Order
“Touch” HERE
Read
An Excerpt HERE
(PDF)
Read
FBC’s
Review of “Silence”
I
loved Michelle Sagara's Silence, the first of her YA urban
fantasy series Queen of the Damned,
and I've been eagerly awaiting the sequel since. Touch had some great moments and dealt with some heart-rending
situations — to name a few: child abandonment from both the parental and child
perspectives; parents beginning to date again from the perspectives of both the
teen child and the dead husband; and most to the point, given the cliffhanger
of Silence, how you cope when the
love of your life comes back to you as a ghost, from the ghost and the
protagonist's perspectives. All tricky balances to walk, and the author manages
them beautifully.
One
of the things I love in this series is how Sagara
deals with the ideas of “coping” with death, and the nuances of grief. What “moving
on” even means, and whether it's possible.
I
also continue to love the supporting characters Amy and Michael, in part
because Sagara makes these
characters that could easily be stereotypes, so very much more. A lot of how
she does that is by having both of them make strong choices: agency combined
with competency is always a win for me.
That
said, Touch did feel kind of
middle-book-ish to me. There was a lot of character and issue exploration, but
not a whole lot of plot movement. The author did clarify some of my questions
from the first book, and the ending once again presented a very interesting
dilemma, but there was some lag getting there.
I'm
also a little unsatisfied with Alison's
character arc — namely that it doesn't seem to really arc at all. It's more an
exploration of who she is, but she doesn't change. One of the central conflicts
of this book is the value of friendship when that friendship is actively
dangerous to each involved party. And likewise what an average human can do
when faced with supernatural forces targeting them. Now, Sagara did set up the possibility of training average humans, but so far, the average human is dead
weight that causes complications for their friends. I suspect being valued
precisely for her ordinariness might
be part of the point, but it didn't work for me.
I
would have liked a little more movement on both plot and character fronts in Touch, but Michelle Sagara has set up a lot to work with in the next installment
and I look forward to reading it.
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