A review by atagarev
Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire

4.0

A promising beginning to a new urban fantasy series. A large portion of the book is dedicated to setting up the world and some longer running mysteries and conflicts and there is much more emphasis on building the mystery than on action scenes than the typical UF book. Overall this makes for a very slow paced book that takes a lot of time to establish many characters and interpersonal conflicts that are... well, honestly, totally superfluous to the main conflict in the book. There are honestly so many side characters that they take center stage and leave the "main" plot as an afterthought. This might have bothered me more if said main plot was interesting or engaging but it was a pretty cookie cutter mystery with a magical macguffin where the obvious bad guy with an obvious motivation turns out to be the bad guy with the obvious motivation by the end i.e. its almost an anti-twist as the first immediate guess of the reader turns out to be the correct.