Strange Angels by Lili St. Crow
May. 29th, 2011 11:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
If Dru can’t survive until sunrise, the game’s over …
Dru knows that The Real World – peopled with ghosts, suckers and zombies – is a frightening place. She’s ready to kill first and ask questions later, so it’s going to take her a while to work out just who she can trust.
Dru Anderson has been ‘strange’ for as long as she can remember, traveling from town to town with her father to hunt down things that go bump in the night. It’s a weird life, but a good one – until in an icy, broken-down town, a hungry zombie bursts through her kitchen door. Dru is going to have to use every inch of her wit and training. Can she stay alive long enough to fall for one – or both – of the guys hungry for her affections?
Since the death of her mother, Dru Anderson and her dad have been hunting things from The Real World like ghosts, vampires and zombies. Arriving in a small town in the Dakotas, Dru knows that this hunt is different. She’s having dreams about a snowy owl that warns her something bad will happen and her dad won’t tell her what he’s looking for. When he returns late one night as a zombie that’s under something or someone’s control, Dru’s life spirals out of control.
Hunted by supernatural creatures and uncertain what to do, she finds herself having to trust local loner, Graves, a half-Asian kid who lives off the grid in the back of a mall. Together they need to work out what Dru’s dad was hunting and why if they’re to survive but then a dark, mysterious djamphir called Christophe turns up with information about Dru’s past that changes everything …
Lili St Crow’s first YA novel is the first in an urban fantasy series but it suffers by containing a lot of set-up that won’t really pay off until the later books.
Dru’s strong first person voice slowly describes her family background, her psychic abilities and the differences between our world and The Real World, where supernatural creatures hang out. However, while she’s been trained by her father to shoot, fight and hunt, she dithers over key decisions, so events happen to her rather than her driving events. She’s also slow on the uptake and engages in pointless arguments – including 3 pages of bickering over who drives her truck. The revelation of her secret past takes her dangerously close to Mary-Sue territory.
Graves is more interesting. Keen to help Dru because he genuinely likes her, he’s a survivor with plans for a future that get thrown into disarray by events beyond his control. However the fact that he’s relegated to one corner of a love triangle, neuters his role in the story. Christophe is the other corner but he arrives too late in the story to make much impact and frankly, the impending love triangle is something that’s been done many times before.
All in all, there’s a lot of running around and action, but the story never gripped me as it should and I wasn’t interested enough in Dru or her inevitable beaus to want to read more. It’s an okay read, but not a special one.
The Verdict:
Lili St Crow’s YA urban fantasy is an okay read, but Dru never gripped me as a character and key revelations about her take her too close to Mary-Sue territory for my taste, while the inevitable love triangle between her and two male characters has been done elsewhere too many times before. There’s a lot of set-up to the book, which I don’t doubt will pay off in later books, but I’m not interested enough to read on.
Thanks to Quercus for the free copy of this book.
Dru knows that The Real World – peopled with ghosts, suckers and zombies – is a frightening place. She’s ready to kill first and ask questions later, so it’s going to take her a while to work out just who she can trust.
Dru Anderson has been ‘strange’ for as long as she can remember, traveling from town to town with her father to hunt down things that go bump in the night. It’s a weird life, but a good one – until in an icy, broken-down town, a hungry zombie bursts through her kitchen door. Dru is going to have to use every inch of her wit and training. Can she stay alive long enough to fall for one – or both – of the guys hungry for her affections?
Since the death of her mother, Dru Anderson and her dad have been hunting things from The Real World like ghosts, vampires and zombies. Arriving in a small town in the Dakotas, Dru knows that this hunt is different. She’s having dreams about a snowy owl that warns her something bad will happen and her dad won’t tell her what he’s looking for. When he returns late one night as a zombie that’s under something or someone’s control, Dru’s life spirals out of control.
Hunted by supernatural creatures and uncertain what to do, she finds herself having to trust local loner, Graves, a half-Asian kid who lives off the grid in the back of a mall. Together they need to work out what Dru’s dad was hunting and why if they’re to survive but then a dark, mysterious djamphir called Christophe turns up with information about Dru’s past that changes everything …
Lili St Crow’s first YA novel is the first in an urban fantasy series but it suffers by containing a lot of set-up that won’t really pay off until the later books.
Dru’s strong first person voice slowly describes her family background, her psychic abilities and the differences between our world and The Real World, where supernatural creatures hang out. However, while she’s been trained by her father to shoot, fight and hunt, she dithers over key decisions, so events happen to her rather than her driving events. She’s also slow on the uptake and engages in pointless arguments – including 3 pages of bickering over who drives her truck. The revelation of her secret past takes her dangerously close to Mary-Sue territory.
Graves is more interesting. Keen to help Dru because he genuinely likes her, he’s a survivor with plans for a future that get thrown into disarray by events beyond his control. However the fact that he’s relegated to one corner of a love triangle, neuters his role in the story. Christophe is the other corner but he arrives too late in the story to make much impact and frankly, the impending love triangle is something that’s been done many times before.
All in all, there’s a lot of running around and action, but the story never gripped me as it should and I wasn’t interested enough in Dru or her inevitable beaus to want to read more. It’s an okay read, but not a special one.
The Verdict:
Lili St Crow’s YA urban fantasy is an okay read, but Dru never gripped me as a character and key revelations about her take her too close to Mary-Sue territory for my taste, while the inevitable love triangle between her and two male characters has been done elsewhere too many times before. There’s a lot of set-up to the book, which I don’t doubt will pay off in later books, but I’m not interested enough to read on.
Thanks to Quercus for the free copy of this book.
