People as old and powerful as he should never be given someone to love. For Anna he would destroy the world.
Fair Game continues the story of Anna and Charles, this time to Boston, getting themselves involved in the investigation of a supernatural-hunter serial killer who’s been killing people (including Fae and werewolves) for decades.
The Three-Body Problem is an interesting book. It was originally written in Chinese and won a whole pile of awards, earning lots of interesting ratings. That was enough to get me to put it on my list for this year.
On the downside, I almost put the book down after the first 10%. It starts with historical backstory and even when the timeline advances to the present day, I still wasn’t particularly caught up in the story. I very rarely read books without at least some sort of fantastical element to them and even a decent chunk into this book, I wasn’t feeling it.
This time around, we leave the icy mountains to instead to head to Seattle. Long story short, the werewolves are coming out as the Fae did back in the 80s (in this universe). In order to make the transition a bit smoother, Charles and Anna are traveling to Seattle as representatives of the Marrok in order to meet with various delegations of the European wolves.
After so many books (if you read the Mercy Thompson books first), it’s interesting to see the first real look at the European wolves , or really European characters in general. We have one wolf who rules most of mainland Europe as an unofficial, cruel mirror of the Marrok, another who believes himself to be King Arthur reborn, and another Omega whereby Anna can learn more about her powers. On top of that, there’s a Fae apparently powerful enough to hold the negotiations in check and a white which who gets her power from a rather interesting sacrifice. After only half a dozen characters in the first Alpha and Omega, it’s interesting to see so many more here. It brings Hunting Ground much closer to the Mercy Thompson books in style.
First off: no, you didn’t miss anything. This book really does start a few days after Anna’s and Charles’ are mated, skipping to the end of what essentially makes up the Alpha and Omega short story. It’s a bit of a rough start, especially since so much of Anna’s character comes from those events that we never actually see, but I think it works.
That leads into the next interesting part / potential problem with these books. Anna was tortured and raped by her first pack. Even though you never actually directly read the scenes in question, they’re an unrelenting part of Anna’s characters through not only this book but the entire series. On top of that, the paranormal romance parts (read: sex scenes) of Alpha and Omega are far more direct than they ever were in Mercy Thompson. Putting the two together leads to some rather strange and questionable scenes, in particular between Anna and Charles that, at least in my opinion, feel like they were never dealt with as they should/could have been.
In some ways, Fire Touched manages to back down from the scale of the previous two books. We’re no longer fighting primordial spirits or gods, but rather “just” the Fae. Of course, as we see through the course of the book, there are some Fae who might as well be gods.
On the other hand, this book as many as any that came before will really change the shape of the future of the universe that Briggs is building. In a nutshell, the wolves are going politically toe to toe with the Fae. Anything more than that would be even more a spoiler, but it’s still another interesting bit of worldbuilding.
Aurora is something of a strange book. The core of the story follows a generation ship heading out to Tau Ceti at 1/10th the speed of light. The story starts after six generations and more than a hundred years have already passed, just before they arrive. Things are already going wrong and never really get better.
One thing that I really didn’t expect was how quickly the story goes. Perhaps influenced by Coyote novels by Allen Steele. This time around though, maybe 10% of the way through and we’re already at Tau Ceti. Halfway through and things have already gone terribly. Another quarter and we’ve got half the ship heading back and half staying on another world, never to be heard from again . The last section deals with returning to Earth and is honestly pretty skippable in my opinion. Any one of these could have been a decent chunk of a story all by itself, but all together and there’s a constant feeling of flux from story to story.
Interesting thing about tight first person point of view: when the main character feels strongly about another character, it comes through really strongly. Take for example Christy, Adam’s ex-wife. On one hand, I’m sure she’s not quite as bad as she appears, given that all we see is from Mercy’s point of view. On the other hand, she’s really a fairly troubled person.
On the supernatural scale, we actually manage to step up another level from the River Devil and Coyote and friends. This time around we get an ancient big bad from the Canary Islands who’s just as hard to kill as the River Devil but has even more firepower (heh) on their side. It’s a fascinating bit of mythology I’ve never come across anywhere else and manages to fit well enough into the current world.
Frost Burned feels almost like two novels sort of smooshed together. In starts out with something of a bang with the entire pack getting kidnapped by people apparently mad enough to take on an entire pack of werewolves at once. By the second half though, that’s shifted into a little bit of Fae and a lotta bit of vampire trouble which–don’t get me wrong–is related, but feels like a different sort of book.
It actually works surprisingly well though.
River Marked takes what we’ve seen in the previous 5 Mercy Thompson books and turns it somewhat on its head. Previously, we’ve had interesting but not entirely unbelievable versions of werewolves, vampires, ghosts, and fae–all with a distinctly Old World influence on them. This time around though, we finally dig a bit into Mercy’s father’s family and get a big nasty beastie from the Americas.
On one hand, it’s nice to get a bigger world to interact with. I’ve read fewer books than I’d like dealing with non-European myths and legends, so it’s a good thing to scratch that particular itch. On the other hand, the way it’s introduced in this story makes for a rather abrupt ‘power level’ jump. We’ve already seen centuries (millennia?) old vampires and (possibly) wolves and the Gray Lords are nothing to sneeze at, but this is perhaps the first time that literal gods takes the stage .
Stephen Leeds returns!
This time around, the ‘big idea’ plot that sort of fades into the background is the idea of encoding research into DNA. It’s something that’s actually happening now, although (so far as we know) not actually being used to store anything in a person’s genetic code. But it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility.