May as well get these out of the way while I’m updating things. Read them months ago and just couldn’t be bothered recording them.
- Seanan McGuire‘s Indexing is pretty good. It’s a bit busy and the fairy tale elements are obviously contrived, yet it manages to work for the most part rather well.
- The most recent Dresden Files installment, Skin Game, makes me start to seriously wonder what I ever liked about the series. To be fair I actually started wondering that last installment, but this one really drives the feeling home. The relationship between Dresden and Murphy, the light saber, his self-moral questioning… it’s all just cringe-worthy. There are a few notably well-done scenes, but for the most part it just seems incredibly juvenile.
- The fourth book in Keri Arthur’s Nikki and Michael series is shockingly enough not awful. Rather, Kiss the Night Goodbye is merely average.
- The Damask Circle series, also by Keri Arthur, ties into the above series. Its first three entries (Circle of Fire/Death/Desire) are all both episodic and more or less as painfully generic as a paranormal romance can be.
- And finally we come to Cecy Robson, the author of the Weird Girls series. I found the first book to be one of the worst I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading, so of course (of course) the second and third ones were pre-ordered and showed up shortly after. The second, A Cursed Embrace, is so horrific I could not finish it… not even by skimming. In fact, it single-handily nearly destroyed my desire to ever pick up a paperback again. I flat-out refuse to so much as even open the third book.