Karen L. Mead

I said last year when I reviewed Trouble With the Cursed that I was locked into this series for the long haul, warts and all. Even so, this book was frustrating to get through.

Now, I am aware that the level of scrutiny I’m about to submit this book to is high, and I doubt my own books would hold up under it if I was capable of looking at them objectively. But this is just how my brain works, so I’m going to proceed. Spoilers will ensue.

This book only makes sense if you buy into a retcon about Trent and Rachel’s childhoods. Originally, Trent was bullied by a boy named Lee during his childhood and it was only after Rachel encouraged him that he began to fight back. Lee also tried to kill Trent and Rachel with an exploding boat waaaaaay back in Book Three, but he’s been forgiven for that, so let’s set that aside. What matters is that now, Harrison wants us to believe that the three of them had a fun, shared childhood experience of one-upmanship, rough-housing and doing pranks or whatever. Whereas Lee’s merciless bullying of Trent was originally one-sided, now it appears that Trent gave as good as he got. This revision of Lee’s character happens so that Trent and Rachel don’t see Lee’s evil plans coming to fruition until it’s almost too late.

This is complicated by the fact that everyone at the summer camp was being dosed with memory drugs because there was illegal genetic tampering going on, so Rachel and Trent don’t remember much about what happened during those summers– mostly just that they became friends, and she got pissed off and threw him into a tree once. Now, apparently they remember fun and games with Lee.

The retcon is annoying, but as these things go it’s a relatively subtle one. What annoyed me more was stupid behavior on Rachel’s part. At one point, Jenks (her partner) starts saying “Rachel, I have to tell you–” and she keeps ignoring him. He seriously tries to tell her critical information about five or six times, and she keeps cutting him off, then breezes out of there without listening to what Jenks is trying to say. To be fair, Rachel is very worried about her boyfriend at the time, but seriously: who hears a “Hey, I have to tell you this, it’s really important!” and then leaves without hearing it? It’s incredibly contrived.

Okay, those were my main complaints, but now I’ve got another one that deals with the very end of the book. If you care at all about spoilers, TURN BACK NOW

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…so Rachel finds out that there is a spell that can bring the dead back to life, and immediately decides she’s going to bring back Kisten, her boyfriend from earlier in the series. If she does this, there’s probably going to be a love triangle between Trent, Rachel and Kisten, and that sounds incredibly tedious. Worse, it might be used to break up Rachel and Trent so Trent can go back to being a villain, killing his character development. The books were more exciting when Trent was still a wild card– he’s been nicely domesticated now– but is this the way to do that? He’s come so far that any backsliding to the evil politician/businessman of the first few books would strain credulity, at least for me.

Trent does say at one point early in the series that he’s going to get Rachel under his control and she won’t even know it (or something to that effect), so Harrison could take the route of this all having this been an incredibly long game from Trent, making Rachel fall in love with him so he can use her. Would anyone buy that though? He’s been a loyal boyfriend and a caring dad to Ray and Lucy for like, what is it, seven books now? Long game indeed.

There are nice things too: it’s fun watching Ray and Lucy grow up, and Bis, Rachel’s living gargoyle, is consistently adorable. The subplot with Jenks and the new pixie, Getty, is fun to watch, if a little slow-moving. And in this book, Rachel actually slings a ton of magic around without waiting to get physically beat up first, which was one of my main complaints last time.

So yeah…I’m a little afraid of where this series is going to go. I really hope it doesn’t backslide in order to create drama. But that’s probably what the book market demands, and Harrison may not feel she has much of a choice. She didn’t bring this series back from the grave so everyone could just tread water together, so something big has got to drop. I just hope I still like reading it at that point.