I have a lot of other books in the queue, of course, but I seem to have started reading Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville series and I made a deal with myself that I would write it up no more than three books at a time, to keep from having everything completely blur together.
I knew very little about this when I started; I think I’d picked the first book up very cheap and knew it was popular and urban fantasy of the first-person, supernatural creature + romance variety. It caught my eye when I was scrolling my ereader looking for inspiration, and then I was off.
The first is Kitty and the Midnight Hour, and it’s actually considerably different than I expected. Yes, it’s first-person and it’s supernatural creatures living parallel lives in modern society. But the thing with werewolves is that I expect a lot of focus on the tropes of pack dominance and hierarchy, especially with regard to mating, in a fantasy/id-tastic/eroticized way. But Midnight Hour takes these elements and positions them as, at best, raising genuine questions about how werewolves live in a human society, and at worst, the mechanisms for abuse. In fact, the whole book is about Kitty learning to reclaim agency as a survivor of abuse of various kinds. This made it more emotionally tough going than I expected at times, but was also a welcome surprise.
The next book, Kitty Goes to Washington, deals with fallout from Kitty coming out as a werewolf on her radio show in the last book, as she’s subpoenaed by the Senate. Kitty meets other groups of weres and vampires and sees different ways of organizing and living, which is clearly going to be a major concern of the books. And the upshot is that magic in the form of supernatural creatures comes out in a big way, which is also a thing I enjoy exploring in these kinds of worlds.
The third book, Kitty Takes a Holiday, struck me as somewhat less strong, for two reasons. First, to the extent these books try to do mystery elements, they aren’t particularly successful; in both this book and the first I spotted those responsible for various acts almost immediately. Second, this book shakes up the personal side of Kitty’s life in a way I didn’t find very convincing; it may be that I’m not supposed to be convinced in the long-term, so we’ll see how that plays out. It does feature further conflicts as supernatural society and ordinary law enforcement interact, however, and like the others, was a fast and entertaining read.
There, now I can dive into the next one . . .