Other than Harry Potter, contemporary fantasy/occult stuff was never our cuppa......
And this book didn't make us believers.......it's a freakin' mess overall........sometimes sharp, funny and thrilling, but more often than not, dense, tedious and clogged with endless, nap-inducing mythology and world-building.......
At times, we laughed at its clever dialogue exchanges......and at times we literally snored through all the magic potions, ghosts, demons and whatnot.......those parts read like the worst college textbooks you ever had to suffer through.......
Speaking of college, that's where this tale unfolds.........asking you to beleive that the Yale campus hosts a hotbed of secret magical societies.......who do things like dissect still living hospital patients, using their innards to predict the future......
Policing these occultists and doing a fairly lousy job of it, is the Lethe, another super secret outfit. When the main Lethe Cop mysteriously disappears, his tasks fall to his incoming freshman apprentice, Galaxy 'Alex' Stern.
And Alex is some piece of work......she's a feisty, tattooed, take-no-shit badass with a horrific, violent backstory of her very own. When she starts an investigation to see if the magic crowd had anything to do with a townie girl's murder, she suffers through brutal assaults from entities both supernatural and mortal.....
This poor kid has to endure all this, solving the murder and the disappearance of her mentor while trying to keep her grade point average up.........(not to mention being stalked by an old ghost who want her to solve his murder.....)
Sounds like fun, huh? Only sporadically.
The pace remains ponderous throughout, until author Bardugo decides to pile on all the twists and showdowns in the last few chapters. It reads like the publisher grew tired of her dithering around and ordered her to wrap it up in the last 50 pages...……(we''ll give her this much, though.....a great kick-ass final line to set up the inevitable sequel)
If you're really into this epic, modern day unfocused hocus pocus, then we guess this book will make you happy enough and hit all your buttons.
But if you're new to this genre, just getting your feet wet, be advised this book makes no real effort to appeal to anyone who normally wouldn't go near this kind of book with a ten foot magic wand. Also, don't let kids get near it.....Harry Potter this ain't...….it's top heavy with rape and gore.
Okay for the fantasy fans...…..for everyone else, we'd only conjure up 2 stars (**)
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