Magic Breaks by Ilona Andrews

[lightreads]

Magic Breaks by Ilona Andrews

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I read this at the very end of pregnancy, which was just a few weeks ago but might as well be another country. But I remember enough to know I was deeply bored by this: battle, running, battle, shipping, battle, battle. The thing is, this series has a refreshing brutality. That's actually a compliment – the shit that happens to the heroine is genuinely frightening (without going instantly to rape!) and it's treated with the proper respect and gravity, with this cool understanding that you keep moving, even with your trauma. Except the problem is? The romance is cast as, like, a refuge from all that. The whole port in a storm, your back against mine sort of thing. Which is great! Right up my alley!

…Too bad the dude in question is obnoxious, clichéd, and boring. Ugh, with the very worst of the possessive animal behaviors thing. And I know, I know I keep harking on this, but werelion, guys.




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Comments

[jadelennox]

I have been wracking my brains for a long time trying to figure out the criteria you come up with for giving a book higher or lower than a three, and I admit it is still a compelling puzzle. Sometimes a three stars review goes to a book like this one, which seems to be "scorn scorn scorn, but fun sometimes!" And sometimes you give three to "great great great except for this annoying single thing." It makes reading your reviews deeply entertaining.

[lightreads]

I'm loling, because I occasionally try to figure this out too. ...And can't! I dunno, it's all very organic and emotional and contextual. This, for example, got an extra star I think because it did keep my mind occupied while I was in the hospital a few weeks before H was born, and that goes a ways. My philosophy -- such as it is -- is that I can put as many of my arbitrary feelings as I like into a review, but ideally I should contextualize them because that's what makes a review useful/interesting to other people. But ratings are a giant joke in most circumstances, so there I'm arbitrary as hell.

So yeah. I got nothing.

[cyprinella]

It ended up being a pretty decent read for me, especially compared to the last Hollows book and this other random novella I read on my trip, but yeah. Battle, battle, loling about donkeys, battle, explicit sex at the end that I skipped. Engaging enough to keep me up to finish it last night though. IDK. Popcorn book I guess? I also didn't quite know what to make of the "We killed off all the Native Americans so [plot]" but also we're going to have a Native monster and talk about how Roland killed off these other Native powers thing and Doolittle's speech on disability among other things. I think mostly because I was waiting for it to go off the rails and it made me twitchy.