Tempt the Stars (Cassandra Palmer, #6) by Karen Chance

Review: Being a goddess is a lot less fun than you might think. Especially when you’re only a half goddess, and you only found out about it recently, and you still don’t know what you’re doing half the time. And when you’ve just used your not-so-reliable powers to burglarize the booby-trapped office of a vampire mob boss. Yeah, that part sucks.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Cassandra Palmer, aka the Pythia, the freshly minted chief seer of the supernatural world. After all, Cassie still has to save a friend from a fate worse than death, deal with an increasingly possessive master vampire, and prevent a party of her own acolytes from unleashing a storm of fury upon the world. Totally just your average day at the office, right?

Review: I have an idea of where this series is going to go. But after reading this book, I have no idea how long Karen Chance plans to take to get us there. For a two year wait I felt like it should have had more impact for me than it did. But the two year wait could have also been to its detriment. Considering my super long to-be-read list, I’m not really one to go back and re-read books unless I find it exceptional. So because of that I found myself occasionally confused this time around. This one didn’t quite draw me in as easily compared to the others either.

It definitely keeps to Karen Chance’s usual style of non-stop action to the point of where your head spins and occasional humor, but something felt missing for me this time around. I know what else (or rather who else) was missing as well, Mircea. In the earlier books I wasn’t necessarily Team Pritkin or Team Mircea because I’m just not that much of a Cassie fan, but I feel like she’ll ultimately end up with Pritkin. And books like this where Mircea is literally nowhere to be seen only reinforce that idea and further raise my heckles when it comes to my annoyance with this supposed love-triangle. It’s a pathetic one at best. After reading the Dorina Basarab books, Mircea has easily become one of my favorite characters of the series and I feel like while we see fantastic development for him there, he really gets the shaft here and I find that frustrating.

And you know what else is frustrating? Cliffhangers. We’re left with another one. Apparently this was originally 800 pages and Chance practically had to cut the book in half to get it published. After reading it that didn’t surprise me at all. I’m at a place now where I much prefer the Dory books because I find it has all of the plusses and none of the drawbacks that irk me with the Cassie books. I just wish Chance was able to produce both series in one year instead of alternating them every year.

I’m at the point where I’m contemplating dropping the Cassie books and focusing solely on the Dory ones. Since this book was really only half the story, I may read the next one but if I don’t connect with that one either, I’ll be hanging it up…unless the 8th book is the last one.

November 2, 2013 | Categories: Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Books | Tags: Blood+, caedmon, Cassandra Palmer, Cassie Palmer, dorina, dorina basarab, Hagi, Haji, Hunt the Moon, John Pritkin, Karen Chance, kill bill, kit marlowe, louis-cesare, louis-cesare and dorina, midnight's daughter, Mircea, Mircea Basarab, Pritkin, radu, Roc, Saya, tantor media, tempt the stars | 6 Comments »