Gloria's Pages

Pretty disapointing.

The book had a good, strong start. Watching Mik finally bond with his team, their first missions, and watching him and Ash fall in love was nearly pitch-perfect. The flaws of the novel begin soon after, however. I have a hard time buying that digging into apparently publicly available information (or at least information that someone with Mik's security clearance would have access too) would result in Mik getting kicked out of the city just a week later. There's more to it than that, but as a cover story it's terrible. There's some interesting stuff with Violet's team, and I really like Daniel, but Mik trust them waaay too much. He'd just been betrayed by his people and tossed out, and the very people he'd been taught to fear and hate from birth take him in, and he trusts them just like that? Frankly I spent sometime thinking that Violet had done a mental whammy on him, but nope, they really were the good guys. Things progress from there, there are parts that are really good (like hunting horses, fighting the trio of vampires, the tunnel, and basically every scene with Daniel), but it starts to fall apart again with the info-dump from Marcus and the really easy breach of the city walls during the final invasion. And old, powerful spell like that shouldn't have been that easy to break. At the end the Big Bad even reveals all his plans to Mik, apparently because there's some rule of the universe that Evil must gloat over our hero. No cliché must be left unwritten. And Nate... sigh. What can I say about Nate, other than the fact that I called it the first time Mik caught him talking to himself? So obvious I thought it was a red-herring. It wasn't.

So, like I said, I really wanted to like this book, but the clichés kept getting in the way and bonking me on the head. Too bad.

Edit: yeah, called that too. God, the clichés in this book.

Final take: If you were to take out all the horrible clichés in this story it would be a decent read. Unfortunately they are such a glaring part of the story that I cannot ignore them. If the author manages to drop them in the next book it might be a good novel. For that reason I'll check out Origin of Darkness, but if it's as cliché-ridden as this one that'll be it for me and this author.