Unraveling Words: Unraveling: The Undead Pool by Kim Harrison

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Unraveling: The Undead Pool by Kim Harrison

Title: The Undead Pool

Series: The Hollows Book Twelve

Publication Date: February 15, 2014

Witch and day-walking demon Rachel Morgan has managed to save the demonic ever after from shrinking, but at a high cost. Now strange magic is attacking Cincinnati and the Hollows, causing spells to backfire or go horribly wrong, and the truce between the races, between Inderlander and human, is shattering.

Rachel must stop the occurrences before the undead vampire masters who keep the rest of the undead under control are lost and it becomes all-out supernatural war. However, the only way to do so is through the ancient elven wild magic, which carries its own perils.

***

My Thoughts

The Hollows is almost coming to an end and I'm actually a bit glad in this case. Not because the books turned horribly bad or anything, but because it's time to finally say good bye.

With that said, this book wasn't as great as the others, at least not for me. I immensely enjoyed finally getting to know more about the elves, their system, and their crazy wild magic, not to mention their close dealings with the demons. This further foray into the world building was done brilliantly. We get to know so much about the elf politics and their religions and the big dupe that is the wild magic. There were some interesting twists that took shape towards the end that I'm excited in seeing where they go. I ran across a post in 9gag that when I read it I immediately thought about the Goddess and how the elf's wild magic works.

I think it does a great job in bringing into perspective the Goddess.

As much as I loved this part of the book, I still felt restless while reading it. I would get anxious at parts and it would suddenly just lose my interest. For all that the world building was awesome the action, not so much. In the latter books we always see Rachel using her magic left and right, whether that was with her splat gun, cooking charms/spells, or doing some weird convoluted demon spell. Now, we only see her doing a few short spells here and there. I think he splat gun my a total appearance of two times. It was disheartening.

My other issue was the characters themselves. It seems to me that in Harrison's quest to show some solid character development, she is losing the essence of the characters themselves. I'm not saying they are so changed they are unrecognizable, far from it. But they aren't the same characters I fell in love with. Rachel's fiery attitude came sporadically, Trent's badassness shone through here and there, and Ivy was...idk, kinda boring? I think they only ones that have kept true to themselves 100% is Jenks, Bis and Quen, from the little we do get to see from him. Even Al wasn't the same and he was actually the only character that got bad, distasteful in my opinion. I did however love to see more of Newt, she is a fascinating crazy demon :)

There aren't that many series that are this long and even less that I have followed all the way through and that's saying something. So if you like your urban fantasy then the Hollows is a must read!