Happy New Year and I hope you were given/bought yourself/otherwise acquired an armful of books to enjoy. For my part I’m working myself through my stack one by one and I have found a new series of novels, by Colleen Vanderlinden, and I am sharing the review I wrote for the second book in the series. (Not aimed for younger teenagers).
The vigilante and self-appointed saviour of Detroit, the twenty-something Molly whose social skills are not always up to scratch, has turned a heroine for real in this second instalment of Colleeen Vanderlinden’s Broken series.
If the reader thought our heroine’s workload was heavy before it is nothing compared to what she is expected to accomplish now: save the world and stop the villains from flattening Detroit in the process. To help her in this quest she has an assortment of creatures, and there is especially one who is more than eager to help her get over the loss of her first love in life. The growing gang around Molly that is working to save young girls from evil now has to stop the whole of the Greek mythology from rampaging urban USA.
The author is taking her main character in a direction I had not anticipated and at first I felt disappointed. Maybe the heroine is becoming too almighty – and the supporting characters too weak – to deliver the kind of gasps of fear lest things go horribly wrong for the good guys; there is a lack of suspense that I want from a novel like this. At times it veers dangerously close to the fantasy romance, but maybe this is what Vanderlinden intended all along.
Luckily the end more than makes up for any doubts I might have had and I could not help but smile at the clever twist the plot takes. The unforeseen ending and the extensive (and unorthodox) use of Greek mythology that is added to the motley crew of weres, vampires and witches add something new and exciting to the genre.
Helena S Karlsson 