A review by wardenred
Trailer Park Trickster by David R. Slayton

adventurous mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

He had no prayers. He had no gods, and the closest things he’d met to them were jerks.

Well, this was... pretty different from the first book, even though it's a direct continuation of the same story. A lot of the things I enjoyed about White Trash Warlock are still here: the awesome "parallel worlds" setting with its awesome rules, the Tarot-themed elven courts, the magic, the complex politics between all the supernatural beings, and that whole vibe of big powers placing people as pawns on a cosmic chessboard. I very much enjoyed Adam's storyline, the juxtaposition/intersection of the mundane and the magical in the mystery plot that follows his aunt's death, and the way he continued reforging bonds with his estranged family.

What I didn't love was the other part of the story. I liked Vic in the previous book, but once he become a prominent POV character, a lot of the engagement kind of fell away. Somehow, he turned out to be flatter than I expected. I wasn't a fan of "splitting the party" and having Vic wander off a lot into the elven lands without Adam. I think a big part of that was that it was more boring to see those magical landscapes from the POV of a near-complete outsider, someone discovering this stuff for himself for the first time. Through Adam's eyes, all those dangerous wonders had an added mistique because he was already familiar with them and *still* constantly discovering something new. I would've also preferred to see certain big events in Arden's and Silver's storylines through Adam's eyes rather than Vic's, because while Vic does build his own rapport with both of them, it can't beat Adam's dynamic with Arden developed in the first book, or what Adam's history with Silver adds to their present interactions. Adam's relationship with Vic also kind of meandered throughout the book, and not just while they spent those big chunks of time apart, but when they were together in a scene, too. 

Honestly, the way the split into two POVs here was a disappointment compared to the POV split in the book one, because here it was mainly just "A is here doing X, B is there doing Y, then X and Y storylines intersect," which is a pretty normal thing to do for sure! Except compared to how Bobby's chapters in the first book turned Adam into an unreliable narrator and vise versa and showcased how different a shared history can be... it just felt flat.

Nevertheless, there were a lot of intriguing moving parts to the plot, a lot of unanswered questions that I'd love to figure out the answers to, and once again, a tense cliffhanger. So I very much intend to finish the trilogy. I also suspect that a lot of the weaknesses I saw in this book wouldn't bother me so much if I wasn't comparing it to all the things the first book did better!
Expand filter menu Content Warnings