Author: Danielle Ellison
Publisher: Entangled
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!
Erratum:
p51 "How is spreading around our area so quickly?" should be "How is it spreading around our area so quickly?"
p174 "I start to pull my hand away but it the stupid mark will stop it." I have no idea what that means!
This is another first person PoV from Entangled - a publisher with which I've had mixed results. When they're good, though, they're very good, which is why I keep coming back. This is a sequel - as far as I can tell - to Salt, which I've not read since I didn't even know that it existed when I requested this one! Whether that affected my appreciation of this one, I can't say for certain, but I can say that I was not able to read all of this because it bored me.
How often have I blundered into a sequel without knowing it was one? You don't want to know. While this novel doesn't explicitly declare that it's a sequel, it does describe itself on its cover as "A Salt novel" (nothing to do with Karen Salt!), but merely declaring that doesn't tell me that this is a direct sequel to the previous one. It tells me that it's in the same universe and that's all. The earlier novel isn't available on Net Galley now, so I came into this slightly blind.
Penelope Grey (no word on whether she's brought down fifty shades...!) is an Enforcer - a trained witch which bewitches demons and thereby protects muggles from attacks. She's evidently based strongly on Buffy, so I feel I have to declare up front that I'm not a Buffy fan. I loved the movie which Whedon hated, but hated the series, which Whedon loved! Anyway, Penelope is a card- (well, gold triangle-) carrying member of the C.E.A.S.E. squad. I don't know what that means. I guess it's explained in the first novel?
She's paired with her boyfriend, Carter, and apparently works quite often with Ric - the token gay guy - and his partner, the straight Maple (kinda like Willow, but not, I guess? They're both trees, and since my name is Wood, I can empathize!). These two characters really don't have a heck of a lot of involvement in this story.
I have to say, also, that I have a real problem with first person PoV novels because unless they're done really well, they suck. This one is twice as bad because it has dual-person PoV - alternating Penelope and Carter which was depressing to say the least, although in the end I got used to it. This does highlight the fatal weakness of 1Pov (other than it's me-me-me all the time) - you can't depict anything happening unless the character witnesses it or at least hears about it, which severely limits the story. Adding a second 1PoV to the mix doesn't improve things - it merely makes them twice as bad and more confusing to boot!
Carter calls her Pen, but she doesn't call him Car. I'm not sure what to make of that! Maybe she doesn't do this because he's totally anal about his name - he won't use the first name William which his father employs, so he uses the middle name which his father refuses to use. Definitely parental issues here.
As it happens, reading from Penelope's perspective wasn't too bad, except, as I've mentioned, there's far too much me! ME! ME! when she's professing her powers and skills. It turns out that it's actually really annoying to hear a narrator keep telling you how truly wonderful she is. Who knew?! This is one very good reason why I usually start wishing for a come-uppance to befall the narrator just to put them in their place! I just don't like a main character who emulates a Care Bear; it irritates the heck out of me.
Another problem I had was with the trope Latin incantation: Virtute angeli ad infernum unde venistis. I had two years of high school Latin which is rusty as hell, but it seems that all this says is something like (roughly): "By the virtue of the angels, go back to the hell from whence (yes, whence!) you came," and thus the demon is dispatched.
Evidently killing off demons - or repatriating them - is really easy. That's fine, but I've never seen it explained in any novel which employs this trope why it is that Latin is supposed to have power - or at least more power than the equivalent phrase in English (or in any other language dead or living)! JK Rowling would have us believe that waving a stick and chanting two Latin words would get you some majorly magical results. Why? It would be nice - really and truly nice - for once to read a novel which dispenses with this tired trope or which at least explains it in a way that makes sense within the novel, but hope fades eternal....
Nor have I ever seen the point or purpose - in Buffy or in this novel - of the physical fight with the demons (or in Buffy's case, the vamps). In this novel they have salt bullets which kill demons (or technically which send them back to hell so they can come right back out again), so why the h-t-h combat? Why not simply get a salt-bullet machine gun and take them out? It made no sense. Neither did Buffy make any sense with the amateur karate hour when they could simply fired crossbows or stake-loaded guns at them. That's one reason why I never liked that show: it seemed so amateur.
Also, I never got the point of the demonic visits. What, exactly, were they here for? What was their purpose? What were they doing? I ask because in this novel it seemed like they actually had no purpose whatsoever other than to stand around like targets in a fairground for Pen and Car to show up and pop them down so they could get their cuddly toy (or their toy cuddle). Taking demons out was never a problem for these two, who probably ought to have been named Mary & Sue! It was always easy for them. There was no tension or drama involved at all in the fighting, so it wasn't at all appealing to me to read.
Back to the story. Something unusual is going on in town in that Statics (the novel name for people who have no powers - aka muggles, but that name was taken) are starting to exhibit magical powers (even without the Latin speech so I rest my case!) and this looks like it might be connected to Penelope finding herself some power by means of a disapproved route in volume one: her power effectively comes from the demons themselves which makes it even more inexplicable. The only person who seems interested in helping Pen figure this out, is actually not a person per se, but a demon!
Actually I found that demon to be the most interesting character in the entire novel (at least the portion I read). She's a female named Lia. How it comes to be that demons have regular names and come in at least two genders goes unexplained. Seriously, if they're just like humans, then where's the interest? I was more intrigued each time Lia showed up, but unfortunately, she wasn't showing up very much in the first 50% of the novel, and when she did show, it was always to Pen. In the end she really didn't do very much. She kept popping up like a clue in the children's show Blue's Clues which made her more of a cheap plot device than a real character, so I quickly became disillusioned with her, too. Since she was the only character at that point in whom I had any interest, I saw no point in expending any more time on this novel. I didn't care what was going on or how it ended.
It seemed really artificial to me that Pen has to meet Lia later to get some info! Why couldn't she get it right there and then? I don't mind being led around in a novel as long as I'm going somewhere - as long as there's a good reason for it - but when artificiality starts seeping in like a sewer smell, I'm less sanguine about it.
That seemed to be the problem with this novel - it never really went anywhere. There was a nice vein of humor in it from time to time, and some of the writing was truly interesting, but there was no descriptive prose at all to speak of - it was one long, long, terribly long, conversation, and all-too-often the conversation never went anywhere or moved the plot along. It became tedious to read.
If an editor had trimmed out about 30 or 40 percent of this novel, beefed-up the descriptive prose to provide some context and atmosphere, and cut the idle conversation back, I think I could have liked it. Potentially it had a lot to offer, but it never achieved that potential for me. Things didn't fit, or they didn't make sense, and it just became a chore to read in the end. I can't in good conscience recommend this novel.
