From Goodreads, because I’m really far behind on my reviews, and it’s a good summary of the book:
Ghoulies. Ghosties. Long-legged beasties. Things that go bump in the night…the Price family has spent generations studying the monsters of the world, working to protect them from humanity – and humanity from them. Enter Verity Price. Despite being trained from birth as a cryptozoologist, she’d rather dance a tango than tangle with a demon, and is spending a year in Manhattan while she pursues her career in professional ballroom dance. Sounds pretty simple, right?
It would be, if it weren’t for the talking mice, the telepathic mathematicians, the asbestos supermodels, and the trained monster-hunter sent by the Price family’s old enemies, the Covenant of St. George. When a Price girl meets a Covenant boy, high stakes, high heels, and a lot of collateral damage are almost guaranteed. To complicate matters further, local cryptids are disappearing, strange lizard-men are appearing in the sewers, and someone’s spreading rumours about a dragon sleeping underneath the city…
After it took me a few books to really get into it, I have been a huge fan of Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series for many years. I was aware that she had written other paranormal fantasy books as well, but somehow never really felt the need to check them out (partially because of the dreadful outfit that the woman on the cover – who I now know is supposed to be Verity – is wearing). Also, I think I skimmed a blurb for this years ago and must have noticed the ballroom dancing more than the monster hunting. I was missing out. Only after my former Cannonball rival, now good online friend Jen K mentioned having blazed through the first three books in this series in about two days and really enjoying them (she’s now read the entire series to date) was my interest peaked enough and checking my LibraryThing, I had in fact bought the first book on sale a while back (this is frequently the case – since I started reading and buying e-books, I own way more books than I can easily keep track of, hence the need for a digital archive). Since I have a baby, I can’t really read three books in two days, but I did finish this one in about 24 hours.
Full review on my blog.
I love that we had the same issues with the cover and even if it makes total sense after reading the novel, they could have gone with her normal street clothes. I am going to go out on a limb and assume that these types of novels have more women readers than men so a revealing school girl outfit is maybe not the best choice to appeal to your target audience.
I also would have preferred the cover with Verity in street clothes. It’s not like she’s not wearing a better outfit on the second book.
Yea, this cover isn’t great. I don’t mind it, because I think it fits Verity pretty well, but I do wish it wasn’t quite so sexed up. But on the other hand, running across rooftops in a skimpy outfit, is pretty par for the course in Verity’s live.
I love this series so very much.
I’ve read the first three so far, and prefer Verity’s books to Alex’, although Half-Off Ragnarok got better once he and Shelby could be honest with one another.
Verity is my favorite as well but from Seanan McGuire’s comments, I think Antimony might be her favorite. If you look at the short fiction available for InCryptid, it has a lot of back story on Jonathan Healey and Fran, a few stories about Verity and a lot more stories about Antimony. There aren’t any about Alex.