Posted by I was so incredibly super stoked to see this book make it to the finals. I adore this author’s other work, The Heartstriker series starting with Nice Dragons Finish Last because Bob is one of my favorite characters — just thinking about that series makes me want to do another re-read.
This book is set in the same world as the Nice Dragons Finish Last books, the DFZ or Detroit Free Zone. It’s a futuristic urban fantasy set about 80ish years in the future. I’m not sure I can be an impartial judge to determine if this world building sufficiently stands alone and is easily accessible to new readers because I’m so overly-familiar with this world. I didn’t feel like things were being re-explained to me too much which might be a flag for new readers — but I also feel like there was probably enough context for it to make sense to a new reader? The two series really have nothing to do with each other outside of setting and there are only brief references made to the characters from the other series.
So, this starts off with a little girl who’s turned into a monster and then was sent to live at a hospital to try and figure out what’s going on with her. She’s growing fur, claws, fangs, and people are horrified when they look at her, so much so the nurses don’t even make conversation with her, they just leave her pills and dip out of the hospital room. After a long time of enduring this kind of treatment she’s visited by a strange man who’s able to see the silver thread that’s been tied around her wrist for as long as she can remember, but that no one else can see. It’s been a curiosity her whole life, and she’s always thought of it as her little treasure… and so, it’s alarm that not only can he see it, he can yank her around by it. This strange man offers her a way out, a way to be a human again, but she needs to come with him and take his special pills.
She gets turned into his lackey and is forced to do basically anything he tells her to, even if she really doesn’t want to. There’s a large leap forward in time and now she’s become aware she’s something known as a changeling. She doesn’t really have a default setting with a regular body she goes back to each day, instead she has many different bodies that she uses for different assignments. That said, she feels most comfortable in a body she calls “Yogurt Lady”, a face and image she uses after seeing it on a yogurt commercial, because no one looks at her for too long. This is important because if someone starts to suspect that she isn’t what she appears to be, her magic starts to strain and can break against the force of the disbelief. Her magic is kind of like a fae in that it requires belief to be potent and can melt away under scrutiny.
She’s been sheltered her whole life in that she has no social life outside of “work.” Her “boss” is a blood mage and this is important because blood magic has been outlawed, deemed to be too dangerous and fucked up. One day the fucker goes missing and you’d think that’d be great news for our main character but it isn’t. If her blood mage master doesn’t craft these special pills that she takes every day, she’ll essentially dissolve into a pile of goo and then cease to exist. This wouldn’t even bother her too much except this means her sister will die too. She’s learned that there’s a life tied to the end of her silver thread, and it’s her sister.
There’s a romance in here as well but it kind of took a side plot role instead of being the main story. There are usually fairly PG romances in her other books but this one had an on page sex scene which was only notable because I can’t recall this happening in her other books. I’d say this is now a PG-13 book, lol, it’s not raunchy if you’re wondering.
This is a really fast paced book, I flew through it in a sitting. It’s fast paced for a bunch of reasons. The plot doesn’t really meander. We know what the problem is and the character is working on fixing it. Every day she goes without getting her pills resupplied is one day closer to death so the tension builds slowly throughout the book and she doesn’t have time to fuck around. The word choice, sentence structure, and overall style of writing is very easily digestible which aids in the fast-paced feeling. This also isn’t a terribly long book, it gets the story started quickly and then moves through the paces of trying to fix the problem for the MC. This story comes off as though it was written by a veteran writer, because it was.
Overall, I’d recommend this to people looking for a fast paced fun story featuring an unusual shapeshifting main character.
When Kristen reads and has her own review I will add it on to this one along with our scores so we have a score for the board!