I read the first two books in Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke & Bone series a few months ago, and put off commenting on them for this long for reasons mentioned in the second part of this post. I remember little about them now besides that the first book was very, very interesting while the second (Days of Blood & Starlight) felt like it got lost within its own mythology. The connection to the ‘real world’ was almost entirely severed and it shifts from being Urban Fantasy to almost pure Fantasy. It’s not a shift I was particularly fond of. The way it concluded though indicates that the third book might have more of a mix to it.
The As the World Dies trilogy is a set of zombie novels by Rhiannon Frater (The First Days, Fighting to Survive, Siege) whose first installment starts out fantastic. As things progress however and the main characters reach ‘The Fort’ it starts to fall apart. Maybe it was the strain of trying to create unique voices for so many different characters, but the end result is a collection of… well… characters. Characterizations rather than people. They feel fabricated, typecast. I ended up having to force myself through the second book and was so put-off by the dialog that I avoided reading the third for almost three months. Just read it now, finally, and… I don’t even know. Mysticism was introduced out of nowhere to completely dominate the story and end things on a… happy, I guess, note. It reminds me of how reincarnation was pulled out of thin air in Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter series or of what I’ve heard regarding the ending to Lost.