A review by jayvall
Pax Demonica by Julie Kenner

2.0

I wanted this to be much better than it was. I suppose it might be time to just give up on this series since it's not what's making Julie Kenner money anymore and she doesn't seem to be terribly interested in writing it. The story takes place over the course of about 48 hours and while I enjoyed the family going to Rome, they never really got to do anything there. I feel like part of sending your story to Rome should be having the reader experience the sights along with the characters, and here, every time they tried to go somewhere, they got waylaid because someone was tired, someone needed to eat, someone needed to stop and look at a map, or a demon popped up. I also thought this would have benefited from more (better?) editing because I'm pretty sure Kenner got the time difference between Rome and CA wrong (if it's the noon in Rome, it's 4am in California, not 10pm) and at one point Eric popped up while Kate was having a conversation with Stuart. I'm not the closest reader in the world, so catching these mistakes just made me pay more attention to other things that might be wrong rather than just enjoying the story.

While I've enjoyed the previous books in the series, this one just didn't do it for me, and it makes me question whether I want to continue with it or if I should just stick with my fond memories of Kate the Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom. Also, at 183 pages on my ipad, the last 20+ were all back matter. Is it really necessary to highlight every book in not one, but two series with multi-paragraph long blurbs for each book?