Bone Crossed by Patricia Briggs

[lightreads]

Bone Crossed by Patricia Briggs


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Fourth book in the urban fantasy with the werecoyote car mechanic.

Why did I read this? The third book did such a terrible job with the aftermath of rape (OMG I have been raped and am therefore unworthy of my boyfriend's love!), and I thought I was done. This book walks back the very worst of the last book, then wanders along through your standard issue urban fantasy plot, with extra werewolf mating. It would be unexceptionable, if only Briggs didn't keep trying to have, you know, issues. Mercy's PTSD appears to consist entirely of panic attacks neatly timed to further the plot or so her boyfriend can comfort her. No cycling mood, change in sleep patterns, fixation on details of the assault, or you know any other actual realistic symptoms. Briggs could have done better by spending three minutes with the DSM-IV. I am done patting authors on the back for remembering to include the effects of trauma at all -- now try doing it better.

Oh, and did I mention there's a deaf boy in this book? He's very brave, you know, and also apparently an Olympic champion lip reader, because the kid is better at it than any deaf person that I've ever met (which is a lot, by the way).

The real problem with this series is that on the surface it's fine. There's nothing egregiously wrong with this book like there was the last one, and in fact a few aspects of the kid's disability are handled very nicely in that there's no actual fuss about it. But the shallowness with which she approaches things I care about a great deal is actually more infuriating than complete wrongheadedness can be.

Dude. Stop playing issue bingo and go back to writing a fun and pleasant little urban fantasy series.

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Comments

[readerjane]

(OMG I have been raped and am therefore unworthy of my boyfriend's love!)

See, I thought that was the poison potion talking, warping Mercy's self-image. That the faerie draught was a shortcut for months or years of abuse, so that what we were seeing in Mercy was what she would have been like after Tim had been beating on her for ages, only the magic compressed it in time. Which, I thought, was a neat way of pointing out that committing a crime like rape via magic doesn't make it one bit different from the mundane variety. Same outrage: different means.

OT: are you just catching up with reviews, or have you been speed-reading? Wow. Can one speed-read with audiobooks? Does it sound like chipmunks?

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

That the faerie draught was a shortcut for months or years of abuse,

Yeah, I was completely unconvinced by this at the end of the third book. She saved it for me in book 4 by basically stepping right back on the whole thing and mentioning it only once. It's weird -- I want to like this series more than I do, because unlike most it actually has well-fleshed secondary characters. And yet it keeps tripping me up on one thing or another.

I actually was reading that much -- I had some bacation between the end of work and the beginning of the last year of school. Vacation now over, sigh.