Magic Burns by Ilona Andrews

Sequel to Magic Bites. Second verse same as etc. – lightweight urban fantasy told by first-person female narrator in post-apocalypse Atlanta.

Best thing about this series is still the worldbuilding. It's interesting and maybe it's not mind-blowingly unique, but I've realized that's actually pretty much all of what I'm interested in. Because otherwise these books are . . . weird. They do a neat two-step around a lot of the genre's clichés (vampires! Still disgusting!) and then barrel face-first into others (werelion beastlord who loves her, sigh). And the whole thing makes me feel vaguely whipsawed and headachey.

I was explaining to bayleaf how I have this weird relationship with this subgenre. I find it simultaneously compulsively readable and deeply, deeply problematic. As a feminist, often, though also sometimes as, I don't know, a human being. This series so far is doing okay in negotiating those reactions, but like every single other venture, I walk away annoyed that it doesn't do more. Surely surely the problematic elements aren't inherent to the subgenre? I mean, the fundamental theory seems sound – write women's fiction that doesn't apologize for also having fistfights, because hey we can acknowledge that women want to have adventures as well as vampire werelion boyfriends. And yet . . .

Anyway. I digress. This series delivers exactly what you expect out of the subgenre, and the only place it does more is the setting. No, I don't know if that's meant to be a rec or not -- I think that depends entirely on your receptivity to that sort of thing. Mine is waning at the moment, so there you go.