Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsWhite Witch Long Book
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 20, 2009
OK. I'm going to write this review before reading any of the other reviews. It will be interesting to see if anyone else had the same reactions to Rachel's latest adventure.
AND I CANNOT SAY THIS ANY MORE PLAINLY *****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS*****!!!!!
I felt this was a very frustrating book. At 500 pages, it seemed to drag interminably before coming to any sort of point. Rachel goes a lot of different places, always in a bad mood, has inconclusive conversations with a lot of people, always has to have some sort of drama whenever she tries to leave, then goes some other places. I think probably at least 50 pages could have been cut with no harm to the book whatsoever. And Rachel continues to be pointless irritating on some important issues, like always wanting to be at crime scenes, but not being willing to take the time to learn evidence protection rules.
However, I had worse problems with some other aspects of the book:
1) Pierce!!?? We find out about this incredibly important person in Rachel's life who it just so happens has never been mentioned before. It smells like a retcon, and I don't buy it. I also don't like him for Rachel, at all. If not Ivy, then big Jenks is the obvious choice.
2) Shunning? I don't ever recall such a thing being mentioned before as a possibility. Shouldn't Rachel have been worrying about it pretty often? Shouldn't there have been some warnings, some due process? It seems incredibly arbitrary and political. If that's just the way it is, fine, but we should have heard about it before.
3) Mathilde(sp?) & Jenks. Jenks's wife is dying, and he's torn up about it, but I don't think we've ever heard so much as a whole paragraph of her speech. How are we supposed to care about her when she never comes on-stage? For that matter, what happened to Jenks's son that he was teaching to be his replacement (not the one that went bad, the other one)? And Jenks has money and can use the phone. Why is he so dependant on Rachel to take him shopping? If his wife needs certain herbs so badly, why can't he have them delivered. He's done deals with the outside world apart from Rachel & Ivy before.
4) Marshall. I never did like him, so good riddance, but he still was too much of a presence in this book. I guess the point is no "nice guy" can survive extreme Rachel-ness, but we got that already.
5)The banshees. Mrs. Walker was just wasted -- a good build-up with no resolution, and the whole banshee way of life was too vague for me. Do banshees normally avoid killing and Mia went bad, or do they always killl (untill Holly)? Rachel seems too OK with leaving an "apex predator" free.
6) The ending. Some guy we never heard of killed Kisten? And he's (totally) dead? And he killed this other guy we haven't seen for several books? This was really lame. It reminds me of when Skimmer killed Piscary instead of Rachel or Ivy getting to do it. I also didn't "get" what Rachel was feeling when she burned and sealed the chamber. She does her first "black" magic for why exactly? So nobody will know why Kisten died? Seems like it would have been a good way to force some changes to the vampire "mafia" operating outside the law.
This whole ghost thing coming out of left-field seems to have knocked any advancement of the Trent and studying with Al subplots off the rails too.
