After how much fun I had with Strange Practice, it seemed only natural that I’d checkout the sequel! Because apparently there’s more than one!
This book starts with Greta and Ruthvan in France attending a conference about supernatural medical practices.1 In pretty short order things go wrong in that Greta gets kidnapped and it takes a while to notice she’s missing thanks to people being conveniently called away and not thinking much about the woman at a conference not paying attention to her phone for a bit. Gradually, you learn that she’s been taken by a coven of vampires, the head of which has a grudge against Ruthvan, and that this is a pretty terrible coven in most respects. Partially because one is turning people without consent, and partially because another is summoning so many cute things that she’s causing the fabric of reality to grow thin.
I mean, worth it though.
This book was as much fun as the last one, I’m happy to say. It doesn’t suffer from second book syndrome in that it’s still a contained adventure that references previous events and builds on the characters. There are a few perspectives I didn’t care for initially, but it was good to have them in the narrative to help flesh out the universe and give the last few keys to the puzzle of what was going on. The story has so many disparate parts that you really don’t know until the end how they all fit together, but they do fit together pretty marvelously.
I also really like how the diversity is done in this universe. They exist and that’s it. It feels like the universe is diverse as opposed to a story where they are trying to hit a quota. They are there, you notice them, their actions are informed by their experiences, and then we focus on the vampires destroying reality that we need to call in the forces of hell to deal with.
It does, however, still have that other issue where it doesn’t sound like it’s taking place in the modern day. Every reference to cell phones and smartphones feels out of place because they all talk like they are from a very different era. It feels jarring, but I wonder if some of that is because it takes place in Europe.
Overall, I really enjoyed it! The series is a lot of fun so far and I’ll probably check out the third when it comes out.
- Which is actually a pretty fascinating world detail! [↩]