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A review by tessisreading2
Grave War by Kalayna Price
3.0
I skipped two books when a library hold came in. The thing is... it didn't really matter, and I think that's the major flaw with this series. All seven books cover perhaps a year in the book world, and Alex and her friends basically just keep going around and around in circles. The Big Ultimate Villain is someone we met in previous books... who got more villainous in some of those books... and I guess got more so in the two I haven't read yet, but somehow escaped any consequent detainment/punishment... and who develops yet more superpowers, ancestry, and goals which seem to have come out of nowhere, because that's how things work in this series.
It feels sloppy, unfortunately; the more urban fantasy I read, the more I understand how Ilona Andrews is the behemoth of the urban fantasy genre - because the authors had an overarching world setup and plot from book one, and while they never played their hand too early, on re-reading early books in their series, you can see the hints and clues that the readers and often the characters missed at the time. Price clearly wasn't doing that; most of this comes out of nowhere, and Alex, as usual, doesn't pay attention to anything until it becomes plot-necessary for her to do so. Remember that Alex has a missing brother? Neither do I, because except for a few brief mentions in previous books she didn't seem particularly worried about it. Remember her traumatized younger sister? Yeah, remains totally irrelevant to basically everything always. When the heavy drama begins early in the book, Alex seems about as worried as she is when she's dealing with a run-of-the-mill grave witch case with a jerk client, which is nowhere near proportional to the scale of the crisis she's confronting. It makes it hard to find the books particularly stressful, because nothing feels real.
That said, there's something to be said for that. The series is pleasant and engaging, there are plenty of bad guys and dramatic fight scenes, lots of endearing secondary characters, and while Alex is something of a Mary Sue (boy is she ever) she's not unpleasant. There's no sexualized violence, which is a pleasant change from many urban fantasy series. The whole series is wrapped up with a neat little bow - and if the bow is a little too neat and the series is a little too wrapped up in, basically, the very last chapter of the book, well, that's consistent with the rest of the series, and it's nice to have a thorough conclusive ending to things.
It feels sloppy, unfortunately; the more urban fantasy I read, the more I understand how Ilona Andrews is the behemoth of the urban fantasy genre - because the authors had an overarching world setup and plot from book one, and while they never played their hand too early, on re-reading early books in their series, you can see the hints and clues that the readers and often the characters missed at the time. Price clearly wasn't doing that; most of this comes out of nowhere, and Alex, as usual, doesn't pay attention to anything until it becomes plot-necessary for her to do so. Remember that Alex has a missing brother? Neither do I, because except for a few brief mentions in previous books she didn't seem particularly worried about it. Remember her traumatized younger sister? Yeah, remains totally irrelevant to basically everything always. When the heavy drama begins early in the book, Alex seems about as worried as she is when she's dealing with a run-of-the-mill grave witch case with a jerk client, which is nowhere near proportional to the scale of the crisis she's confronting. It makes it hard to find the books particularly stressful, because nothing feels real.
That said, there's something to be said for that. The series is pleasant and engaging, there are plenty of bad guys and dramatic fight scenes, lots of endearing secondary characters, and while Alex is something of a Mary Sue (boy is she ever) she's not unpleasant. There's no sexualized violence, which is a pleasant change from many urban fantasy series. The whole series is wrapped up with a neat little bow - and if the bow is a little too neat and the series is a little too wrapped up in, basically, the very last chapter of the book, well, that's consistent with the rest of the series, and it's nice to have a thorough conclusive ending to things.