Customer Rating:  
Summary: Surprisingly better than expected!
Comment: Well I've been a fan of Merry from the start and while Anita Blake seems to have gone haywire Merry got lost in faerie politics. The reviews for this are mixed, and thats fair. There are still the usual confusing plots and alliances and I must admit that as usual I'd forgotten who some characters were! However the main storyline running through this is Merry's escape to LA away from the lands of faerie and the Seelie and Unseelie Courts with their plots and their tricks.
Now that Merry is pregnant with twins you expect things to get sorted out, and they pretty much do. She becomes Queen of the Slaugh with Sholto, regains the old weapons of power from the Goddess and even faces her ultimate foe; cousin Cel. There is more blood and guts than sex in this latest book, and thats a good thing as the plot seems to move along for a change.
If you haven't lost complete faith in the series then give this a try, my only hope is that this is the final Merry book as this seems to end things quite nicely. I can't imagine what would come after this and its sure to degenerate back into a trashy soft porn series again.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Enough already
Comment: This book is just awful.
I gave up reading Anita Blake a few years ago but I still enjoyed the MG series. Well now it has been turned into an absolute circus and I just feel that LKH has run out of steam. It is just way too descriptive, I'm fed up with the constant hair colours, eye colour, body disfigurements, endless, endless power and Merry has just turned into another Anita Blake, The Queen of Absolutely Everything! A self proclaimed goddess! not even rape by her uncle will faze her. Geez, I think she has actually superceded Anita Blake in the biggest Mary Sue of this genre.
LKH has lost it, this addition is poorly written and I will not be purchasing another one of her books. I can't even finish this one because there just isn't any challenge anymore. No element of mystery or anticipation just regurgitated nonsense.
Customer Rating:
Summary: More magic battles and intrigue
Comment: I totally disagree with the first two reviewers. Yes the rape doesn't traumatize her as much as it would a normal person, but she is supposed to be a magical person descended from a love goddess who has unborn twins genetically derived from 6 of her lovers trying to stay alive long enough to rule the fey! - surely you cant quibble about reality at this point in the series...
If you like a fun fantasy with a sassy heroine, trying to deal with court intrigues, old feuds and the various lands of the sidhe all battling each other then this is a great series, and a good book. However you rea;;y do need to read them in order to keep track of who is who.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Non stop action
Comment: So many things happen in such a short space of time that there is no chance to be bored with this book. Everyone is still trying to assassinate Merry and her men, there are lots of cliff hanger moments and plenty of blood, but very little sex in this one.
I agree with some other reviewers that the rape is glossed over, but I think this is more to do with so much happening and Merry has not yet remembered it than being ignored by Hamilton.
The book left me itching to know what will happen in Los Angeles, will she ever be queen, how will the men who have spent little or no time outside faerie adapt to the human world, how will magic spread to the humans... I could go on and on with questions. All good books leave you with wanting more, and this one certainly left me waiting impatiently for the next Merry book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: poorly written.
Comment: Laurell K Hamilton's books have been getting steadily worse for a long long time. I'm still reading in the hopes that she'll start to show some of what used to make her so enjoyable again. The early Anita Blake books were quite entertaining and when the Merry Gentry series started I really enjoyed the first few books too. Sadly things started to slide when the books lost all plot and descended into almost constant sex scenes that spanned the whole entire book. I enjoy sex in books but not to the exclusion of plot. This book can't be tarred with that reason for being bad however as the sex is kept to a minimum - well as minimum as LKH seems to be able to keep it these days anyway and there is a storyline of sorts.
To summarise the plot, the book starts directly after the events of A Lick of Frost (Meredith Gentry 6) with Merry in hospital after being raped by her Uncle Tarranis (Merry shows almost no signs of any trauma - very strange) then a plot to kill Merry's guards begins to unfurl and Merry calls up te wild hunt in revenge to go chassing after the plotters. And that's about it as far as plot goes, Merry reacting to all that the seelie and unseelie and the sluagh and the goblins can throw at her while gaining magical power ups from the Goddess. There is a plot, even if it's mostly the tying up of old threads and dealing with random people that get in her way.
The real problem I found was her repetitive and silly descriptions that read as if they had been lifted directly from one book to the next. On more than one occasion I laughed out loud they were so bad - it sort of spoils the mood of the story when the terrible prose distracts you from the plot. Everything is all sparkly and moonlight lit with detailed pointless descriptions of hair and clothes and rose petals raining from the sky.
I enjoyed the early Merry Gentry novels and I suppose that this book could have seen an end of the series as many of the loose ends from previous books have been tied off. Her father's killer has been unmasked and her enemies defeated for the most part. Unfortunately I don't think that this will be the case and more stories will be spun out with Merry doing more sparkly, magical, and wonderful things with new powers given conveniently by the Goddess just in time and with conversations that start in the middle of the action and just drag on and on to showcase Merry's wonderfullness. I think LKH need to take a break from writing for a while not churn out a Merry and an Anita book every year. She needs to go back and re-read all her books and rediscover her characters for herself and maybe things might improve. I'm still reading in hopes they do but i'm not sure how much longer I will be.
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