1.10 Book Review: Cassie Palmer Series
Cassandra Palmer series by Karen Chance.
So my usual preamble about any series review; I dislike the time-travel trope in most media.
It is usually full of plot holes, inconsistencies and often characters making dumb decisions that they justify poorly. I want to like it, but authors use time-travel as a lazy device and leave dozens of plot hooks and conundrums hanging about my head days later. I like Doctor Who, but you can drive buses through the holes in the time-travel episodes’ plot. Essentially, I want to like time-travel, however movies and books with great popularity but ill-conceived finishes have ruined it for me. The stories without plot-holes usually end up as ‘looped time’ bubbles that finish and end with either the whole thing becoming final and never repeatable, or self-contained and ceasing to have meaning. There’s only so many times you can finish a book and think ‘so none of it mattered? No one lived, no one learned anything, nothing changed or was achieved?’
Then I met Cassandra Palmer as she fled the vampire
mob and went on the run from supernatural community and murderous
mages. And I learned to love time-travel.
I’ve never read it done better than in these books.
Go back and read that line again. Cassie Palmer
does time-travel better than novels where the focus is the jumping back
and forth. It isn’t even the main focus of the story. Karen Chance aces
the time-travel offhandedly while she’s weaving
a terribly gorgeous tapestry of a world and she does it so well, I’ve
never found a plot hole.
The series is a fast paced action-adventure-romance-
I started the series with the second book by pure
happenstance. It was on the paranormal shelf in my favourite second-hand
bookstore and I was interested enough to take it home. By the next day I
was on book depository, furiously ordering
the other four volumes of the series. A few months later I was buying
the second series by Chance (Midnight’s Daughter.)
A big test of a good book series is whether or not a
book makes sense and reads when it is self-contained. I read the second
novel in the series and understood the world, the characters, the plot
and what had happened previously in about
six chapters. This isn’t an easy feat to do and Chance did it
wonderfully without repeating herself ad-nausea every novel. There are
plenty of over-arching plots going on (enough it is actually stunning
how neatly packaged they seem when you’re reading them)
and tangential events that affect the characters on many levels but
each novel has a beginning, middle and end. I’ve noticed serials that
haven’t learned this trick and add up to a single book that spans about
700k and takes three books to get through the
prologue. I ‘read’ (started skimming and skipping chunks) one book that
had about four pages of plot and events that ended with a cliff-hanger
that had nothing achieved, resolved or gained in the whole book.
Now I’m behind by one book in the Cassie Palmer
story; the last book I read had everything neatly wrapped up; except for
one thing that Cassie wasn’t happy with and was going to go and fix.
The cliff-hanger at the end was nail-biting excitement
for me as I considered the character’s next actions.
That’s how you do cliff-hangers.
The characters for me are the biggest appeal in a story and there is something extremely real about the characters in these novels. From the mad Pritkin to the face-palming Mircea and Cassie herself; who channels everyone who find themselves in a position of importance and have no idea how it happened and spend most of their time trying to work out their job, and not get caught in embarrassing situations.
The plots are so complex and masterfully woven I
won’t tackle explaining what it is precisely that appeals to me over the
series; each book contains its own villains and its own challenges for
the characters to overcome. I had a moment
of gob-smacked shock when I smugly thought to myself ‘Ahah! A plot
hole’ that was filled naturally and neatly in the next book. It was the
sort of moment where I realized I had been lead into a trap of believing
Karen Chance had backed into a corner, when
actually she had slipped a noose around the plot-rabbit and cooked it
while it was cackling its victory.
The romance is spicy and there are moments where
you will be trying to figure out what to do with all the emotions in
your mouth. I refuse to spoil any moment of joy for a series this good-
but it is steamy and heavy; with the characters
showing the benefits of different levels of emotional love and
investment.
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