mistakenly given to the wrong parents and grows up largely left alone in rural England (while the boy who Heaven and Hell thinks is the Antichrist grows up being tutored by their agents, who hope to sway him onto their sides).  It features a large and eclectic cast of characters, from the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, to the three kids in Adam's gang (Pepper, Brian, and Wensleydale - the Them), the four horsemen of the apocalypse (War, Famine, Pollution and Death; Pollution replaced Pestilence, who retired when penicillin was invented), Anathema Device, the descendant of Agnes Nutter (a renowned witch who actually got the future right in her prophecies), a couple of witchhunters (Shadwell and Newton Pulsifer of the Witchfinder Army), and a medium (Madame Tracy - she's Shadwell's neighbour), who are almost all flailing about trying to stop the end of the world.

While I liked Good Omens the first time I read it....I honestly wasn't a huge fan this second time around.  It took me over 70 pages before I felt like things were actually getting interesting enough to continue.  I caught myself wondering around page 200 or so how there could possibly be another almost 200 pages in the story.  With the huge cast of characters, I found I only really enjoyed a few of them (mostly Aziraphale and Crowley, but more-so when they were together; there was a chunk in the middle of the book where they largely disappeared and that felt like a slog). 

With that being said though, I actually enjoyed the ending once I finally got there.  Having Adam's friends defeat the horsemen, and Newton halting nuclear Armageddon by attempting to "fix" the machine (because he breaks everything he tries to fix) was pretty great.

But overall, this felt like a book I should have left alone.  I would have preferred to have remembered Good Omens being great (even without actually remembering it in any detail), rather than now living with the fact that it isn't as good as I remember it being. :(

Oh, but one interesting side note on rereading it: when I first read it all those years ago, a friend of mine mentioned that it was really obvious whether Pratchett or Gaiman was writing a given part.  I hadn't yet read anything by Pratchett, so at that time I didn't notice this at all.  Going back to it now though, oh yeah, it seemed really obvious (particularly in the first half of the book - basically the really crazy stuff just felt more like Pratchett, as it were).

Watcher of the Dark

Well here we are: Watcher of the Dark, the final Jeremiah Hunt book by Joseph Nassise.

This is going to have a lot of spoilers, so be warned.

Watcher of the Dark takes place a few weeks after King of the Dead.  Hunt is on the run, not only from the Boston Police Department and FBI, but also from Simon Gallagher's forces (in order to save Denise's life in King of the Dead, he had to stab her in the heart with an ancient dagger.  Gallagher walked in right at that moment and Hunt was automatically on the run with no chance to explain himself).  Hunt's made his way to Las Angeles and is lying low in an old motel, only to find himself kidnapped by unknown assailants.  They bring him to LA's marshall, Carlos Fuentes, who threatens Denise and Dmitri's lives unless Hunt agrees to work for him.  And so Hunt finds himself working with Fuentes lieutenants: Rivera, a very powerful mage, Ilyana, a half demon, Perkins, a man able to magically find anything, and Grady, a Mundane thief.  The five of them are tasked with tracking down a mysterious magical key that has been split into three pieces.  A key that the mysterious Preacher has just decided will be the perfect payment from Hunt for his help in saving Denise back in New Orleans.  All the while Hunt is trying to find a way to get out of his indentured servitude to Fuentes without his friends getting hurt.

A lot of the plot gets driven along by Hunt (and therefore the reader) not knowing what the heck is going on.  Fuentes' lieutenants won't tell Hunt anything about the missions he's on with them, leaving him to kind of figure it out as they go along (which seemed really stupid - shouldn't you at least tell him vaguely what everyone is looking for so he has some way to actually be helpful?  Or, I don't know, what to watch out for so he can actually be on the lookout and not trigger anything/warn people if he sees stuff?)  They're also not particularly likeable as a bunch, especially through the first half of the book, making me miss Denise and Dmitri.  Sure, some of them kind of grew on me as the book went along. I think Perkins would have been endearing had he lived longer.  While I never cared for Fuentes or Rivera (they kind of made me think of mustache-twirling villains), Ilyana was also starting to become a more interesting character when she started opening up to Hunt (although I don't know how much of that was truthful).  But when Denise and Dmitri finally do show up, I still felt relieved that we're back to the people I actually care about.

What made this even worse was that at the end of the book, when Hunt, Denise, and Dmitri come up with some sort of plan to get themselves out of this mess, they also don't actually say what it is (the exact line when Hunt comes up with the plan was: "And I told them how we were all going to get out of this mess."  That was it.  Then the plan slowly gets parceled out over the next fifty pages).  I feel like this has happened in the other books, too, but it was particularly infuriating since the entirety of Watcher of the Dark was built off of withholding information.

Another thing that I really didn't get was Ilyana.  I'm not entirely sure what her entire powers were.  And a lot of what she could do seemed to make Hunt's addition to the team completely irrelevant.  She could see ghosts.  She could eat ghosts.  She presumably could see other people working magic (like Hunt could with his ghostsight).  Oh yeah, plus she was super strong and super fast. So why was he here again?

But to make it all weirder, she (and no one else for that matter) didn't seem to notice that Hunt was possessed later in the book.  Like possessed Hunt had passionate sex with her one night.  Then normal Hunt woke up confused as to why he was naked in her bed and where his clothes were.  Shouldn't she have noticed something weird with his aura or something?  Or did she notice and just not care?  I have no idea.

