Rachel Morgan’s world is a funnier, scarier and more interesting version of our own.  For those newbies out there, their 60’s were a whole lot wilder than ours.  Well meaning scientists, in an attempt to cure world hunger, engineered an especially fecund tomato.  Said tomato turned out to carry the seeds of a plague, which would wipe out most of the world’s population.  In the aftermath, creatures who, due to their small numbers, had hidden their existence from us in an effort to remain safe, emerged.  Vampires, pixies, fairies, witches and, yes, even elves suddenly wanted social acceptance and legal recognition.  While such a premise could easily turn farcical, KH makes it magical.  Her characters, their concerns and issues, are very real.  Surprisingly, the challenges they face do not feel contrived.  Rather, they feel natural.  I rooted for the good guys, because I identified with them.

If you’re not familiar with the series, then stop!  The next few paragraphs contain some plot spoilers.  If you’re familiar with the series, however, then read on…

At the end of For a Few Demons More, Piscary and Kisten were dead, her relationship with Ivy was at a crossroads and the balance of power in the city was highly unstable.  Rachel was wrestling with her role in these events, even as she played a pivotal role in them.  Although she had no memory of Kisten’s death, she knew that she was there.  Although she identified as straight, her relationship with Ivy caused her to question her sexuality.  Although she had wanted Piscary dead, she hadn’t planned for the effect of his death on the people she loved.  Rachel finally realized that instead of Wonder Woman in Trousers, she was an adrenaline junkie who sometimes made bad choices.  “Bad” and “good” weren’t the black and white concepts she thought.  If she wanted to grow in her relationships with the people she loved, then she needed to accept more responsibility in the community they shared.  In short, realized that she needed to grow up.

Rachel Morgan is a very appealing heroine to someone who struggles with many of the same issues, who, after graduating from law school, is wondering what exactly it means to grow up.  Relationships, family, career, friends—it’s hard to make life work in a tough world, and the answers aren’t always obvious.  Fantasy, as a genre, is full of too many one dimensional heroines: the beautiful but helpless princess whose innocence masquerades as arrogance, the Penis Envy Princess whose tough exterior hides a heart of gold, evil woman whose only goals are to make life for those around her miserable.  It’s always refreshing to find a real woman.  The irony of TODW is that KH relies too heavily on Rachel: instead of her character furthering the plot, in this installment, her issues became the plot itself. 

Although it begins very promisingly, with KH’s characteristically humorous prose and excellent pacing, TODW soon reveals itself as a lame duck.  Absolutely nothing happens.  After 455 pages, we still don’t know anything new, really.  KH throws in a few tidbits at the end, but they feel like afterthoughts.  We still don’t know who killed Kisten, Rachel and Ivy still have a tense relationship, Rachel still hates Trent and struggles with the idea that good people can do bad things, Rachel is still upset about Jenks’ mortality, she still…she still…she still…and there you go.  TODW is one big, long “she still.”  350 pages into it, I was desperate for the book to end!  I felt like screaming, “yes, I get it!”  KH apparently thinks that Rachel’s issues are so unusual, her readers cannot hope to grasp them on the first or second introduction.  She repeats herself constantly.  By the time I got to the last quarter of the book, I think Rachel had had the same internal discussion about Trent—“wow, he does bad things to achieve good ends, just like me!” at least ten times.  She did more sitting around and having angst about her issues than she did anything else.

Sometimes writers fall in love with their characters.  Yes, all writers love—and hate—their characters to some extent, and all characters are amalgams of the writer, whoever the writer wishes he could be, and the people in the writer’s life.  When it comes to art, only those with healthy egos need apply.  The problem occurs when the writer crosses from normal interest to self indulgent absorption.  The character’s every movement, every thought is of the utmost interest—even what the character wears becomes crucial.  That KH is victim to this problem becomes obvious when she stops an action scene to tell us what kind of clothes Rachel is wearing.  I don’t care!  There was almost as much about Rachel’s hair and clothes in TODW as there was about her fear of commitment.  If I had wanted to read an in depth discussion of these issues, then I would have picked up the latest issue of Cosmo instead.  Most annoying of all, even though KH devoted the better part of 455 pages to Rachel’s issues, by the end of the book, I didn’t know any more about them—only that they existed.  Rachel didn’t actually get anywhere with Ivy, Trent or anyone else.  TODW left off exactly where it picked up—with Rachel not knowing what to do next.

