Nina Berry

I wanted Pagan to be more in on what was going on rather than kept in the dark for so long, other than that though I don’t really have any complaints.

Even if Pagan isn’t fully involved in the spy action until closer to the end, from early on she is investigating her mom’s past, trying to figure out her man of mystery guardian Devin, there’s the constant question of will she fall off the wagon and when things do turn more action-oriented it’s very much Pagan taking the lead on that, so there is still plenty of intrigue here even if it ultimately wasn’t as much of a full on spy story as I’d anticipated going in.

The time period details lived up to my expectations without going overboard or slowing things, I especially loved the fashion and glimpses of movie-making in that era.

I enjoyed Pagan’s chemistry with Devin (he’s only three years older and not a guardian in a parental sense so it’s not creepy) yet at the same time I appreciated that a romance between them never became the primary focus of the book given that there were other aspects to the story that I felt like were more vital to the development of Pagan’s character.

I loved every messy bit of Pagan’s personality and her life, the guilt and PTSD she carries over what she did to her dad and sister were palpable and brilliantly came into play at a pivotal moment, her lingering feelings for/and scenes with the ex who abandoned her were completely absorbing, and maybe more than anything else I liked that her drinking problem is handled realistically, ever present, ever challenging for her.… (más)

Imagine you're a teenaged girl with scoliosis and a back brace and your biggest fear is that the cute guy you're crushing on noticed your brace when he touched your waist. (Side note: When I was young it seemed every single book was about a girl with a back brace and how she felt about it. So the day I had to go to Shriner's to be examined for scoliosis was a frightening time indeed. I was fine, fyi, we went to breakfast then saw Return of the Jedi.) Anyway, Dez is that girl, and I super enjoyed the way she thought about her brace. She hated it for the pain, for the teenaged embarrassment, for all the annoyances, but she loved it for helping heal her body. It was an accurate portrayal of chronic illness and disability, in my opinion, and I liked that.

Now imagine you're that same girl and somehow you turn into a tiger. A really big, powerful tiger. You're freaked out, you're scared, and you are more powerful and strong than in your human form and that is cool. That's what I liked about Dez and about this book. She had such a clear view of her body--what it was, what it could do--and that was important to the story.

Okay, so there's more here, about the shifters (otherkin), about Dez needing to go to a very small school for them to learn what she is in order to protect herself and in order to be protected from the group that's out to kill her and all of her kind. So it has that wacky boarding school trope I love, combined with spoonie issues, and some really fun characters. I like.
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This is where it sort of switched genres and got weird. The love triangle is still going on, it's even more awkward, she's fallen out with some of her friends over a tragedy that wasn't her fault, and, oh, yeah, Dez and some of her friends are going to travel into another world and rescue their friend. No big thing, we're just moving from urban fantasy to fantasy (watch out for those weird creatures in the woods!).

I loathed the all too conveniently manufactured melodrama in this book. The love triangle, her friends being mad, all of that could have been solved with a few conversations. Instead, everyone sulks and sneaks around, no one tells the truth, and that sort of stuff is romanticized. Dez's birth father and mother were cardboard caricatures and weren't any fun at all.

This series has come a long way from Otherkin and I wish it hadn't.
(Provided by publisher)… (más)

This book totally switched gears on Caleb and Lazar, making Lazar sympathetic and Caleb a jealous dick, and it seems to have done it all for the Love Triangle. (Insert birds chirping and violins playing here.) TBH, were I Dez I wouldn't want to date either of them.

Obviously I didn't enjoy this book as much as I did Otherkin. I still liked it, but it felt as if so much about what these stories were about--what Dez was about--had changed. She moved further away from her life as a disabled person, because she wasn't any longer, and that lack of thoughtfulness about her body and her self was to this story's detriment. Still, her friends were there (found family wacky boarding school), and there were new evil plans from her enemy and new cracks in that enemy's armor. A good book, but the weakest in the series.
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