I'm also not entirely sure what happened with her at the end either.  She betrayed Hunt to Rivera and Fuentes.  But then Fuentes and Rivera betrayed her for some reason.  It seemed like she was going along with them, so I don't know why they needed to betray her (especially since after they did, they only took a bit of her blood but didn't kill her or anything).  Maybe they needed her as a sacrifice for a later part in their ritual that got interrupted?  But it seemed like the Gate to Hell was open already, so wasn't the ritual completed?  I honestly don't know.

But the book ends and Hunt has once again stopped the world from ending with the help of his friends.  Unfortunately the story doesn't actually end here, even though it is the last published book in the series.  The way it ended, with the FBI still searching for them, the Preacher being mad at Hunt, Gallagher's men still presumably after Hunt, and Ilyana and Rivera still out there, it makes me think there were supposed to be more books following this one.  But it came out in 2013 and there seems to be no further books in the series seven years later...

Actually, that brings me to one more question about Watcher of the Dark: where WAS the FBI?  Hunt was driving around LA, both with Fuentes' lieutenants and by himself, often in broad daylight and not at all trying to hide.  And Fuentes even calls Agent Doherty, who was Agent Robertson's protoge in King of the Dead.  Since they all believe Hunt is the serial killer known as the Reaper, shouldn't they have been all over LA looking for him, like they were all over New Orleans in King of the Dead???

Needless to say, Watcher of the Dark wasn't my favourite book in the Jeremiah Hunt Chronicles.  It kind of felt like a stepping stone to help the larger Jeremiah Hunt story along.  Unfortunately there just hasn't been any more of that larger story released to give this book more meaning. :(

King of the Dead

Well, I did it!  I actually read the second book in Joseph Nassise's Jeremiah Hunt trilogy, King of the Dead!

King of the Dead picks up a few months after Eyes to See.  Jeremiah, Denise Clearwater, and Dmitri have been lying low now that Jeremiah is on the FBI's most wanted list, being framed as the serial killer known as the Reaper, plus blamed for the death of Detective Stanton (even though he is innocent of that, too).  But as time goes on, Denise starts getting visions about the apocalypse happening in New Orleans that she has to be there for according to Gaia.  So despite Hunt's trepidation, the three of them make the journey.  The arrive to find the city's magical community in shambles.  Denise's old friend and ex-coven mate, Simon Gallagher, is the new Lord Marshall because everyone else is either dead or in a coma.  Some sort of plague is targeting the magical community, and as much as Hunt would rather be ANYWHERE else, because Denise refuses to leave, he remains to help her figure it out.

King of the Dead was an interesting read.  I liked how the FBI agent tracking Hunt got his own chapters (I actually found myself wishing there were more!) It was also neat to see how the magical community worked (or at least functioned since many of its leaders were out of the picture).  I also really liked the mystery of the disease and how Hunt's ghostvision ended up key to helping everyone figure it out.

But I didn't really like the end of the book.  There was what I'm going to call a "final showdown" in New Orleans where the book felt like it was going to wrap up.  But then the story kept going for another fifty pages.  And those last fifty pages felt rushed.  This may have been on purpose, as Hunt himself then had a tight time frame, but it just didn't feel very satisfying at all (especially since there was only one chapter from Denise's perspective, where maybe a second one could have taken the time to flesh out what was happening a bit more - although again, this was probably deliberate that there wasn't a second Denise chapter so the reader could be more shocked by what happened when Hunt found her).  The very end is also rather abrupt so, I suspect, the story can continue in book 3 right where this leaves off.  This is all really unfortunate, as up until this rushed and kind of unsatisfying ending, I was really enjoying the book.

With that being said though, I'm still interested to see where Watcher of the Dark takes us....

Eyes to See (Reread)

This is a bit embarrassing (yet also somewhat par for the course for me, unfortunately) - years ago, I read (and loved) Eyes to See by Joseph Nassise.  At that time I couldn't wait to get my hands on book 2 in the trilogy.  But then for whatever reason, I just never actually read it.  I've taken the trilogy out periodically from the local library, but never read more than book 1.  I think as the years passed it was harder and harder to go back because I didn't really remember Eyes to See anymore. 

So a few days ago, I decided I was going to remedy that.  I once again took the trilogy out from the library (super glad they're all still available!) and actually started rereading Eyes to See.  A large part of this decision came from me feeling like reading something I actually want to read, not something I feel like I HAVE to read (which just seems to keep happening in life).

It was very interesting going back to it, six years later.  I only remembered some of the vague story beats.  I remembered Jeremiah Hunt, and how he had given up his eyesight to find his daughter, which ushered him into a supernatural world.  I remembered the ghostsm Scream and Whisper (but not necessarily their names).  And I vaguely remembered that Hunt found her by the end, and was on the run from something by the end of the book; that was about it.

