Inkspot Fancy

In the aftermath of his actions from the last book, Atticus is finding himself at the heart of a lot of scrutiny - a lot of DEADLY scrutiny - that he never wanted. With the aid of the local witches, with whom he has an uneasily cordial relationship, he has to face a series of horrible new trials.

If you're looking for fun, this is generally a fun book. Our hero is one of the few ageless characters in fiction who actually feels ageless. There's something unapologetically other about him, something rooted in old power that doesn't feel the need to make itself modern, and I think that's to its credit.

Also, the story in this one feels a lot more focused than in the first book, also to its credit. The first book set up its premise and then kind of tooled around for a bit before getting down to the actual business of the plot. This time, everything seems to tie together a lot better.

So in a lot of ways, this is a better book than the first one. I even think just in a general sense, it's better written. The dialogue flows, the story never feels like it's dragging, and there were come points at which I just stopped and reread a passage because it just *caught* me, and I loved it.

But there's also a few things about it that just didn't work as well for me. His interactions with the gods and goddesses, for instance, just lacked a lot of the tension that they had in the first. In fact, they felt weirdly inverted, especially with the goddesses. There's a scene, and I'm trying to avoid spoiling here, but he's talking with a particular goddess and she acts like a being with no self control, and then he puts her in her place as though she were some sort of dangerous child. I finished that scene and found myself wondering how someone like that could possibly have managed to thrive for all this time. It undercut her whole character.

So, I'm not giving up on the series, not by a long shot. But I found myself disappointed by this book after the stellar first offering.