*Bone Crossed* by Patricia Briggs
This makes book 4.5 completed in 2009, for those of you keeping score at home.
In Bone Crossed, Patricia Briggs crafted a masterful plot and deep characters whom I felt strongly about. Her world building continues to astound me in its balance of subtlety, texture, and completeness. Bone Crossed was worth every moment of waiting for since I finished the last book in this world, Cry Wolf.
If you haven't read any of the Mercy Thompson Series, read them. Amazing books. Amazing. Bone Crossed is the fourth in this series, although there are two other stories in the same world but following different characters as protagonists in different localities. I love them all. Really fun, funny, complex, thrilling, interesting urban fantasies.
Several of the characters are now dearer to my heart than before. In light of the werewolf social structure, I really came to admire Adam more in these books. He worked really hard to be the understanding, supportive mate Mercy needed and allowed her a surprising but believable amount of support for a werewolf with his mate. Stefan is back in this book, and he is even more the best, most likable evil creature I think I've yet read. He challenges my notions of 'good' and 'evil' and I'm in love with him a little bit all at the same time. And Chad. I cannot talk about Chad in detail without giving things away. But, wow. I was so delighted by how well Patty captured ten-year-old boy; and profoundly deaf person; and really brave person. And that she managed to put all of those things into a single character is ... yeah. Wow. I work with people who have various disabilities, and I was as delighted by the accuracy with which Patty captured the hearing character's reactions (in all their breadth) to someone profoundly deaf as I was at how well she captured the deaf character himself, and she did all that without ever reducing him to his disability.
Mercy continues to be a favorite character/narrator of mine. In Bone she has to deal with the emotional fall out of the trauma at the end of Iron Kissed. Patty tackles a lot of hard stuff, and I hurt with Mercy while reading a number of scenes. Mercy also gains more knowledge of her own abilities as a walker ... which are all spoilerish but really cool. Also in Bone, Patty continues to make better and better use of Mercy's heightened sense of smell: so many things were vivid in ways I'd never considered before because of Mercy's particular way of recognizing/describing things by their smells.
Except for Blood Bound, the second in the Mercy series, Bone feels like it has the least number of pages with 'action' on them. Bone moved much faster than Blood though. There were none of the 'lull' scenes in the middle of Bone where Mercy was sitting on her hands feeling frustrated about not being able to do anything regarding the problems going on around her as in Blood, although, the tension from the main plot was greater in Blood. I'm comparing the two of them, in part, because in both Mercy has a great deal of interaction with the vampires in her world. The interesting connection is that with the two books focusing on vampires, while they actually have more gore in the 'action' parts, they feel like psychological thrillers. Whereas I register more of an action/mystery combo in Moon Called in Iron Kissed (books one and three respectively) which deal primarily with werewolves and fey.
Compared to the others in this world, Bone for me probably ranks only three or four out of six. I think a lot of that has to do with the places I've been at when reading each of them. But, mostly, what turns out to be the 'main plot' in Bone revolves around a bad-guy who clearly should have terrified me ... and failed to. Now, I said 'turned out to be the "main plot"' because the subplots, three of them that I can clearly discern, were fabulous. All three of them had scenes that nearly had me biting my pillow in fear. The main plot had quite a bit of creepiness and ick as well as intriguing well laid out ideas; for several little reasons however, the fear-factor for the baddie whose demise was the climax of the book was not visceral enough to leave me breathless at the end the way Cry and Iron did. I savored it. I admired (laughed and hurt with) Mercy. I loved the new insights I gained into vampires, ghosts, and several individual minor characters. But the Big Boss, as video gamers would call it, just didn't quite pack the emotional punch I was looking for.
Some of that last bit sounds negative, but only very slightly, only in comparison to the other books in this world, and even then I liked it a lot. Really, it was a spectacular book. If I weren't on a mission to read 25 un-assigned novels this year (and didn't have a take home exam, exams on Monday and Wednesday, and some other homework and dishes waiting for me) I'd turn right around and re-read Bone Crossed. Because it was really, really good. Read it in less than five days. Not record breaking, but I've had a truly busy week and still poured through an enthralling read. Don't let the critical analysis deter you. Go, read Bone Crossed right now. It's worth every penny of the hardback book price.