What I didn't remember was the actual goings-on.  Hunt gets called in by Detective Stanton to investigate a murder scene.  Stanton thinks Hunt is a psychic, and Hunt has no intention of telling Stanton otherwise.  The murder is a gruesome one, and the murderer left writing in several dead languages on the walls.  As an ex-professor who specialized in dead languages, the writing in particular intrigues Hunt, but so does a familiar-seeming charm he finds at the crime scene.  When a second body is found with the same writing (and yet another charm, which Hunt realizes came from a charm bracelet that his daughter had), he realizes this may be the lead he has been searching for over these five long years to finally find her!

The world that Nassise built, especially around the ghosts, is still so interesting.  I liked the first encounter where Hunt is hired to exorcise a ghost from an apartment building, and Hunt goes through all the levels of ghosts that he's encountered (and how this particular ghost hid its true nature).  I actually would have liked to see a bit more of that sort of thing, but oh well, the story is still good without it.

This time around, I admit that I had a harder time getting into it though.  I'm not entirely sure why....but I suspect that it had to do with Hunt being on his own.  I know that the first time I read Eyes to See, I didn't really like some of the interactions between Hunt and the other characters; this time, I actually preferred those moments over Hunt being on his own.  I really liked Dimitri, and loved Stanton - he was the perfect foil to Hunt (and I loved how once he saw real evidence of the supernatural in terms of the fetch, he was all on board with stopping it because he knew it was dangerous).  I think I liked Denise more this time around too - the hedge witch was a very capable woman on her own.

I'm once again excited to read book 2; this time I'm actually going to read it, too! ;)

Oddkins: A Fable for All Ages

Note: this review was originally written in a notebook on Dec 11/19 while I was on vacation last week.  I've made some minor edits to it while transcribing it.

"Oddkins: A Fable for All Ages" is another story I've had on my Kindle for quite some time.   A friend of mine recommended it to me (or at least I think he did - he may have recommended a different Dean Koontz and I got this one accidentally).  I've never actually read any Koontz before and wasn't really sure what to expect.  When I first started reading "Oddkins," I didn't know what to make of it, but once I got into it I liked it quite a bit.

After a magical toy maker passes away, it's up to his creations to find his replacement.  But the forces of evil want to claim the toy factory for themselves; a group of evil toys from the hidden sub-basement awaken and seek to stop the Oddkins, while an evil toy maker arrives to buy the factory.

The Oddkins were a fun group: they were all unique, yet very loyal and good.  I loved how they got through their various encounters (like how Butterscotch talked down the mongrel, or Patch stood up to the alley cats), and how each of them had dreams beyond their initial purpose of helping their special children.

The squad of bad toys were really well done too.  Rex and the others were all rather terrifying in their own ways, especially for the Oddkins (but I felt it too).  I also liked how besides being malevolent, their lack of empathy meant they didn't really work together because in a way they couldn't.  That was a really nice touch.

I have to admit, I'm now quite curious about what happens to Viktor, the adult who saw the toys and had his world unexpectedly awakened as a result.  What does he go on to do now?

My one major complaint was that I found the story a bit heavy-handed at times, particularly at the end.  But overall, I thought this was a well-written good vs evil showdown, which I do recommend.  Just not necessarily to all ages - it's a bit dark for children in my opinion.

Hags, Sirens, & Other Bad Girls of Fantasy

I bought Hags, Sirens, & Other Bad Girls of Fantasy many years ago, whne I was in school. I wanted short stories to give me a break from reading psychology text books. Life didn't exactly turn out how I'd planned, so Hags, Sirens, & Other Bad Girls of Fantasy (and most of the other anthologies I bought at that time) remain on my bookshelves (and on The List). While looking at my books, trying to decide what to read after Empire of Sand, I thought I'd give this a whirl.

The premise behind Hags, Sirens, & Other Bad Girls of Fantasy is fun: this is supposed to be an anthology of stories dedicated to the bad girls of fairy tales and mythology, because "bad girls have more fun" and they "have their real world competition beaten, hands down, both for outrageous behavior and for sheer, unmitigated gall" (those quotes come from the introduction by editor Denise Little). Unfortunately the vast majority of the stories in this volume didn't live up to Little's hype. 

It started with "Shall We Dance" by CS Friedman, which was an odd little tale about a bewitching mystety woman who preys on alpha males, making them into shadows of themselves before abandoning them for the next alpha. This one was odd because the mystery woman spoke no words (the story was narrated by a guy who saw her destroy his friend), but it did have a bad girl. Then we had "Bitter Crowns: a Tale of Crownland," which was the first story that left me wondering why it was in this book. The story is about a female lawgiver who travels around and dispenses justice (rather like a Herald of Valdemar); she encounters a serpent from her past who traps women in trees so they can create blood fruit for it. While interesting, there were no hags, no sirens, and no bad girls. This happened again and again, with tales that either had no bad girls, or bad girls who were really good girls doing bad things. Of the 20 stories in this book, only about 5 of them had an actual bad girl doing bad things. The winner on that score waw probably "Black Annie" by Jean Rabe, a brutal tale of a hag who slaughters a village because they killed a cat in an attempt to lure her out. 

The stories I enjoyed were "The Light of Ra" by Phaedra M. Weldon, which was about Isis, Set, and Osiris, "Mother of Monsters" by Greg Beatty, which was said to be one of the really good stories of this volume by other reviewers, "Lilith" by Peter Orullian, another one listed as really good, and "Heart of Stone" by Scott William Carter, which tells of how Medusa learned to love. 

