Charmed Nights

by Kim Richardson

[Berls]

This series absolutely improves with each book. I enjoyed the characters much more in this book, the mystery was both more compelling and less obvious (I didn't solve it ahead of time) and the MERLIN trials really propelled the story along.

Tessa has grown on me and her loyalty to friends and family has helped me to overlook my annoyance with her temper. It's how she deals, where some people would get sad she gets mad. Okay, I can understand that. In this book she talks about having grown "great big lady balls" about a million times though and I found that really annoying. There are other, less annoying ways, of expressing you have internal strength, grit, etc. I hope it's a 1 book phenomenon.

Her aunts have also become less flat - they still have their defining traits that are a bit caricature-like - but I also got to see them more as people, which was nice. And her love-hate relationship with Marcus progressed and improved in this book.

I don't love special snow-flake story lines and something of that is starting to emerge here. I guess I should have seen it coming because of how quickly she takes on abilities in each book. A little stronger hint of that is presented here, in the way she uses some skills for the MERLIN trials. Despite that, I did enjoy the MERLIN trials and they, combined with Ruth getting charged with a murder, made this book better than the other two for me.

The narration continues to be better than the first book, reaffirming my feeling that what bothered me in the first book wasn't actually the fault of narration but character development. I'm glad I didn't give up on listening to the series.