Rating: WARTY!
This urban fantasy novel title shares my initials, and I have to live up to its title here, because, while the first time I read it, it wasn't great, neither was it awful, so I got the next two volumes thinking I might get into it. In some ways the story has a good premise, but in others, it's trope and cliché and I've moved on from that because of so many substandard and/or otherwise disappointing reads I've been through. I much prefer the road less-traveled these days because I've become so tired of reading the same old stories under supposedly different, but instead just are highly flimsy guises, and this novel is far from a road less traveled. So in the end it really was an Ill Wind for me.
It harks back to the ancient idea that there are four elements: air, earth, fire, and water, which is patent nonsense, but under this premise, the protagonist is a powerful weather warden (the series title). Weather wardens control the weather which means all of us ought to be really pissed-off with them, because they sure aren't doing much of a job. By that light, we ought to be extra pissed-off with Joanne Baldwin since she controls two of the four elements, and that, apparently, is rare.
Joanne is on the run from someone or something, and desperately trying to find her heroic guy to rescue her, and that 'damsel in distress' motif is a problem for me, especially since we don't learn very quickly exactly what she's supposed to have done, although the blurb talks of "accusations of corruption and murder." I have no clue exactly what it was she's supposed to have done because the story was not that memorable, and it's irrelevant anyway because you know for a fact it will turn out that she was set up.
But I gave up on the second reading far too early to get that information refreshed because I really didn't care to read it again. I don't even recall why it needed to be such a mystery except as a rather ham-fisted attempt to lure the reader on. It didn't lure me on as I recall. I was more interested in Joanne and her powers, but that interest was somewhat diluted by her desperate need of a St George.
So all I can say is that this didn't really do it the first time, and although I resolved - for whatever reason - to give it a chance, on closer examination, it failed. But what I lose on the read-about, the local library gains for its book carousel, so I can't complain too much! But I can't commend this either.