I know that anthologies are really hit and miss, but I found it to be a real slog to get to the better stories in this volume. I almost didn't finish reading Hags, Sirens, & Other Bad Girls of Fantasy because it was such a slog. But I made it through, and now I can finally cross it off The List for good).

Fair Game

After reading The Night Circus, I decided to continue on with the fantasy reading.  The Night Circus reminded me of urban fantasy (but without the vampires, werewolves, witches, and fae), so I decided to read Fair Game, the third Alpha and Omega novel.

Fair Game takes place quite some time after Hunting Ground.  Werewolves have outed themselves to the world.  The Marrock Bran has tightened werewolf law; where once young wolves may have gotten a warning, now they are executed if they break that law.  And Charles is the one who gets to do the honours.  He's been sent out as his father's executioner for about a year now.  And the job is killing him. 

Luckily for Charles, he is mated to Anna.  Anna knows what is happening because Charles has stopped playing music and has shut down the bond between them.  She goes to the Marrock, who doesn't listen to her.  So then she gets Asil to help her.  It is Asil who finally gets through to Bran that Charles needs to do something else to get his mind off of all the killings he has had to do for the pack.

Luckily an opportunity comes up that is perfect: there is a serial killer loose in Boston, and the FBI want a werewolf to help them find the culprit.  Bran sends Anna to consult with them, with Charles as her bodyguard.  They discover that the victims have largely been half-blooded fae, along with a few werewolves thrown in since the werewolves have gone public.  Unfortunately for Anna and Charles, helping the FBI puts them on the killer's hit list.

I loved this book.  Reading about Anna and Charles felt like going back to visit old friends.  Fair Game was also a bit of a departure from the way Anna and Charles are in earlier novels though: Anna is in many ways the stronger one here, while Charles is the weaker one (ghosts from his executions are literally haunting him, and he is terrified they will hurt Anna so he has shut the bond down between them to protect her, even though that is hurting her terribly).  I loved the change in Anna in particular because she has grown into herself now, refusing to be anyone's victim (she even says that Charles teaching her to protect herself is the best gift he ever gave her; that he is still willing to come and help her/protect her is the second best).  And seeing Charles truly vulnerable to something was refreshing (and how the power of love literally does save him, because fearing for Anna's life helps him break through the stranglehold the ghosts have on him).

This was the first book though that I felt might have benefited from me reading more from the Mercy Thompson series (which I haven't read since 2009).  A lot of time passes between Hunting Ground and Fair Game and there's even reference to things that have happened to Mercy that I really feel like I should have read first.  But really, it's not a huge deal - those references are only made in the first chapter or so, then Fair Game goes onto its own path.

The characters were also a little hard to follow.  Anna and Charles meet six people initially in Boston: two FBI, two Homeland Security, and two agents from CANTRIP (the agency dealing with supernaturals), then a Fae.  Outside of the two FBI characters, who are around through the whole book, I had a hard time keeping all of the other characters straight, especially since I don't really think the Homeland Security ones show up again (so I kept second guessing myself with names and wondering who was who).  By the end of the book I was fine, but the middle got a bit confusing trying to keep everyone straight.

But like I said, I really did love this book.  I'm glad the series has continued (book 5 was published in 2018) so I'll be able to read more adventures of Anna and Charles in the future. :)

Touch the Dark

I've been reading so much nonfiction lately that I hit my end: I had to read fiction.  So I grabbed Touch the Dark by Karen Chance, a book that I was planning on reading right before I ended up with a bunch of nonfiction library books I had to get through first.  So yesterday I grabbed it for something to read while waiting for my doctor's appointment.  I read a good chunk of it there, then came home and just kept reading, finishing it at like 3 or 4am.

Touch the Dark is the story of Cassandra Palmer, a seer who was raised by vampires.  She's been on the run from the one who raised her for years (she had previously gone to the cops and effectively destroyed his then business dealings and he wants revenge).  Realizing he's finally found her, she's about to run again but this time she wanted to say goodbye to her roommate (this was the first time she had someone else dependent on her and didn't want to leave him in the lurch).  The vampires catch up to her at the club where he works, but he manages to fend most of them off because he happens to be a vampire too (Cassie is right betrayed because she had no idea).  He takes her to the Vampire Senate, where they want to offer her protection in exchange for her help.

From here things get a bit weird for a bit.  Cassie has a ghost helper, Billy-Joe, who tells her the guy who killed her parents is nearby. So she hops out the window to go talk to him (and maybe kill him? I honestly don't know what her plan was here). I thought the guy was a vampire and Cassie didn't really have much luck dealing with multiple vampires on her own, but it turns out he was a satyr (which was extra weird because she had just been talking to the ghost about faerie and how faeries couldn't exist when this satyr shows up, so I don't know).  Anyway, the vampire guardians and this crazy mage find her somehow (magically?  I don't know, wasn't very clear), then there's a showdown in the parking lot with them and Cassandra versus the satyrs who turn out to be part were-rats.  Plus some evil (?) mages show up too.  Cassie and Billy-Joe work some magic of their own, accidentally popping Cass out of her body and into the past.  After she gets back from that adventure, she pops out of her body to possess one of the evil mages.