In Bone Crossed, Patricia Briggs crafted a masterful plot and deep characters whom I felt strongly about. Her world building continues to astound me in its balance of subtlety, texture, and completeness. Bone Crossed was worth every moment of waiting for since I finished the last book in this world, Cry Wolf.
If you haven't read any of the Mercy Thompson Series, read them. Amazing books. Amazing. Bone Crossed is the fourth in this series, although there are two other stories in the same world but following different characters as protagonists in different localities. I love them all. Really fun, funny, complex, thrilling, interesting urban fantasies.
Several of the characters are now dearer to my heart than before. In light of the werewolf social structure, I really came to admire Adam more in these books. He worked really hard to be the understanding, supportive mate Mercy needed and allowed her a surprising but believable amount of support for a werewolf with his mate. Stefan is back in this book, and he is even more the best, most likable evil creature I think I've yet read. He challenges my notions of 'good' and 'evil' and I'm in love with him a little bit all at the same time. And Chad. I cannot talk about Chad in detail without giving things away. But, wow. I was so delighted by how well Patty captured ten-year-old boy; and profoundly deaf person; and really brave person. And that she managed to put all of those things into a single character is ... yeah. Wow. I work with people who have various disabilities, and I was as delighted by the accuracy with which Patty captured the hearing character's reactions (in all their breadth) to someone profoundly deaf as I was at how well she captured the deaf character himself, and she did all that without ever reducing him to his disability.
Mercy continues to be a favorite character/narrator of mine. In Bone she has to deal with the emotional fall out of the trauma at the end of Iron Kissed. Patty tackles a lot of hard stuff, and I hurt with Mercy while reading a number of scenes. Mercy also gains more knowledge of her own abilities as a walker ... which are all spoilerish but really cool. Also in Bone, Patty continues to make better and better use of Mercy's heightened sense of smell: so many things were vivid in ways I'd never considered before because of Mercy's particular way of recognizing/describing things by their smells.
Except for Blood Bound, the second in the Mercy series, Bone feels like it has the least number of pages with 'action' on them. Bone moved much faster than Blood though. There were none of the 'lull' scenes in the middle of Bone where Mercy was sitting on her hands feeling frustrated about not being able to do anything regarding the problems going on around her as in Blood, although, the tension from the main plot was greater in Blood. I'm comparing the two of them, in part, because in both Mercy has a great deal of interaction with the vampires in her world. The interesting connection is that with the two books focusing on vampires, while they actually have more gore in the 'action' parts, they feel like psychological thrillers. Whereas I register more of an action/mystery combo in Moon Called in Iron Kissed (books one and three respectively) which deal primarily with werewolves and fey.
Compared to the others in this world, Bone for me probably ranks only three or four out of six. I think a lot of that has to do with the places I've been at when reading each of them. But, mostly, what turns out to be the 'main plot' in Bone revolves around a bad-guy who clearly should have terrified me ... and failed to. Now, I said 'turned out to be the "main plot"' because the subplots, three of them that I can clearly discern, were fabulous. All three of them had scenes that nearly had me biting my pillow in fear. The main plot had quite a bit of creepiness and ick as well as intriguing well laid out ideas; for several little reasons however, the fear-factor for the baddie whose demise was the climax of the book was not visceral enough to leave me breathless at the end the way Cry and Iron did. I savored it. I admired (laughed and hurt with) Mercy. I loved the new insights I gained into vampires, ghosts, and several individual minor characters. But the Big Boss, as video gamers would call it, just didn't quite pack the emotional punch I was looking for.
Some of that last bit sounds negative, but only very slightly, only in comparison to the other books in this world, and even then I liked it a lot. Really, it was a spectacular book. If I weren't on a mission to read 25 un-assigned novels this year (and didn't have a take home exam, exams on Monday and Wednesday, and some other homework and dishes waiting for me) I'd turn right around and re-read Bone Crossed. Because it was really, really good. Read it in less than five days. Not record breaking, but I've had a truly busy week and still poured through an enthralling read. Don't let the critical analysis deter you. Go, read Bone Crossed right now. It's worth every penny of the hardback book price.