Tricked by Kevin Hearne

(Iron Druid Chronicles #4)
Genre: urban fantasy
Pages: 338 (handy Mass-market paperback)
Published: April 2012 by Random House
Recommended for: only those who've read the first three books in the series, but I recommend the Iron Druid books to absolutely any fan of urban fantasy or the paranormal genre

My Take:

At the start of this fourth book in the series, our hero Atticus O'Sullivan, last living Druid on Earth, has just returned from the realm of Asgard and a mission to kill the Norse god Thor to find that-- as per usual for Atticus-- a whole bunch of gods, goddesses, and mythological characters of various ilk and pantheon would like very much to see him dead.  After conscripting his old friend Coyote (of Navajo and other Native American tribal lore) to help him fake his old grand demise, Atticus just wants time to train Granuaile, the former philosophy major/hot-headed lady bartender he took on as his apprentice a few books ago, in the magical arts, to spend some quality hunting time with his Irish wolfhound Oberon, and generally lay low for a decade or so.  Unfortunately for Atticus, Coyote has something else in mind: he recruits Atticus to solve a seemingly innocent problem in the local Navajo tribe which turns out to involve defeating a couple of malevolent and nearly invincible local skinwalkers-- scary Western American shapeshifters.  Add to that already deadly mix the reemergence of Atticus's vampiric friend and lawyer Leif, a (characteristically violent) vampire political feud, a Navajo hatalii (medicine man) who is more than he seems, and a very foreboding encounter with the Norse goddess of the Norse underworld (appropriately named Hel) and her pet hellhound, and you have, well, another week in the life of Atticus O'Sullivan.  You have to wonder how the poor guy gets any downtime, after dealing with a millennium or two of this kind of stuff.

This is the third book in the Iron Druid Chronicles which I've reviewed (somehow I managed to miss the chronological third book, Hammered, but I'll get around to reviewing it sometime.)  I remain just extremely impressed and generally delighted by this unconventional and endlessly entertaining fantasy series.  Atticus's flashback-stories about his life in various countries and time periods, the modern urban Arizona setting, the eclectic-ness of the mythological people and creatures featured-- and how hilariously they are portrayed in many cases-- is just fantastic.  In Hammered (the volume I haven't reviewed yet), Atticus has an encounter with the Virgin Mary as well as of course her peace-loving son, Jesus Christ, a variety of valkyries, and of course the total jerk that is the Norse thunder god Thor.  In Tricked, we get to meet somewhat fewer new characters and deities than in the previous books, probably because the ranks of the series' large cast have already swelled with so many great characters.

There is the introduction of Hel and a dastardly hint about a possibly pending apocalypse (but what else is new??)  We get much better acquainted with Coyote-- one of my absolute favorites from the earlier books. Coyote definitely lives up to his reputation as a trickster god, but I came to love his distinct way of talking and pulling strings around "behind the scenes"-- oh, and the way he calls Atticus "Mr. Druid".  I don't want to dole out a ton of spoilers (it's hard with these books, because I just want to put my favorite of Atticus's quotes and pop culture references in the review and maybe frame them), but all of the running gags with Atticus and Granuaile and Oberon had me chuckling out loud every few pages.  (This, by the way, is not such good behavior to be exhibiting-- I'm in college and have a roommate now.)  Speaking of Atticus's hound Oberon, he featured quite a lot in this book, especially compared to Hammered, where his hilarious commentary, lovable naivety, and penchant for sausages were for the most part much missed.  I also enjoyed the (slow but definitely present) progression of Atticus and Granuaile's relationship, which is frequently less master-pupil than Atticus says he would prefer it to be.  (But we all know he belongs with Granuaile and Granuaile alone.)  Who knows, maybe their romance will take front seat in the next Iron Druid book, Trapped.  This fifth book will be released on November 27th, which is soon but barely acceptable-- I need another "fix" of this series very soon.    I'd absolutely love to hear from fellow Iron Druid fans or any other readers!!