After that craziness passes, the good made, Pritkin, freaks out because Cassie shouldn't be able to do the things she just did and therefore must be a demon.  He attempts to kill her right in front of the vampires, who don't take too kindly to that (but can't kill him because that would start a war with his mages).  They eventually manage to convince him that Cassie is not a demon (and suggest that he was sent to kill her because he has a one-track mind).

Somewhere around here, it's revealed that Cassie may be the heir to the Pythia, a powerful seer who is sort of the arbiter between the various supernatural factions.  Mircea, a powerful master vampire, tries to have sex with Cassie, believing it's the only way to make sure she is a suitable candidate for the Pythia's power (there's a rumour going around that the power won't go to a virgin).  There's a super long sex scene where he agrees to answer her questions in exchange for pleasuring her (it's kind of weird and goes on forever - over like two chapters).  She's into him, but keeps refusing sex because deep down she doesn't want to be trapped with the Pythia's power.

Before Mircea can actually do the deed, they're interrupted because the Senate is under attack.  Around here, Mircea and Cassie travel back in time because they've figured out that the bad guys are doing the same: they're travelling back in time to change the past so events go the way they want to.  They have sex in the past in other bodies (because why not?) then have a showdown with the bad guys: Rasputin and the missing heir to the Pythia (a seer who was trained from birth to become the next Pythia).  Cassie hopes the missing heir is under Rasputin's coercion, but that appears to not be the case when the heir attempts to murder her.  Time stops and the actual Pythia (who is dying) shows up and tells Cassie that too bad for whatever she wanted, she is going to be the new Pythia (it turns out the whole losing your virginity rumour was just something a seer from the past started because people weren't letting her take a lover. I thought that was funny).  So Cassie and Mircia stop Rasputin and the heir (who get away), and save their future.

As you may have gathered from my synopsis, this book was weird.  Very weird.  I didn't think I liked it too much at the beginning, but then Billy-Joe showed up and it got pretty fun.  Billy-Joe was a gambler who thought he was god's gift to women - some of his banter back and forth with Cassie was hilarious (Cassie was the only one who could really talk to him).  Since no one else could really see him, he made a great spy, but Billy-Joe being who he is, he had a habit of wandering off and otherwise not being super reliable.  He was just fun.

I liked Mircia (he's a master vampire who is related to Dracula) and Louis-Cesar (another master vampire, and the dueling champion of Europe) as well.  The way the two different master vampires were was pretty fun, and I felt like Chance really nailed how Mircia would think of mortals.  Also, putting together Louis-Cesar's past from the snippets of memory Cassie Saw was rather fun.  But outside of this, the book felt like a bit of a mess plot-wise, almost like it needed to be split into two to be more coherent (or just heavily edited to be more coherent?  I don't know).  I read the synopsis for the next books in the series and they didn't really sound too appealing, so I'm probably not going to read any more.  But that's okay.  I'm glad I gave this one a try, and had some fun along the way. :)

War for the Oaks

Well, since I've been on an urban fantasy kick lately, I decided to give Emma Bull's War for the Oaks a shot.  War for the Oaks caught my eye at a little bookshop a year or two ago; it's apparently one of the pioneering works of urban fantasy.

War for the Oaks is the story of Eddi McCamdry, a rock and roll singer and guitar player.  She decides to leave her boyfriend and the band they were in together; her friend, Carla, who is the drum player, decided to leave the band too.  Carla was driving Eddi home, but Eddi decides to walk the rest of the way; on her walk, she is drafted into a war between the Fae.  For their war to be serious, they need a mortal tied to the war.  The Seelie court decided that Eddi would be their mortal.  So they assign her the phouka, a shape-changer who can be either man or dog (and the one who was responsible for Eddi being drafted into the war in the first place) to guard her.  The phouka refuses to leave her side, so Eddi decides (at the suggestions of both Carla and the phouka) to start a band.  Carla knows a keyboarder, but neither of them know a good lead guitarist or bassist, so they put an ad out and attract some first-rate talent: shy Hedge who only mumbles while speaking but is a fantastic bassist, and handsome Willy Silver, who plays a mean lead guitar and electric fiddle.

Eddi is right off the bat attracted to Willy.  She takes him to bed after their first date, even though that's normally not her style.  But at the first faerie engagement at Minehaha Falls, she discovers that Willy isn't human.  And he wasn't exactly playing fairly with her emotions.  She later discovers that Hedge also isn't human.  She gives the two of them the same choice: they can stay in the band if they want to, but she refuses to keep them if they're just forced to be there by the Seelie queen (the Lady).  Both agree to stay, and hence the band Eddi and the Fey is born for real.

Meanwhile, Eddi slowly finds herself falling for the phouka.  He's a trickster sort of fae, constantly getting on Eddi's nerves for the heck of it.  But he has always been straight with her.  During the first engagement, when Eddi is formally bound to the battlefield, the phouka gives her an ointment which lets her see through faerie glamour; she looks around in wonder and finds the phouka looking exactly the same as he always does.  The ointment allows her to go onto the battlefield without being coerced (the phouka even admits that if she had chosen to run at the end, he wouldn't have stopped her then - but she chose to stay due to his friendship).  They manage to survive the first engagement, even with the phouka giving away their hidden position to save the Seelie fighters from being ambushed on their flank.  Eddi even comes to the rescue of the brownie Meg, who ends up cleaning Eddi's apartment for her.  It isn't until the summer solstice though that the phouka and Eddi finally admit their love for one another (and Eddi takes a bit to convince because she's afraid it's just another game to him).

