Volume 4 of the Indigo series had a lot to prove after the slump in book 3, but amazingly it did. In this, Indigo is part of a troop of travelling players - all one big family run by the father, their mother having died giving birth to the youngest child. She and Grimya have been happy during their travels with the group, but now the lodestone which shows her the direction to take to find the next demon she must tackle indicates that the town that they have come to for a festival is the location. Sure enough, disquieting things are happening: withering of crops, a sleeping sickness and people going missing - who turn out to have become entranced and set out from the town without others seeing them go. And rumours go round of a black forest ringed by a thorn hedge. Indigo and Grimya rightly suspect that all these things are connected and are demon-inspired.

Before long, the family of players are caught up in the encroaching disaster as the eldest daughter falls victim to the sleeping sickness. I won't say any more about the plot not wanting to give away spoilers, but this story sees Indigo bereft of her normal companion and support, and having to rely on people who turn out to be unreliable in at least one case.

Although the story did drag a little bit in places, it was a lot better than the previous books in the series, especially volume 3. The set-up did remind me of a couple of books by other writers: Diana Wynne Jones' Cart and Cwidder for its travelling player characters and Roger Zelazny's Amber series, especially the earlier volumes in the series which deal with the black road, because the black forest and the environment it leads to is rather reminiscent of some of the dimension travelling in those books. But this volume deserves a 4 star rating. I think I will pause my reading of the series for a while on this "high". ( )

3.5 ( )

In the snooze fest that is the Indigo series, this is as far as I got. To give an idea of just how dull this series is, note that I am a completist. I have waded through some truly terrible stuff just to finish a series, or read through the entire lexicon of an author. Yet after Nocturne, I just couldn't care enough about Indigo or her struggles to bother picking up another one of these incredibly dull books about the most inactive main character in fantasy.

In this book, Indigo has taken up with a traveling band of performers, but finds that one of the demons she released is sapping color and light from everything. (One wonders what would happen if the demons simply avoided Indigo, she never seems to take any active steps to find them, stumbling across them as they cause her trouble. That seems about par for the course for Indigo's inert nature though). Her telepathic wolf is threatened, as are the members of her adopted circus family, but Indigo can't really seem to be bothered to do much about it until the very end, when she gathers up enough energy to think really hard about her enemy.

On the way, Indigo is annoying, petty, childish, and displays a marked lack of graciousness towards those around her. One wonders why the circus family (or anyone else for that matter) would want to be around her, let alone help her out. By dawdling around through most of the book, she places everyone around her in jeopardy, and although (for the first time) she has a minor role in defeating the demon, by this point in the series I'd had enough.

A petulant princess watching other people complete her quest to right the wrongs she let loose makes for dullness. This book is only 280 pages long, but felt like it was much longer, and not in a good way. After this one, I gave up. Maybe someday my completist leanings will drive me to read the final four parts of the series, an experience which I anticipate will be like walking through knee deep mud, but that hasn't happened thus far. ( )