Actual rating is 2.5 stars.
My Initial Reaction...
Ugh! I'm pretty disappointed with Kitty Takes a Holiday. After the excitement and forward momentum of Kitty Goes to Washington this felt like taking several steps backward. The last 50% was significantly better than the first but overall, I just needed something more.
The Narration...
Marguerite Gavin IS Kitty for me and she's grown on me even more with Kitty Takes a Holiday. There were a pretty broad spectrum of characters and voices - complete with accents - that she had to deliver and she nailed them. She still doesn't have that special something that blows me away, but she's a solid narrator and I will definitely consider other books she narrates.
The Characters...
Damn it Kitty! You were doing so good! Kitty had been such a submissive wolf at the start of this series, but over the course of the last two books she grew so much. That growth isn't gone, exactly, in Kitty Takes a Holiday but it's been replaced a bit by someone who's moping around feeling sorry for herself. You know what's worse than feeling sorry for yourself? Reading about someone else doing it! It was so boring and annoying. I know she had every right to feel a little (or a lot) shell shocked after what happened to her in Kitty Goes to Washington, but the way she was handling it I felt like the Kitty I had cheered on for being ballsy as hell was gone. Oh and she's still not on the radio in Kitty Takes a Holiday, which is another book missing what had been my favorite element of this series when it began.
Things really picked up when Cormick and Ben enter the picture, but it still had a very disappointing edge to it. Ben, her lawyer, who I absolutely loved in Kitty Goes to Washington isn't the same in this book. For the sake of avoiding spoilers, I'll just say that I miss the old Ben. And the Cormick... well I kinda loved him more in this book, probably just because I got to see a lot more of him. He hasn't really changed or anything, I just know him better and like that much more.
The Story...
So the first half, give or take a bit, of Kitty Takes a Holiday centers around Kitty's retreat from civilization to work on a book about her life and her inability to write it, not to mention the difficulty of dealing with the people in the small town where she's staying. It could be summed up as: Kitty Goes to the Country to Hide and Stick Her Tail Between Her Legs. Yep, I was bored. There was some important foundation laid for the rest of the book in this section, but boy do I wish it could have been hurried a long a bit.
Then Cormick and Ben show up and things get interesting. In a really depressing kind of way. I was glued to Kitty Takes a Holiday from this point on - there was interesting conversation, action, romance, plot twists. All the good stuff, but I kept feeling my stomach drop. Nothing went the way I would have liked and, while I'm totally okay with that in general (because it's not my story afterall), I'm very worried about where the future books will go because of some of the plot twists in Kitty Takes a Holiday.
Concluding Sentiments...
I just hope Carrie Vaughn has some really great twists up her sleeve, because with how Kitty Takes A Holiday left me, I'm pretty discouraged about where the series is going. Kitty seems to be recovered, though, so I'm sticking with it for a least one more book. And then we'll see.