Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs
Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series just keeps getting better and better.
The most powerful tool in an urban fantasy writer’s itinerary is world-building. World-building can carry the most cliched characters, it can handle the most inane plot devices, and make a reader believe anything.Thankfully, Briggs can world-build, create excellent characters and plot.
Blood Bound (Book 2) left Mercy with the choice of two men, Sam and Adam, and entwined more deeply with the secretive, dangerous world of the fae. While one issue is solved (her choice of mate, which I oddly accept), the other is made worse, when Mercy’s boss, a fae, is charged with murder.
In this book, Briggs opens the world of the fae even more to the reader and the experience leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Not because it was distasteful, but the experiences of the fae in Mercy’s world mirror the experiences of Native Americans, Indian Americans and Japanese Americans in the dirty history of this country. One thing I’ve noticed in many of my favorite Urban Fantasy series’ is that they use the otherworld they’ve created to address many of the racial, sexual and theological history of the United States. Which I love on the one hand (makes me want to write a fantasy novel), but on the other hands frustrates me that these issues can’t be discussed openly, without fictionalizing it to entertain while teaching (and even then, a lot of readers don’t even see beneath the surface of the monsters).
But that’s not the issue of this review. Suffice to say, I loved this book. Mercy continues to evolve as a character, and the secondary characters are more than able to hold their own character arcs. What satisfies me the most about the book is that the romantic tension has been resolved amicably and realistically–though I AM curious about Stefan the vampire! Though I thoroughly enjoyed Books 1 & 2, Iron Kissed has made me a Mercy Thompson fan for life–and rue the day I picked up Moon Called, as each installment in the series is only released annually. Ah well…Briggs has begun a spin-off series, following Mercy’s foster brother (I guess?) Charles and his love interest, Anna, in Cry Wolf (August 2008), so twice yearly can sustain me in between Sookie releases and the end of L.A. Banks’ VHL series (nooooooooo!).
Grade: A+
3 comments April 17, 2008
