Stray by Rachel Vincent

Yep, another "paranormal" book review.

Stray, by newcomer Rachel Vincent, is the story of Faythe Sanders, a college student and werecat.

I bought this because of the cat theme (I love cats) and because a favorite writer, Kim Harrison, recommended it. I'm not sorry, it was a good story overall but...as Publisher's Weekly put it:

"Vincent's debut, an urban werecat fantasy, is a good story that suffers from about 200 pages of bloat"

and

"Unfortunately, they [Marc and Faythe the lead characters] both have frustrating character tics that are only exacerbated by the novel's length: Faythe is more often too-stubborn-to-live than kick-ass, and all the tears Marc wells up over Faythe don't forgive his insufferable jealousy."

I would recommend catching a copy of this at the library so you can decide for yourself if you want to go further with the series (next up is Rogue and then Pride coming in '09) although Ms. Vincent DOES create a unique and very very interesting world.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Rogue has to offer, but I'm hoping that Marc gets over his "bad" self and Faythe remembers that she does, indeed, have a brain.

3 out of 5 berries because the ending was pretty fast paced and kept me reading far into the night.

Jennifer Scales and the Silver Elm

This is the third book in the "Jennifer Scales" series by MaryJanice Davidson. On the whole, it's not bad - it's an interesting story, well-written, and it's engaging. Plus, since it's written for a Young Adult audience, it's short. For all the shortness, however, it does resolve its crisis; there isn't anything left hanging as a "tune in next time", which made me happy.

*SPOILERS for the series. Possibly. Just FYI.*
Jennifer is back in form as a were-dragon. Her adventures take her to a lot of weird places, including a parallel time-line and a place known only to, and sacred to, the dragons.
They also take her into a realm of not only self-sufficiency, but (almost paradoxically) the realization that she isn't the only one affected by her decisions, she doesn't always know what's right, and maybe she should just shut up and pay attention once in a while to people that very likely do know more than she does, and very probably do have good, valid reasons for what they do. I'm not going to give away more than that; you'll have to read it.

Overall, I really enjoyed it. There were a couple things I wasn't thrilled with, though. The first was the opening scene. The "telling the end of the story first then doing a flashback to the rest of the story" schtick is getting old. Everyone is doing it these days, and I'm getting really tired of it. It was totally unnecessary, and I thought it was rather jarring. It didn't serve to get me interested in the story, it just annoyed me. Maybe it'll go over better with the YA readers.

Parts of the story seemed to be rather disconnected, jumping around from scene to scene with little to no real "segue" - or kludged in at the last second, almost like the authors said, "oh crud, we forgot that we had to resolve that...uh....cram it in there."

Other than those two things, though, I thought it was a good book. And really, the overall story arc and writing almost made up for those.
4 out of 5.
Other than that, though, I did enjoy it.