Jessica ❁ ➳ Silverbow ➳ ❁ 's Reviews > Written in Red

Lately I've been dividing genres into parts, and in keeping with that pattern, there are two types of Urban Fantasy (generally speaking).

In the first type, various supernatural creatures live hidden among us, and maintaining that secrecy is paramount to their society.

In the second type, various supernatural creatures live openly among us, but are forced to constantly walk the tightrope of human approval. Vampires, Weres, Fae, etc. are either met with fangirlish worship by pandering wannabes, or thinly-veiled contempt from the rest of the humans who fear what their bones recognize as Predator. They are threatened with things like formal registration, so that they can be tracked and/or monitored by a fearful government, and they live in a constant state of tension, waiting, waiting, waiting, for the humans to freak out and try to exterminate them.

If for no other reason, this is why Anne Bishop gets a gold star.

In Bishop's world, supernatural creatures don't hide. They don't cater to human fickleness in the hopes of preserving a fragile peace. They own the earth and everything in it, and they allow humans to exist as long as "the monkeys" don't become too much of a nuisance.

So that's pretty awesome.

As for the characters, Anne Bishop is either in possession of oscar-worthy acting skills, or she made a deal with the devil in order to be able to create such believable and consistent characters (or I suppose she could just be an incredibly gifted writer).

Take Asia Crane. She is the most hateful, the most self-absorbed, the most narcissistic villain I've come across in a LONG time. But even while I was wishing she was a real person whose eyes I could scratch out, I couldn't help but appreciate how unflagging she was in her set-behavior. There was no incongruence of actions. Asia Crane was Asia Crane (devil that she was) until the bitter end.

Then there are the shifters. It's postulated somewhere in the book that the shifters had adopted their animal forms so long ago that they had likewise adopted some of the animal behavior along with the form. And this, in my humble opinion, is the best part of the book: wolves, and crows, and hawks, in people form, acting like wolves, and crows, and hawks. Whether it's a wolf threatening to eat someone b/c he's aggravated, a crow refusing to give correct change from a register b/c coins are shiny, or a hawk snooping through packages b/c he smelled a mouse, it's ALL hilarious.

But it was also LONG. So very long. And the beginning, while being highly entertaining, was very slow plot-wise. Also, after 500+ pages, I don't have a solid grasp of what this is all about. I think it may have something to do with world peace unification of supernatural creatures and humans, but I'm not sure, and I don't know why that's important. Right now the series seems to be focused on protecting Meg from "The Controller" but I'm having a hard time swallowing that as an endgame, b/c (more than likely) The Controller is a human, and Bishop's world paints a very clear picture concerning how easy it is to snuff out an aggravating human.

Overall it was excellent. Hopefully more will be revealed in A Murder of Crows, and then I will have absolutely no cause for complaint.

Sidenote: There is currently a murder of crows in my backyard. They are almost large enough to be ravens (but I'm pretty sure ravens don't live around here), and they are freaking me out. Fyi.