One casualty of this approach—call it absence of plot—is KH’s normally wonderful prose.  I like funny books and the Rachel Morgan series is usually funny—a perfect blend of deadpan observation and quippy comment.  The prose in TODW is stultifyingly bad.  While on one of her runs, Rachel muses, “and when a guttural cry broke the wind’s hush, fear slid all the way to the bottom of my soul and wrung every breath of courage from me” (352).  WTF!  Increasingly, toward the end of the book, TODW read like a precocious tenth grader’s journal entry.  Regarding her love life, Rachel sorrows over the impossibility of having a happy love life.  She refers to it as a hunger, “the hunger from seeing someone who has what you want but knowing that if you get it, it will break your heart, your life, and your soul” (446).  Again, WTF? For all the ponderous “will she or won’t she”, here, there really isn’t any discussion of why.  KH treats us to endless debates, but skips over the parts that actually lead to a decision.  Maybe, if KH had devoted slightly more time and effort to developing a plot, I’d have some idea why, all of a sudden, Rachel is doomed to be alone.  As it is, the few decisions Rachel makes seem highly contrived.

TODW is less of an adventure story and more of a ponderous morality tale.  Pilgrim’s Progress comes to mind, only without the victory.  In previous books, Rachel’s issues were intimated rather than openly discussed.  In TODW, Rachel’s issues are the major plot feature, around which all other plot features revolve—and the change is not a good one.  For example, towards the end of the book—PLOT SPOILER—Trent finds himself a prisoner in the Ever After and his friends—or at least compatriots—debate whether to rescue him.  From page 405—414 they debate whether to rescue him, and it’s not as though anyone poses a complicated argument.  Instead, they rehash the same two simplistic points over and over again.  I felt like I was back in law school.   There was absolutely no purpose to this that I could discern, to this—except to illustrate the depth of Rachel’s confusion.  Is summoning demons always bad?  Can it be good?  Are people who do this always stupid?  Is it possible that people are both smart and stupid, both good and bad?  This is the kind of morality lesson that deserves one line—not 455 pages.  This did not, last time I checked, come from the Young Adult section of the bookstore, where such lessons are a lot more appropriate.  And, honestly, if you want to learn some fifth or sixth grade level lessons on morality, then C.S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander or J.K. Rowling do it a lot better.

Perhaps most disappointing of all, KH quite noticeably backs off on the Ivy storyline.  At the end of FAFDM, Rachel is struggling with some very real, very important questions about her sexuality, her relationship with Ivy, and the nature of love.  Although there’s no end to gay interest books, gay porn and LGBT propaganda, books that feature heroes and heroines who just happen to be gay are rare.  We could use a few more role models who teach the all important lesson that “gay” is just a part of who you are, same as “straight”—it doesn’t define your character.  At the end of TODW, Rachel and Ivy were still doing their dance, but the perspective was different—Rachel’s big issue was how to let Ivy down easy. 

This is the first book in the Rachel Morgan series that felt like a throw away to me.  Apart from the fact that it wasn’t exactly a gripping read, it wasn’t true to the characters that KH has so lovingly crafted over the past 4 years.  The sudden changes in temperament, radical shifts in interpersonal relationships and inability to further the plot smacked of fan fiction more than anything else.  The same thing happened to Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series a few years ago—she replaced tight plot twists, suspense and humor with endless group sex scenes—and it depressed me terribly.  I truly hope that KH does not become another LKH and that TODW is just a weak entry in an otherwise gripping new series.