My Rating:

Review: Wildefire by Karsten Knight

Genre: YA fantasy
Pages: 400 (hardcover)
Published: July 2011 by Simon & Schuster
Recommended for: don't really recommend it
Disclaimer: This is a review of an ARC, which I received from Simon & Schuster in exchange for an honest review

Synopsis:
Every flame begins with a spark. 

Ashline Wilde is having a rough sophomore year. She’s struggling to find her place as the only Polynesian girl in school, her boyfriend just cheated on her, and now her runaway sister, Eve, has decided to barge back into her life. When Eve’s violent behavior escalates and she does the unthinkable, Ash transfers to a remote private school nestled in California’s redwoods, hoping to put the tragedy behind her. But her fresh start at Blackwood Academy doesn’t go as planned. Just as Ash is beginning to enjoy the perks of her new school—being captain of the tennis team, a steamy romance with a hot, local park ranger—Ash discovers that a group of gods and goddesses have mysteriously enrolled at Blackwood…and she’s one of them. To make matters worse, Eve has resurfaced to haunt Ash, and she’s got some strange abilities of her own. With a war between the gods looming over campus, Ash must master the new fire smoldering within before she clashes with her sister one more time… And when warm and cold fronts collide, there’s guaranteed to be a storm.

My Take: 

*Sigh*.  The synopsis sounds so amazing and that cover is incredibly alluring.  Seriously, it's a gorgeous cover!  I had very high expectations for this one, so its failure to meet said expectations was semi-devastating.  I'm going to be an optimist here, and highlight what did work in Wildefire.  First off, I liked Eve.  Ash's sister was by far the roundest character (by that I mean complex and realistic, not portly ;) in the book.  She is a bad-ass, there's no denying it.  Even though she never really succeeded in coming across as the villain of the piece, I would've liked to learned more about her and what happened to her after she ran away from she and Ash's adoptive parents.  I also think that Karsten Knight is a great descriptive writer... maybe a little too much of a great descriptive writer at certain times.  The writing can get kind of flowery and paragraphs are spent describing the architecture of the boarding school and the surrounding redwoods, etc, etc.  I also liked how our teenage god and goddess incarnates aren't based on Grecian mythology, but rather on loads of different mythologies from around the world.


Now for the bad news.  While reading the story of Ash-- a somewhat belligerent, apparently amnesiac teenage girl who flees to a Californian boarding school and discovers she's a Polynesian volcano goddess-- I found myself kind of wishing we could skip all the compulsory teenage shenanigans and skip to the part where Ash comes into her own as a goddess incarnate and she and her friends kick ass.  There's a kind of prolonged prologue (by 'prolonged', I mean forty or fifty pages) which for the most part feels strangely unnecessary.  Almost like the editor should have advised against it.  I think the author might have been better off leaving Ash and Eve's scary-and-shocking-past to be revealed over the course of the book rather than implementing that gigantic and unwieldy prologue.  Ash's romance with Colt, park ranger and stalker extraordinaire, fell completely flat for me.  The climatic ending: ditto.  It's also pretty rare to read a book that is 400 pages long and yet finish it thinking that almost nothing happened.  Or maybe just nothing that a reader would care about, since none of the characters are very sympathetic or likable.    

I know a lot of people really enjoyed this book, but I can't say I did.  My advice is that if you want to read a funny, fast-paced and inventive YA series about mythological adventures, skip this book and read the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan.  If you want to read an awesome and epic novel about gods and goddesses living in the modern United States, skip Wildefire and read American Gods by Neil Gaiman instead.

Cover: 5/5
Premise: 4/5
Characters: 2/5 (for Eve)
Story: 2/5
Overall Rating:

My Favorite Mythological Creatures

  I've always been fascinated by mythology.  To this day, I muse that the convenient swirl of hair below a horse's forelock is where its unicorn's horn once was.  But I also can't see the Black Forest without wondering if the ErlKing goblin is lurking in the shadows of the lovely trees.  Myths have always inspired people as to the possibilities out there, as well as represented the shadows and light of the universal history of mankind.