The summer solstice fae party also brings Eddi the information that the Unseelie queen, the Queen of Air and Darkness, has captured Willy.  She wants the Seelie queen to give her the next battle in exchange for Willy's life.  The Lady refuses, but Eddi pleads with her not to let the Dark Queen know.  Eddi instead comes up with a daring plan that will save Willy from the Dark Queen's clutches.  It requires the help of all of her friends, including Carla, her keyboarder (who is also Carla's boyfriend), the phouka, Meg, and Hedge (who was actually feeding information to the Dark Queen - he agrees to give the Queen false information for Eddi).  They rescue Willy, but he dies in the battle that follows; that prompts Eddi to challenge the Queen of Air and Darkness to a fair duel.  The Dark Queen accepts, and names her challenge: at Eddi and the Fey's next show, they will have to fight for the audience.  The Queen will use her magic to stop the audience from dancing; Eddi must use her to get them to dance.  The duel was supposed to be just between the two of them, but the Lady comes to spectate and names Eddi her champion.  Now if Eddi wins, the Dark Queen and the Unseelie court must leave Minneapolis.  But if the Dark Queen wins, the Seelie court must leave; plus the Dark Queen will take the phouka's life.

So there's a concert, and Eddi wins.  The end.

Honestly, that was literally how the book ended.  I was getting near the end and wondering how it was going to wrap up in so few pages.  And then it just sort of did, in a really hard to follow but quick musical magical battle.  Which was an honest shame, because prior to that I was rather enjoying the book.

I think my enjoyment was largely thanks to the characters.  I liked the phouka, especially at the beginning of the book.  Well, even at the end, where he had fun lines like "I'd thought in terms of seeds, you see, and never dreamed that what I had loosed on the Court was a madwoman with a crowbar."  But pretty much all the "main" characters, like Carla, or Hedge, or Meg, were interesting people populating the world.  Oh, I should also mention that the city was kind of a character in this book too.  I really wish I knew Minneapolis a bit more to have followed along with where everything was taking place better.

One thing that was rather a quirk of the book was the preoccupation with how people were dressed.  The fashion itself was straight out of the 80's (like turtleneck sweaters - I'd almost forgotten they existed until Eddi decided to put one on).  But Eddi details like every outfit she's in, or the phouka wears.  I can't think of another book that I've read with that much detail on clothing.

Other than the weird abruptness of the ending, I also didn't like how the book was a bit lax on time cues.  It would jump like a month or month and a half forward with little warning, which made it a bit hard to follow at times (until it would finally let you know where abouts you were in time).  The story is all linear (thankfully!) so you wouldn't think this would be that much of a problem, but strangely it kind of was.

Overall, I did enjoy War for the Oaks.  The story still holds up rather well in the urban fantasy genre, even though the book is like thirty years old (it's just a little bit dated, that's all.  Nothing wrong with that though - it shows the 80's rather well).  I just wish the ending hasn't felt so rushed.

A Local Habitation

So I seem to be on an urban fantasy kick lately.  I recently ordered some stuff for my cat from Amazon.  To get the free shipping, I decided to get myself the second October Daye book, A Local Habitation.  I was going to read it over the weekend, but decided to get through Hunting Ground first.  Once that was done, I jumped into the second Toby Daye adventure.

This time around, Toby is asked by her liege, Sylvester, to investigate his niece's County.  His niece, January, stopped calling him a few weeks ago.  For faerie political reasons, he cannot go himself.  So he sends Toby and Quentin, a pureblood who is fostering at his court, to investigate.

Toby and Quentin arrive to discover there have been several murders in the County, and January insists that she has been leaving Sylvester messages but HE hasn't been returning her calls.  When another person from the County is murdered, Toby and Quentin realize they may be in over their heads.  The murders are odd for many reasons - there are distinctive markings on the victims, their blood is dead (there is no memory left when Toby and Quentin both try to use the blood magic that is inherent to their bloodline), and the night haunts haven't been taking the bodies (usually these fae creatures take the bodies and leave a sort of mannequin that looks human behind, so normally the fae can call in mortals to investigate the death without fear of the bodies giving them away.  Not so in this case). Then when Toby tries to get Quentin out of there, his escort arrives without a car, right after Toby's car is totaled. The County is also a strange place - there is a dryad living in the tech tree, and no one seems to be telling Toby and Quentin everything they know, making it really hard for them to do their job.  

A Local Habitation was a bit of a mess.  The characters seemed to go out of their way to get murdered.  Toby repeatedly told the people of the County not to go off alone, then pretty much EVERYONE did.  Spoiler: most of them got killed for their troubles.

There were also two characters, brother and sister pair Alex and Terrie, who seemed obviously to be two people in one body.  Alex was only around during the day, and Terrie during night.  You never, ever saw the pair together.  But Toby never remotely figured this out - she had to be shown it near the end of the book.  They also seemed to be some sort of succubus/incubus thing, inspiring the opposite sex to love them; Toby sort of clued into that part way through the book, but still couldn't figure out what they were.  It was lame.

