Order “Rogue Descendant” HERE
Read An Excerpt HERE
Rogue Descendant, published at the end of
April, is the third of Jenna Black's latest urban fantasy
series (she's written a few, all worth checking out), the Nikki Glass or Descendant
series. This is one of those world-building structures
where Greek mythology features heavily, though there are some other cool
mythologies as well. Essentially, the gods have descendants, and if a mortal
descendant kills an immortal one, they gain immortality and some magical powers
related to whatever deity they're descended from. How our protagonist came by
her seed of immortality is part of the matter of book one, Dark Descendant, but the fact of the matter is that all unwanted, Nikki has to learn how to live in the
world she's joined and with the powers she inherited from Artemis. Unfortunately,
while she's beginning to deal with the former, there is no movement on the
latter.
This
bothers me. In book one, of course Nikki
wouldn’t know how to use her powers; she was too busy trying to survive to
start exploring them. Book two rolls around and that no longer holds up; when
her approach in book three is still pretty much, "Oh, I feel like we
should turn this way for no apparent reason IT MUST BE MY HUNTING POWERS,” I
have suspension of disbelief problems. In fairness, Nikki seems to find this ridiculous as well, but she doesn't seem
inclined to do anything about it. She
can come up with ways for other characters
to explore their power, but her own she ignores until she needs it and then
vainly wishes it worked better. Possibly a comment on human nature, but I find
it tiring.
There's
also no net movement on the romance front —
it's still well-handled, but it leaves off in pretty much the same place as the
last book. I can deal with that, though. What concerns me is that the climax of
all three books has involved a final confrontation with Nikki and Anderson, the
head of their non-Olympian-descended-exclusive band who is not the love
interest, against an external threat, and now this book has been dropping hints
that we are going to have a love triangle on our hands, and I hate love triangles.
However,
excepting the fact that all the immortal characters seem to be easily swayed by
circumstantial evidence when they're supposed to be experienced enough with
Byzantine plots to know better, they do all behave in horribly logical and
often twisted ways given what they did know and who they were. Konstantin's son is a refreshingly
complicated sort-of-villain, and the lingering problem of Emma has been resolved. In theory. Jenna Black is great with character consistency and emotional
responses to traumatic events, be they personally painful or physically, that
really resonate as true. It must be said that Nikki is very inventive about not relying on magic or immortality
to save her, and understanding her limits makes scenes a lot tenser than they
would be if she knew how to use her magic and depended on it. I burned through
this book, which is always a good sign.
And yet,
I'm disappointed in this installment. Rogue
Descendant wasn't painful to read by any stretch, but there's no character
growth, no romance development, no exploration of the protagonist's abilities, and
no particularly revealing information about the world. I feel like this whole
book was in order to set-up the characters' huge problems in the next book. It's
very plot-centric, and I want more from a story than just events unfolding.
No comments:
Post a Comment