I finished the latest release of the Mercy Thompson series — Winter Lost — yesterday. Mercy Thompson is one of the few book series from my teenage era that I still actively read, due to a sense of nostalgia and nice writing (nice, as long as I only read one book every two years). I don’t readily dive into new books and series these days (and haven’t been for years). It’s time-consuming to find an author whose genre and style just clicks with me. Most novels either have main characters whom I can’t identify with, dialogues that are too cringe-worthy, generic mass-produced plot, and/or plain bad writing.
Anyway, rant aside, let’s move on to the book.
One of the things I like about Patricia Briggs is that she would do ‘recaps’ of sorts throughout her novel so that the reader only needs to remember the bare minimum of her world and characters to understand what’s going on. It’s great if the reader’s following a series as each book’s released (which is every two years), boring and a waste of time if the reader’s reading all the books in one sitting. Since I’m now the former instead of the later, I prefer having the new story remind me what happened before rather than merely referring to previous events I no longer remember.
A common complaint of readers of Mercy Thompson is the slow pace of the plot. I honestly cannot remember if that’s the case with the previous book. I probably DNFed that one. But Winter Lost was pleasantly well-paced and action-packed with a satisfying climax. It had its long-winding moments, but none of them exceeded my boredom threshold. Of course, after more than dozen books in the series, the direction of the plot is more than a little formularized. But like I said, I was nostalgic.
As for the characters, there’s only so much development available for a character after thirteen novels. And with time seemingly slowing down since the ninth? tenth? novel of the series and thus delaying key milestones like Mercy getting pregnant, Jesse graduating college, members of the pack moving away, etc., our main characters have remained flat with no growth for several novels.
Honestly, Mercy Thompson is a lot better than most books of a similar genre with their templated-characterizations. There are physical and psychological consequences of her adventures, and they are realistic, not just present temporarily to serve the plot. There also exist some minor characters who don’t worship the ground Mercy walked on. But Mercy doesn’t escape the Part Time Hero trope. And that’s why I can’t take more than one book of the series at a time.
Still, it’s nice to immerse myself, however temporarily, in the world of magic and monsters where true love lives right next door.