Pegasus 

The plural is pegasi, but in Greek mythology there was only one Pegasus.  He was a beautiful horse, white, winged, and magnificent, born from the union of Poseidon (who, some say, created horses from the surging sea foam of waves) and Medusa, back when she was still a beautiful woman before Athena turned her into a monster.  The Greek heroes often sought out Pegasus as a mount when they quested to slay deadly monsters.  Interestingly, Heracles and Pegasus never met in myth, though the Disney film will tell you otherwise. ;)  Theseus rode Pegasus in order to destroy Medusa.  Medusa was in fact Pegasus's mother, though it is sometimes said he sprang from her blood in the temple of Athena.  Later, Bellerophon rode Pegasus when he slew the terrifying Chimera. Bellerophon later fell to his death from Pegasus's back, and so the immortal horse flew to Olympus, where he became the steed of Eos, the goddess who brought the dawn.  Pegasus also brought Zeus thunder and lightning on his back, and was placed in the autumn sky as a constellation in honor of his service to the gods.  

Kelpie

I grew up around horses, so the animals have always been special to me.  Whilst Pegasus is renowned as a noble and beautiful horse, the treacherous Kelpie is an infamous monster which hails from Scotland.  The Kelpie is a beautiful water horse whom waits in the shallow water of lakes and streams and entrances humans to sit on its back.  Many humans have tried to bridle the Kelpie and employ it to plow fields, but almost invariably the water monster drags them down to the briny deep to devour them.  There's a rumor that it prefers livers above all else.  ;)

Phoenix 

The idea of a firebird which explodes in flames when dying only to be reborn in its ashes is an ancient one.  The Egyptians first told stories of the creature, and much of Asia and Middle East followed suit over the centuries, calling it by the varied names of Feng-Huang, Ho-oo, Benu, and Firebird.  Today Dumbledore's phoenix Fawkes from the Harry Potter series is well-known as a symbol of wisdom and rebirth.

The Good People

It's what they would prefer you to call them.  :)  Modern faeries abound in urban fantasy and in art, but the original faeries were descendants of the Tuatha de Danann, a mythical race of gods and goddesses who once inhabited Ireland.  After the coming of Christianity to the Emerald Isle, the Tuatha (their name means, in Irish, the people of the goddess Danu) were reduced to nature spirits and the seldom-seen bogies and tricksters of faerie lore.  The sidhe, as they are sometimes called, are said to live under mounds and in cairns, as well as in their mythical homeland of Tir Na nOg.  They are the inspiration for many modern fantasy races, including the elves of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series.

Kitsune

Kitsune is the Japanese word for 'fox'.  In Japan, foxes were revered as wise nature spirits who safeguarded forests and temples.  Many of the urban temples in Tokyo boast statues of foxes which are really quite uncanny!  As long as there have been stories of the mythical fox, there have been stories of humans-- particularly young women-- who turn out to be foxes.  Always, the Kitsune's true nature is that of the fox, and even in their human forms they are capricious and sly.  The typical legend is that a young man falls in love with a girl and marries her, only to later find that she is in fact a fox.  Sometimes, a fox will bless a village or a helpful human. The Kitsune is said to be different from typical foxes in that it may have several tails.  Two or three tails is common in art, but the wisest and eldest Kitsune are said to have snow-white nine tails.  This portrait of a Kitsune is actually quite eerie... it's kinda freaking me out!

Hope you guys enjoyed the myth snippets and the pics.  Feedback is what I live for, so tell me what you think! As far as the Midnight Summer Fest goes, don't forget to enter my giveaway to win one of two books featuring myth and folklore.

