Mercy Thompson

I love urban fantasy, but I have a confession to make. I'm incredibly picky about which series I follow. There are some popular series out there that I wasn't able to finish the first book with, others where I read it and went, "Meh," and some that just don't appeal to me at all.

Mercy Thompson never fell into any of those.

I discovered them late, when five books were already out. I read the first four quickly, but when I got to five, things kind of stalled. I don't know why. I read the first two chapters, but I just wasn't losing myself in it so I set it aside, hoping it was my mood.

That was about a year ago. I finally finished Silver Borne two days ago.

I don't know what went wrong. I still love Mercy, and Adam, and all the secondary characters, but this one just couldn't grab me. In hindsight, I think a good part of it was that it was trying to fix too much. There were all these threads in Mercy's life, conflicts that had grown out of control, and it felt like the author realized that if she didn't do something about all of them now, she'd never be able to fix them and sew the narrative into a whole tapestry again.

So the story ended up skipping all over the place, with the most interesting aspect of the novel - that of Samuel's issues - getting resolved in the last third by such a case of deus ex machina that I couldn't believe it. I felt cheated. Disappointed.

But more than that? Kind of relieved I'd finished the book so I could move on to the next one.

Not right away. I'm too invested in these characters to give up now. But I think I need a little distance. Book 7 comes out in March, 2013, and I'm probably going to wait to closer to that date so I can read six and seven together. Mainlining series fiction is more fun like that anyway.