The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue, #2)

by Gabriella Pierce

[Leah]

I recently read Gabriella Pierce’s first novel 666 Park Avenue and I very much enjoyed the fact the book was a Chick Lit book but with witches. To know it was the first book of a trilogy made me feel even better and I was thrilled to receive a copy of The Dark Glamour, the second 666 Park Avenue novel, to review and I started it as soon as I could. However, sadly, I felt that The Dark Glamour was that awkward, filler book that sometimes occurs between a first novel and a third novel. It’s there, it doesn’t accomplish much, but it provides a link to the huge, potentially blockbuster third book. Judging by the ending of The Dark Glamour, that is indeed true. I don’t like filler books. I want to know a book has a proper purpose, a proper place in the series of books and not just be there as a stepping stone to the next book.

The Dark Glamour brings us back into the world of Jane Boyle and the Doran family. At the end of 666 Park Avenue, Jane was seen to be fleeing from New York and her evil mother-in-law, but actually, in a clever twist, Jane decided she was better off staying in New York – no one expects her to be there, so there she will be. However Jane knows Lynne will not stop until she gets the daughter she so desperately wants, and Jane wants nothing to do with that, so Jane tries to come up with an alternative way to get Lynne off her back forever. She decides the best way to do that is to infiltrate the Doran’s once more and with a bit of witch-y magic, she becomes the mysterious Ella. When she meets Andre, she sees her in, but just what lengths will Jane have to go to get her mother-in-law off her back for good?

My problem with The Dark Glamour is that it is ridiculously slow. Nothing actually, really happens until the last little bit of the novel and it’s so long a read to get there. Basically Jane has a makeover to become Ella and starts sleeping with Andre – despite being married to Malcolm (which I suppose is a mere technicality after what Malcolm did) and despite pining for Harris. Yes, Andre was an ends to a means, I suppose, but it just felt cheap of Jane to do that. To just jump into his bed pretty much at the snap of his fingers. But Jane was like that the whole novel. She annoyed me, if I’m being honest. I liked Jane in 666 Park Avenue, but in The Dark Glamour, she was a shadow of who she was originally. Her magic has deserted her (she’s a crap witch, really, and seems to tire so, so easily). She’s just not the strong woman I thought she was. It’s a bit like she had a personality transplant. If I’m going to see a battle between two witches, then it needs to be a fair fight, and with the way Jane is, Jane doesn’t have a hope in hell of ever defeating Lynne Doran.

The book seemed to relegate all the other characters, too, until there was just Jane and Lynne and Andre. Maeve is mostly non-existant, except when Jane wants to remind us yet again that she’s responsible for what happened to her. I loved Maeve and I can’t believe she’s barely in the novel. Dee and Elodie, Jane’s closest friends aren’t all that close any more. Harris is there only for Jane to gripe about him being with Dee, when she’s married and sleeping with someone else. Obviously it’s Harris who is in the wrong… It just didn’t work for me, sadly. It was a lot of work and effort to make it to the end and then to be presented with that cliffhanger just felt wrong. I know Pierce has to get us interested in the third book, but if people have read your first two books they aren’t going to stop reading now. So a cliffhanger is just a bit gimmicky. When I got to the end, I thought my copy was somehow missing pages. Nothing had been resolved. I will read The Lost Soul, but I found The Dark Glamour to be a very disappointing sequel.