Overall, A Local Habitation was just okay.  I enjoyed it well enough, but wouldn't recommend it to anyone because it isn't great.  I've seen in other reviews on Goodreads that that seems to be the consensus - A Local Habitation is everyone's least favourite book in the series.  But book three is supposed to be phenomenal, so I'll be looking for that in the future.

Hunting Ground

I've had a weird relationship with Hunting Ground, the second Alpha and Omega book.  I started it not long after finishing Cry Wolf.  But for some reason I got about 30 pages in and just stopped reading.  Part of it was that I'd taken out a bunch of nonfiction books from the library and wanted to read those.  But the other part was that I just wasn't into Hunting Ground.

So last night, when I inexplicably couldn't sleep, I decided to continue reading Hunting Ground.  I actually just started again from the beginning; I breezed through the first 30 pages again.  Before I knew it, it was 5am and I was halfway through the book (after taking several breaks to attempt to sleep). 

Hunting Ground takes place about a month after the first book.  Bran, the werewolf Marrok of North America, has decided it's time for the werewolves to come out to the rest of the world.  He has arranged to have a conference with members from the European packs, to listen to their concerns and try to offer them help once the North American werewolves go public.  Charles has a horrible premonition about his father going; Bran reluctantly agrees to let Charles and Anna go in his place.  Immediately after this is decided, Charles feels better about it (he has Native American ancestry from his mother's side; the spirits often talk to him in feelings as they were going in this case).

So Anna and Charles go to Seattle.  Anna is doing much better, but still feels uncomfortable around dominant werewolves.  So to solve that problem, Charles asks one of the werewolves, Tom, and his witch wife, Moira, to take Anna out shopping.  On their way back from their second trip, they are attacked by vampires, who try to kidnap Anna.  They (as everyone does) see Tom as much more of a threat than she is; everyone underestimates Moira though, who manages to destroy some of the vampires with sunlight (causing the other four to flee).  As the conference continues, the vampires strike again and again, seemingly with magic they should not have access to.  The human mate of one of the European werewolves is tortured to death.  Then one of the very scary European Alphas is killed in a spectacularly brutal crime scene after he was in a fight with Charles.  The werewolves all know Charles was innocent because there was proof he hadn't been there.  But his scent was all over the place. On top of everything, the fae, Dana Shea, who was hired by the Marrok to oversee the conference (with no bloodshed) came very close to having Charles killed over that fight (and several of the wolves, including Anna, notice that the fae seems to have broken her word...)  Something is very rotten at this conference, and it's up to Anna, Charles, and the Seattle werewolf pack to unravel it before more people are killed.

I enjoyed this book a bit more than Cry Wolf because Anna has had a chance to grow a little bit.  Yes, she's still got problems being around a ton of dominant wolves.  But she's refusing to be cowed anymore.  Moira was a pretty fun character too, although I wish she'd had a bigger part in the book.  And Sunny (the human mate who died to vampires) was a pretty fun character too - it was neat to see what an Omega human would be like within the world.

I think the plot was pretty fun in a murder mystery sort of way.  I kept trying to figure out who the culprit was (since it looked like one of the werewolves at the conference was at least in on the attacks).  I actually had a pretty good inkling of who it would be until something happened that led suspicion away from that character for a bit (although it turns out I was right - I just hadn't figured out the why) ;)

So yeah.  As usual, a fun romp by Patricia Briggs.  It was the perfect distraction while I was having trouble sleeping! :)

Cry Wolf

I love Patricia Briggs’ books.  So I was pretty excited to start reading Cry Wolf, the first book in her Alpha and Omega series.  I got through the prologue, which dealt with a random character, then got thrown into the story at a point that most definitely wasn’t the beginning.  Annoyed, I charged my Kindle, bought and read the novella that takes place before this book, then went back to it.  Now everything made sense (and I knew who all the wolves in the first chapter actually were).

Once I got through that hurdle, I found I had a hard time putting the book down.  I’ve stayed up way too late over the last few nights reading it (I started it at 2am on the 7th, and finished it a little before 4am today).

Cry Wolf is about werewolves Charles and Anna.  Charles is a two-hundred year old very dominant alpha wolf (second to his father, who is the alpha of all the wolves in North America).  Anna is a rare omega wolf, who is sort of like a medicine woman; she exudes peace and can calm the rage of other werewolves.  Anna was turned into a werewolf against her will and brutalized (that all happened in the novella).  She falls outside of pack structure, so dominance doesn’t actually work on her (alpha wolves can normally command more submissive wolves to do things; those commands just slide right off of her).  In her old pack, she was kept ignorant of her powers and was told she was a useless submissive wolf.  With Charles and his father Bran, she starts to realize that she is neither useless nor submissive.

Charles’ wolf decided as soon as he saw her that Anna was his mate.  This is super strange for him as well as her because he’s never had a mate before.  Suddenly he finds himself not only determined to protect her (from danger as well as potential rivals like Asil, an ancient wolf who is almost as old as Charles’ father), but also able to let down his guard and relax (thanks to her Omega powers).

