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I'd say 3 1/2 stars, but I'll round down this time around. Just a few days ago, someone in the Goodreads Librarian group was asking about the distinction between paranormal and supernatural. The thread ended up with several people's definitions of those two, as well as urban fantasy. My definition: Urban fantasy is a novel set in contemporary industrialized society where paranormal creatures are added as an overlay to an otherwise normal world. The "urban" part, for me, is the contemporary industrialized society. Open worlds have everyone knowing about the creatures that go bump in the night. Closed worlds have the general population in the dark. (And, yes, the book is labeled urban fantasy on the spine.) This series moved from urban fantasy to pure fantasy with this book. Most of the book is set in the demon realm. As such, not only do we slip out of the real world, we have the "out of town" effect. With most urban fantasy series, I tend to dislike the "out of town" books, because I'm a character based series reader. The interactions between existing characters is more important to me than the plot of the individual books. Usually first person "out of town" books bring along very few (if any) of the core characters of the series. In this case, we have demon lord Rhyzkahl along for the ride as a "familiar character" but - quite frankly - he had a personality transplant and is not familiar in the least. So it's like we pulled the character of Kara out of a urban fantasy universe and dropped her into a high fantasy one with very little linkage to the rest of the series. I like high fantasy, sometimes, but I went in expecting urban fantasy. Makes it feel like a bait and switch. I kept waiting for the transition back to the real world, but that never happened. (Okay, technically she did "go home" at the end, but more as a footnote. I was expecting the bulk of the book to be on Earth.) As such, the book dragged a lot more than the previous books in the series. And it's clearly more than my recent "slow to read" nature. I gushed about the first few books in this series. Plotwise, this book was all about Kara being a tool and a toy being passed between the demon lords. The ones that should have been trustworthy weren't, and the ones that didn't seem trustworthy turned out to be good guys (or at least grey hats). After a rather brutal torture scene, Kara starts "training" to up her skills in the arcane. In the meantime, they're still fighting over the broken toy. *rolls eyes* I miss the real world, the mystery/cop portion of the books, and the core cast of characters which were left behind. For me, this was the low point of the series.

2022-10-21 05:26