URBAN FANTASY REVIEW: Dark Swan 4: Shadow Heir - Richelle Mead

Release Date: 02/02/11

SYNOPSIS:

"New York Times" bestselling author Richelle Mead returns to the Otherworld, a mystic land inextricably linked to our own - and balanced precariously on one woman's desperate courage...Shaman-for-hire Eugenie Markham strives to keep the mortal realm safe from trespassing entities. But as the Thorn Land's prophecy-haunted queen, there's no refuge for her and her soon-to-be-born children when a mysterious blight begins to devastate the Otherworld...The spell-driven source of the blight isn't the only challenge to Eugenie's instincts. Fairy king Dorian is sacrificing everything to help, but Eugenie can't trust the synergy drawing them back together. The uneasy truce between her and her shape shifter ex-lover Kiyo is endangered by secrets he can't - or won't - reveal. And as a formidable force rises to also threaten the human world, Eugenie must use her own cursed fate as a weapon - and risk the ultimate sacrifice...


REVIEW:

OK, its not a secret that I had problems with this series for a little while. Not because of the author but because I can’t stand the principle character who not only defies logic but also is so unbelievably self-centred as well as guillable that you really wonder how she survived so long in the world. Especially when she knows how the politics function in the Otherworld.

Yep, so as you may have guessed this wasn’t that high on my priority list to read, so when I noticed that it was the last in the series I thought that I’d best get it over with and to be brutal here, this is a shocker of a book as the conclusion will leave a lot of fans reeling and wondering what the hell happened.

That said, fans will still rush out and buy the book but my advice at the moment, is hold your horses and borrow it from a library. Still here? Right, for me when the lead character is so dislikeable it’s a real struggle not to want to reach into the book, grab her and shake like a cocktail until common sense asserts itself it tells you that perhaps this series isn’t for you. As such looking at the architecture is the only thing I can do to keep going, so that’s what I did, as usual with Richelle the prose is reasonable, the pace fairly decent and the twists come out of the woodwork left, right and centre, but some of those twists will not only kick you in the guts but rip them out and stomp them until they’re mush. It’s not pretty, it’s unpredictable and of course in all honesty this is going to cause controversy not only among the fans but also around the Urban Fantasy genres itself for a while.

All in, personally I wouldn’t recommend this series to readers as I’ve had so many problems with it, so if you want a Mead series to get behind, go for the Georgina Kincaid Succubus titles. They’re way superior in my opinion and as such you’ll be thankful in the long run.