MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS, Devon Monk–Review
Today was release day for Book 3 of the Allie Beckstrom series by Devon Monk. In preparation for this happy day, last Tuesday and the Tuesday before that I, I reviewed book one, MAGIC TO THE BONE, and book two, MAGIC IN THE BLOOD.
I'm not going to talk too much about the cover this time, except to note again with approval that the machete she's holding actually shows up in the story, yay artists (it's still Larry Rostant) whose covers actually address the subject material.
The idea of this book is that Allie has to deal with the soul of her dead father cohabitating her body and generally trying to tell her what to do. She also has to deal with the Authority, which her father was a member of, though he did his dead level best to keep her off their radar and vice versa. Her main goal is to learn to better use her magical abilities, except nothing really comes out of that and she doesn't learn to do too much that's new.
Book three starts almost immediately where book two left off, which isn't something I really like in a series, mostly because it doesn't allow for as much of a lead-in to this story, and because it requires a lot more info-dumping in the beginning to catch the reader up. Unfortunately, MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS kicked off with a lot of infodumping, and I didn't enjoy the set-up too much, although the opening scenes were rather good visually. The pacing was good in the beginning, and we never got cheated out of our payoff.
Unfortunately, as I read through the rest of the book, the pacing started to feel a little hectic. Though I really enjoyed book two and book one had quite a bit of promise, book three felt like a bit of a let down. It was still a solid book, with a solid premise and a lot of good things about it (for instance, there's a moment when Allie splits her lip and she and her boyfriend stop kissing because she hasn't been tested lately, and recently she's had a few sketchy things happen to her--like being injected with a needle and stabbed, and she came into contact with bleeding people while she had open wounds--which I think is a great thing to see happen in a novel) but it wasn't excellent.
MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS felt a bit like the editor saw the burgeoning success of the series and decided to slack off a bit in urging the right amount of tightening around the middle and the end. The sub-threads (involving the creepy nightmare thing, Davy's ex-girlfriend, Allie's father) mostly come together in the end, though Allie's father randomly stops insisting that she find the discs find the discs find the discs, and there's no real indication of why his behavior changed. Allie also doesn't talk to Violet about how her father might be affecting their relationship, even though it seemed like she intended to and she certainly should.
But the main thing that bothered me about this book was the loose ends. Things didn't get ignored, subplots didn't get dropped, no, but so many things were planned out that didn't happen. Though it seems they'll be looked at in the next book, and I don't mind when the last 10 pages set up the thing to be dealt with next time or if there are subplots that span multiple novels (for instance as happens in The Dresden Files) that's not what happened here. Instead, Nora came into town to get Cody, and sure, there was a happy ending there, but Allie never actually gets a free minute to sit down and bond with her friend. They see each other in passing, and it's a bit irksome. There are things that Allie plans to tie up with Violet that she never gets to. She has lessons she's agreed to start taking, but she never even picks out an instructor. Because she never has time, it's pushed off "until later." But as a reader, I want the "later" to come during the time frame of the book. I want the story to be wrapped up.
Unfortunately, this one wasn't, and one of the side effects of this is that the pace felt hectic. Which brings me to my last problem with MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS, which was that it was kind of confusing. I don't want to sound like I didn't understand what was happening or that the plot didn't make sense, because it did. But there were moments when I felt a little lost about what was going on, and they didn't all get cleared up. As a reader, I don't like that feeling of quicksand beneath my toes, even if the narrator is probably feeling the same way.
That said, there certainly were things I enjoyed about MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS. I really liked the gargoyle, and the subtle hints that were dropped about the Hand who created it and the relationship that Allie and he have that may have allowed her to set him free. I loved that we got to see Nora again, and the way that Zay and Allie begin working on their relationship. Seamus was a great character, and seeing him (an adult) interact with his mother (a real badass) was very cool. It was also good to see Zay interact with his peers, have a friend, instead of just playing strong, silent type with Allie. We see a lot of his past--including an ex that causes trouble for Allie, though the way Allie refrained from being catty was great to see, given the general bitchiness that pervades the genre. Monk also does a good job showing characters who have dark tendencies, unfortunate addictions, and real problems, while letting those problems be problems without defining the characters or making them into cookie cutter bad guys while simultaneously refusing to forgive those dark traits just because the characters are on the side of the angels.
In general, I think the series is still promising. Monk does a lot of things right, and the things she does right are things that I find really important philosophically and that the majority of the genre tends to get teeth-grindingly wrong. However, I felt this book experienced a few growing pains.
3/5: The concept is great and this book did a lot of things right, but the pacing and loose ends caused a lot of problems for me.
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