Lower East Side Librarian

Part 4 in the Mortal Instruments series is compelling like the rest of them, but the ending annoyed me, and that the whole thing seems more focused on the romance than the paranormal bugs me, too. That's not to say you shouldn't read it.

"Alpha and Omega" is the first in this collection of paranormal romance novellas, and the only one I cared for. I could get into "Inhuman" and "Mona Lisa Betwining" at all, but I did read about half of "Buying Trouble" before giving up. A & O, while yeah, a romance, has more going for it than just kissery. The protagonist is a semi-recent wolf whose pack hasn't done right by her, and as it turns out has been behaving badly enough to attract the attention of the head werewolf in charge, who sends his hunky Flathead tribe son to bust some heads.

Insurgent starts off immediately where Divergent ended, so if for some reason you read Divergent first, you're kind of hosed. Even having read Divergent fairly recently, I couldn't always remember who everyone was in the first half of the book, and then in the second half I didn't always follow the action so easily. Sometimes authors get so caught up in their characters and stories that they forget that you don't know and love their children as much as you do. Don't get me wrong; Insurgent is a great read, but it does have that middle-of-a-trilogy thing going on, where even at 525 pages, it's really just a vehicle to get you from the beginning to the end.

I'm claiming credit for this one even though I didn't finish it. I got more than halfway through it before deciding it wasn't worth investing any more time in. I suspect Reichs's writing gets better as she progresses through the 20+ book series, but in the first installment of the inspiration for TV's Bones the author is trying too hard--to be funny and clever. My favorite aspect of the novel and character is the clear feminism and gender consciousness.

It's weird how writers can be both original and pedestrian at the same time, isn't it? The idea for Hate List, the story of the surviving girlfriend of a school shooter, is the original part. Probably in real life a lot of people would have a hard time forgiving her or wanting to know what's going on in her head, and would really not want to know how she still loves her dead boyfriend. But that's really good, true, confounding, conflicted stuff. The pedestrian, or maybe just annoying part is how she names people: a principal named Angerson, a bully named Bruter, and the worst, a shrink named Hieler. Ugh! She even talks about the names in the Q & A at the end, how she loves them. Whatever, they didn't totally destroy the reading experience for me. :)

Much the same as City of Bones and City of Ashes, but with more incest, City of Glass is compelling and an excellent companion for international travel.

The best thing about this first entry in a paranormal fiction series is that the sympathetic characters are evil. The succubus, imp, vampires and demons have one angel in their posse, but the titular character doesn't think much of him. The others like the angel okay, but mostly because he's a drinking buddy.