|
Been a while since I've checked in...
After the Spider-Man Clone Saga graphic novels, I switched over to the first two (of three) books in the School for Good and Evil series. Not bad, had some neat ideas - namely, this is where the characters in fairy tales go to get trained - and once the price drops a bit on the third book, I'll tackle that.
Next up was Shapeshifted, book three of five(?) in an urban fantasy series starring a nurse. I'd read the first two some time back as paperbacks, and one of the highlights of finally getting to this one was discovering that there are at least two more in the series. It's decent stuff, but less my "thing" than other series, so I'm holding off on those for now.
Since then, I've been doing some major series catch-up. Indie author Maddy Edwards has a "13+1" book series (13 plus a side novel) called Paranormal Public, and I'd read and enjoyed the first three in a late-2012 binge, back when there was no fourth book. After plowing through books 4-8 plus the side novel, I'm about to start book nine, which concludes the first arc.
"Paranormal Public" is a four-year college for "paranormals" - an umbrella term that includes mages, vampires, werewolves, pixies, fallen angels, and other such supernatural beings. In true Harry Potter fashion, main character Charlotte has been raised as a human and thus knows nothing about any of this. Also like Harry, she turns out to be a Big Deal who has been covertly watched and protected, discovering in the first book that she is the only known surviving "elemental" - someone able to control the four classical elements. Each book unfolds over one semester, except for one that takes place over the summer break.
I wish I could endorse the series more heartily, but I have to ding it on the editing level. Continuity glitches are rare, but there's a big one where a Deep Secret fact gets casually published in a newspaper in one book before getting treated as a Deep Secret again in the next book. There are a lot of little technical errors, though. Dropped commas are the most common, with other punctuation issues (such as missing quotation marks) close behind, leaving homophone problems and dropped/extra words as relatively rare annoyances. I find the use of ALL CAPS for emphasis somewhat annoying, especially when the author uses italics elsewhere in the book, but I'm mostly used to it by now.
All of that being said, I'm not just reading these for the sunk cost. I genuinely enjoy the story and worldbuilding, and I'm interested to see where this book - which was intended to end the series - ends up. I might take a break after that, though; there's a three-year story gap between books nine and ten, and it might be worthwhile to let a few more books come out before I start in on the second arc. Given that books 11-13 have all come out in 2016, that's not as much of a sacrifice as it might appear...
|