Shadows by Ilsa J. Bick
My rating: 3/5 cats
sigh.
yup—three stars cats. and i am angry at having to give this book three stars cats, because i was so looking forward to it! life is unfair.
okay—here are my gripes.
if you are planning on reading this one—do yourself a favor: reread/reskim ashes. trust me. do you remember every single person alex encountered in rule? i sure didn’t. and there are so damn many of them. and so many additional characters. here you go, just from a quick flipping of pages of shadows: jed, grace, tom, ray, ruby, leopard, acne, sharon, jess, spider, lena, chris, finn, peter, davey, tyler, lang, mather, weller, seth, kincaid, nathan, yeager, wolf, ernst, greg, john, slash, cindi, luke, mellie, daniel, etc etc etc. seriously—that is just way too many characters and way too many perspectives. books like infinite jest can have that many characters because they are long and dense and the author can handle that many discrete narratives without breaking a sweat. this one is 518 pages of over-margined and -spaced pages, so it is a shorter 518 than it should be, and not enough space for all of those stories to have adequate breathing room. also, i read ashes ages ago, so the nuances of relationships were long gone, except for the major players. mira grant is really good when it comes to reminding you about her characters and re-establishing characteristics, but this book (and insurgent fell victim to this, too) forgets that we have been reading other books in the meantime—in the year or so since the first book was out and we could use the gentle hand of the author to guide us. and i understand that that can bog down a story, but there is a way to do it well, and it is extremely helpful to readers.
if i remember correctly, ashes was told solely through alex’s eyes, and it was cohesive and the story moved ahead at a breakneck pace, which is what you want in a book like this.
this one was much slower for me, because i had to keep stopping and trying to remember who this person was, and what their deal was, and every time the “view” changed, i would have to regroup. and i am perfectly capable of reading a book from multiple viewpoints, but considering how strong alex’s voice was in the first book, to have it missing for nearly half of this one, and to have all these other characters giving their stories…it was disconcerting.
the first third or so of this book was sublime—if you appreciate violence. i could not believe the amount and caliber of the violence here. i’m not going to list any of it here, because i know sensitive eyes are watching, but—woah. good, gory stuff. loved it. so far from the sanitized, glossed YA books of my youth—when we had to read stephen king to get our fixes for arterial spray.
this one does not disappoint in the bloodshed.
and it also includes a “trapped-under-the-ice” scene, which is something that never fails to terrify the pants off me. i don’t go anywhere near ice, man. not even in my beverages. because somehow, i could fall into my lemonade and become trapped. it could happen.
i guess i just feel sad about this book. with ashes, i was the 1%. most people were turned off when the action left the woodsy bits and changed into a different kind of horror novel involving the horror of human evil instead of the supernatural, even though there was still plenty of supernatural, but i was thrilled! i loved the turn and saw it as a logical progression. this one blends the two pretty well; it is a deeper exploration of the moral frailties of man, and it is quite good in some places, but unfortunately, it is strongest in that first third, and then bloats out into too many different stories for my taste, when i was expecting the same level of “rarrrr! i love every single page!” i was feeling in ashes.
there is no way i am not going to read the third book, but i am hoping hoping hoping that shadows is just flawed in the way that many middle-book-in-a-trilogy books are frequently flawed, and it will triumphantly return to the glory that this one-percenter saw in ashes.
please.
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