The story alternates between their two viewpoints.  Neither one really talks to the other one (sometimes because they aren’t given the time, other times because they’re afraid to express their feelings).  When they get to Charles’ home in Montana, Anna is overwhelmed and feels like she doesn’t belong.  It doesn’t help that Bran’s mate Leah comes over to make a power play with her, and that Charles keeps wanting to leave her behind on things because he doesn’t want to subject her to seeing him possibly kill again.  Charles is also injured (from the novella - he got shot three times with silver bullets, and one of the bullets wasn’t properly removed).  But he isn’t given a chance to heal because there’s a werewolf attack in the nearby mountains.  As his father’s enforcer, it’s his job to deal with it.  Normally that would mean killing the wolf, but with Anna coming along, there’s a chance they can bring him in peacefully.

But the rogue lone wolf is not the actual problem - he was a man changed when he defended a student in the mountains from an attack.  It seems there’s another wolf running around.  And it looks an awful lot like Asil’s mate who died two hundred years previously. Died to a witch....

This book didn’t do anything amazing, but I still had a lot of fun reading it (like I said, I stayed up waaaay too late while reading it).  I’m looking forward to reading the next one in the series (after a break to catch up on sleep though!)

Alpha and Omega: a Companion

I started reading Patricia Briggs Cry Wolf, the first story in her Alpha and Omega series. But I felt like I was in the middle of the story over the first few pages. So I looked it up on Goodreads and sure enough, there's a novella that happens first. Thankfully it was available on Kindle. So I bought it, charged my Kindle, and read it.

This novella is the story of how Charles and Anna met, and what exactly happened to her. She was changed against her will and told for three years she was a useless submissive wolf. Charles is the one who tells her the truth: she is not a submissive, she's an Omega. Omegas has are rare and fall outside of the regular werewolf hierarchy; Anna wasn't submissive, her pack had to beat submissiveness into her.

Together, Charles and Anna confront her pack. Unexpectedly, Charles' wolf claims Anna as it's mate (after knowing her for only a few hours). Together they discover why Anna's pack was so sick. And now she agrees to accompany Charles and the Marrok back to Chicago.

That was a bit annoying, but now I'm ready to actually read Cry Wolf.

Note: I didn't read the version in On the Prowl, but I like the cover better than what the Kindle version had.

Witchling

I actually remember buying Yasmine Galenorn's Witchling, many many years ago. The second book in the series, Changeling, was the one that caught my eye. But Witchling was the first book in the series, so in the end I decided to buy it.

Witchling and Changeling are the first two in Galenorn's series about the three half-human half-fae D'Artigo sisters. Camille is a witch whose powers only work some of the time (I'm not really sure why either....because she's a half-fae?) Delilah is a werecat. And Menolly is a vampire.

The three sisters are Otherworld agents working on Earth. When their fellow agent is murdered, they start an investigation that leads them to demons. It seems Shadow Wing, a powerful and dangerous demon, has taken over the Subterreanean Realm; now he wants to conquer Otherworld and Earth, too. He's looking for the nine spirit seals; if he finds and reunites them, the worlds will merge back into one. So it's up to the D'Artigo sisters (and pretty much everyone they meet) to stop him!

When I bought Witchling, I found it in the fantasy section of Chapters. From the back of the book, I thought it was an urban fantasy. It was, but it was more of a paranormal romance. I was a bit disappointed by that fact because that wasn't what I wanted to read. But I'd already started it, so I kept going.

For book 1 in a series, I really felt like it started in the middle of the story. Characters showed up from the past, and you'd get a big chunk of text telling you what had happened (how they got here, who these people all were, how Camille managed to figure out the solution to their problem, etc). That was actually a huge problem through the entire book - very little showing seemed to happen. Camille would just give you a narrated info dump, you'd get a bit of dialogue, then onto the next info dump. Because of all of this telling, none of the characters seemed to have any real depth, which was unfortunate; I think they could have been much more interesting than they all were.

The amount of characters introduced in this book was also kind of staggering. By the end, there are potentially three very attractive and dangerous men wanting Camille. There are guys interested in both of her sisters (but only one per sister at this point). They also managed to find Titania, queen of the faeries, three demons (which were all rather easily killed), Tam Lin, and a cute baby gargoyle.

One more gripe: everything seemed so easy all the way through the book. As I mentioned, Camille quickly thought through their problem and arrived at the easy solution - this was in the "final boss fight" at the end of the book, which took less than six pages to conclude from initial description of the demon to his conveniently easy death. This example is the most obvious one since I just finished reading Witchling, but it was by no means the only time this sort of thing happened in the book. As a result, the stakes never, ever seemed very high (even when the book was trying to tell me how scared everyone was or how frightening the big bad was).

While those were a lot of cons, the book had some definite positives. For one, the world was very interesting. I liked Galenorn's Otherworld, and some of the strange creatures in it (like the Corpse Talker, she was really interesting). I liked the idea that when the Earth and the Otherworld split apart, some beings chose to stay (like Titania or the vampire Dracula). And the Otherworld itself seemed really interesting (even though I didn't get much of a chance to see it, just whatrver Camille told me and a very small glimpse at the end).

Witchling is also a quick read, so that was a plus. I don't think I would've finished it otherwise.

So yes. Overall Witchling wasn't really my kind of book. So I probably won't go looking for Changeling now. :( But that's ok. I'm glad I gave the series a shot. :)