Jamie Quaid aka Patricia Rice
Saturn's Daughter #1
Urban Fantasy
2012
*** .... okay, maybe ****
cover - I love this cover. It's just so in your face. Ridiculous heels, a motorcycle and a tire iron. Girl means BUSINESS!
But don't let the cover fool you. She wasn't quite as tough as the cover presumes.....
First off - let me just say that I did enjoy reading the book. Most of it. After all, I did finish and I don't finish books if I'm not enjoying them at least a little.....but there were a few times when I found myself doing that frustrated irritable sigh, and rolling my eyes.... I can't even really tell you why.
I love the premise of the book; weird things going on in a forgotten - or rather ignored - section of a city. This section has suffered from a chemical spill, and the chemical spill is causing some weird animation of inanimate objects, causing changes in people, strange abilities in some...
Our main character is a supposedly bad-ass who has had a bad experience with cops and university personnel. Bad enough to cause her to have one leg shorter than the other and residual pain. Even so, she's going to college to be a lawyer, and is working is this oh-so-strange section to earn her way through lawyering classes.
Anyway - long summary short - Tina has an asshole boyfriend who she can never rely on, and one day he's so very late. She's already pissed off, because he's supposed to be picking her up but then he shows up and it seems he's running her down. Of course she's convinced he's trying to kill her - this is the part that got to me. Really? I would have thought something was wrong with the car, not that he's trying to kill me, but it's not my story. She yells at him "Damn you to hell" and he burns up in a fiery conflagration....so of course she right away REALIZES that she did indeed damn him to hell. (unless I'm remembering it wrong, I do tend to wait a hell of a long time to write a review...) He keeps showing up in her mirrors and she never really freaks out about this - but that could be because of all the strange things she already has seen in this oh-so-strange section of the city.
Anyway, jumping to another plot point, a bag of deposit money gets stolen right out from under her.....AND she witnesses a fancy car run down a group of kids.... it's all mashed up into a story.
Her boss, who at first is described as kind of sleazy, in a what I understood to be a lounge lizard kind of way (which is also extremely unattractive to me). She is supposedly unattractive, he's described in an unappealing way but she has the hots for him - even right after her boyfriend has gone up in flames....Somehow as the book progresses, she finds him more and more attractive (of course).
She also finds herself changing. Every time she manages to accidentally damn someone, she gains physical attractiveness - her legs lengthen. She loses her scars. And she finds herself damning people more than she should. Temper, Temper, young grasshopper! tsk, tsk.
So anyway - as I already said, I liked most of the book. The parts I found myself eyerolling at were the reasons she damns people, her not really bad-assedness, and when she finally realizes she's a daughter of saturn - after pretty much ignoring WAY TOO MANY CLUES, such as NOTES that have been left for her to read.
What I enjoyed was her boyfriend's motorcycle gang friends, who consider her a friend and help her out however they can. I also liked all the weirdness that happens in this oh-so-strange section of the city - even though I wish that the writer had written in some more of this. I also liked that her boss had hidden depths, and the weird girl who seemed to start out so meek - changes into a chimpanzee when stressed...but watch out for her.
So - an odd mixture of feelings about this book for me. I found the narrative a little ..... I guess, dry - this was what had me feeling like sighing in frustration - something about the way the narrative was written turned me off, but I did enjoy the story as a whole. Enough to think about buying the next book in the series, someday - whether on kindle or ppb. I would like to see how the oh-so-strange section of the city fares, and would like to read more of the completely weird characters, even though I'm not totally into the whole Daughter of Saturn thing. It just seemed like the story was going in one direction with the set up, the history, the chemical explanations (too much of that, by the way) and then this mystical Saturn's Daughter thing - which happens every so many years, blah, blah, blah didn't quite match the rest. But again - not my story, and the other parts make up for this mis-match of plot.
