Pale Demon (Hollows, #9)

by Kim Harrison

[tellemonstar]

Cross-posted at Book Reviews with the Blogmonstar

Talk about an crazy roadtrip. Trent is finding his magic powers, Ivy is mostly normal, Jenks is taking his recent loss hard and Rachel is faced with possibly having a lobotomy or living with Al forever. Parts of Pale Demon were kind of boring. Yep, okay I get that we are all in the car trying to make it from one side of the country to the other in three days, and nobody is really thrilled to be trapped in a car with everyone else for that amount of time, including breaks. The side trip with having to save Jenks was interesting though.

I do wish Rachel would just accept that she is a demon and can do crazy magic, and stop worrying about whether she is a bad person for doing it. If she’s not causing harm to anyone, with the exception of self-defence, and she’s not using any curses that require human parts, then she’s still a ‘good person’. It just grates after a while to have her have this argument every single time, with the exception of when she is caught in a fire-fight. Unlike Pierce, who just goes gung-ho with the black magic and doesn’t worry whether he has interpreted the scene in correctly, which he often doesn’t.

The whole ‘tulpa’ thing with the demons in Dalliance was pretty cool. Newt is more than a little crazy, but I think she is also one of the more interesting characters in the series. Who knows what is actually in her memories, and it would be very interesting to see if Rachel could give Newt back those memories. Although whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing would be difficult to know until after it was done. But I don’t think she wants to kill Rachel – I think she recognises that there is something special about Rachel.

I wasn’t at all surprised about what the council said and did once the trial started. I quite liked Vivian though – she’s feisty. I also wasn’t surprised that Pierce stuff things up for Rachel, even though he didn’t do it intentionally (or so he said.) The whole thing with the demon-hybrid Ku’Sox was a bit crazy and weird, but at least things started to pick up once he showed up.

I was glad to pretty much see the back of Pierce, that Rachel and Trent’s relationship is becoming very interesting, that Bis is an awesome gargoyle, and that Jenks is doing ok. I just wish parts of the roadtrip had been cut, and there had been more exploration of Rachel’s demonic-ness.