This was my first brush with the newer genre of “Urban Fantasy”. A more contemporary and reality-grounded style hallmarked by authors such as Charles de Lint and Neil Gaiman, I have to say I wasn’t wowed. In the first four chapters, our heroine gets drunk, smokes, is nearly raped, is assaulted by a second man and uses more four letter words than you might hear in the locker rooms of your average sporting event. It takes a full third of the book to get to the fantasy part of this conflicted tale, and that is colored by Dante-like images and Nietzschian philosophy. This novel is dark. Really really dark. Which I wouldn’t mind so much, but there doesn’t seem to be a point. The prose is well written, but the prose doesn’t flow. The copious description that should enhance the reader’s image instead bogs down the storyline, and the storyline itself meanders all over the place until you just want it to be over. A self-described fantasy fan but generally slow reader, I have been known to blaze through novels of this length in a week or less. This one took more than three months, and I can only think that the lengthy read was my resistance to picking it up each time I renewed efforts to finish it. Despite all appearances – a moody fairy gracing the cover, chapter headings with intriguing quotes – I have to believe there is something fundamentally wrong with any book that makes me pick “doing laundry” over “finding out what happens next”. There is obviously a sequel, but I don’t think I’ll be in any rush to read it.
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