Book #37

Kitty Takes a Holiday
by Carrie Vaughn

This one wasn't my favorite of the series. The writing is still excellent, and I love the characters -- I especially liked that I got to see more of Cormac, and learn more of his past, which was both welcome and interesting -- but the plot was a bit lacking. Kitty isn't "taking a holiday," she's running away from her job and her life, hiding out in a small town in Colorado while Ariel, Priestess of the Night tries to build her own supernatural call-in show. Kitty was more than a little annoying with that, I thought -- she keeps calling in to her rival's show and trying to get Ariel to say stupid things, which just makes Kitty seem like an idiot. I like that Kitty is building a pack, but I don't particularly care for Ben as a love interest for Kitty. I think it will work long term, as Ben tries to adjust to life as a lycanthrope, which will give him some depth, but at the moment he's not a terribly interesting character. No, I shouldn't say that, because I think he is interesting, what with the supernatural lawyer and the weird family background and everything, but I didn't like the way he was written in this one. It was painful to watch him try to be his usual lawyerly self while trying to deal with the rage of the wolf inside, but since he isn't the point of view character and I couldn't see his thoughts, it wasn't really something I could relate to, and that made it seem, well, kind of boring and repetitive. I wanted to grab him and yell, "Get a hold of yourself, for Christ's sake! Let's move on, here!" while at the same time trying to imagine how much harder life would be if I literally couldn't control my temper because there was some wild beast inside me trying to claw out and eat people. This is something I can relate to, considering how much I have to hold my temper, but still: watching it from the outside, through Kitty's eyes, when Kitty has already learned to control the wolf, was a bit dull. Part of that might be because we don't know all that much about Ben, so we don't have the personal attachment that makes it interesting to see a character go through that kind of change. It was like having to watch a slide show of your neighbor's kid learning to walk. Vaguely interesting, but you don't care about the outcome, so no more than that.

I also thought more should have been done with the Skinwalkers, and the town's attack on Kitty. I liked those subplots a lot more than the one with Ben and Cormac. I thought it would have been better to have more of a three-way fight between Kitty, the townsfolk, and the Skinwalker, rather than wrap that up so quickly and go to Cormac's trial. But, I still like the series immensely, I love the way she writes werewolves -- I did like that part of Ben's story, the depiction of the slow transformation from man to werewolf -- and I liked how it ended, with Cormac in jail and Kitty back on the air.