Merciful by Casey Adolffson

Genre: fantasy-- mythological
Pages: 494 (paperback)
Published: March 2011
Recommended for: paranormal romance readers and those interested in Greek myth
*Disclaimer: I received this book from the author in exchange for an honest review*

Synopsis:
At 17 years old, Acacia Moirgetes is starting to feel like her boring, lonely existence is something of a tragedy. A Greek tragedy, that is. Acacia quickly learns that the life she thought she knew is a lie.  More disturbingly, it’s a lie she’s been telling herself to avoid the terrible truth.

Now she’s on a mission to corral the Greek gods of myth back to Mount Olympus before all Hades breaks loose. With the help of her guide, a curmudgeonly former goat named Amal, and her two Pyroskia— devastatingly handsome bodyguards, Blaise and Ash, whose devotion to Acacia runs deeper than either ever imagined—Acacia must follow the truth to its darkest ends. Along the way, she’ll have to recover her forgotten powers, come to terms with the woman she once was, and perhaps most importantly, discover why she left Olympus in the first place.

My Take: 

My grandmother sometimes says, "There is a horse for every kind of person in the world: skittish horses for skittish people, gentle horses for gentle people, and for people who don't like to ride, we have horses that don't like to be ridden."  It's the same way with books, of course-- sometimes readers are destined to ride off into the sunset with a book because it's exactly their kind of thing.  Other times, we encounter books that simply aren't up our alley, for whatever reason.  This was how I felt about Merciful-- the book and I never really clicked, but I'll try my best to write a review which does the book justice, as it is both well-written and well-told.


Acacia begins her story as a young librarian, one whom finds herself abruptly disappearing from her daily job of shelving and reappearing in a mysterious desert, clad in unfamiliar garb in an unfamiliar land, alarmingly often.  During one of these strange lapses in time, Acacia discovers that she isn't in fact seventeen years old, but seventeen thousand years old-- and she is the most powerful Moirae, one of the three mistresses of fate in Greek mythology.  So it isn't too much of a stretch that her father is also Zeus, and her extremely devoted, stunningly handsome bodyguards Ash and Blaise are her Pyroskia-- Pyros for short.  Their sole purpose in life is to protect Acacia from rivals and enemies, of which she has gained many over the course of the last seventeen thousand years, and to assist her in all things.  Acacia quickly falls in love with Blaise-- and begins to wonder if she hasn't already fallen in love with him before-- even as she slowly begins to regain her memories.  Meanwhile, her father Zeus has promised Acacia's hand in marriage to Ares, god of war... unless Acacia can gather back the gods and goddesses who, like her, left Olympus before time runs out.  

This book is something of a tome at nearly 500 pages, and in many cases I think things and events could definitely have been left out or shortened to a more readable length.  The writing is elegant and flawless-- I don't think I spotted one grammatical mistake or misspelling over the course of such a huge book.  Acacia is a protagonist with a unique voice, one whom a reader will get to know and understand well very quickly.  The take on Greek mythology is unique and unlike any other modern mythos-type story I've read.  

But.  (Yep, there's a but.)  The story really dragged for me, as I said.  And a disclaimer: I'm not a big fan of paranormal romance.  I really, really dislike heroes who hang over the heroine all the time, somehow managing to form a love triangle as they fuss over her and smother her and guard her life at any cost, etc, etc.  I have the same pet peeve with leading ladies who hover over heroes.  Blaise and Ash's feelings and behavior towards Acacia was explained and made perfect sense within the context of their existences as Pyroskia.  But there were many moments when I just wanted to slap all three of them.  I grew exhausted with Blaise's dogged love for Acacia in particular.  Acacia's interactions with her bodyguards are perhaps a quarter or more of the book, and that didn't make it easy for me to ignore.  However, I will freely admit I'm not much of a romance reader-- as those of you who've read my reviews before know, I tend to be cynical of relationships in books-- so I'm obviously not the intended audience here.  Read Merciful if you dig this sort of romance, and if you're searching for a rather epic and sprawling story which features colorful characters along with surprising twists of plot and of one very mysterious past.

Cover: 5/5 (like it!)

Premise: 4/5

Characters: 2/5

Plot: 3/5

Overall Rating: 3/5