
I hate to be mean but this was really bad (Sorry Laurell).
This book has killed the series for me and possibly all of her books (which is sad cause I loved her books). It felt so lazy like she didn’t want to be writing about Merry at all.
As with most of her books, there’s a lot of recapping of previous books events (feels like she’s trying to up her word count here) and really detailed descriptions of people’s looks (the fabric and exact colour of that dudes shirt has no influence on anything. Upping the word count again maybe). The character’s discuss the same matters over and over and over, bringing nothing new to the table.
There are two major events in this book, one at the beginning and one at the end. The rest of the book is just filler, covering topics mentioned numerous times in all of the previous books. How many times do we have to hear that Merry’s Dad was a great guy? How many times do we have to hear that her aunt is way into torture? How many times do we have to hear that her uncle is a nutjob? And don’t get me started on those dang nails!
Near the beginning of the book she wrote a sentence that grated at my skin so much, it was really difficult to continue reading. She’s describing a pair of sunglasses that Mistral puts on; ” They were silver metal frames with mirrored lenses that reflected everything like a silver mirror.” Good God this woman has 3o+ books (bestsellers no less) under her belt, I know she’s better than this! She also reuses common phrases in a short space of time more than once throughout the book. It almost gives the impression she thinks her readers are stupid or have really bad memories but I think she just didn’t care about this book.
A Shiver of Light was written 5 years after the last book in the series, and after reading it I get the feeling she only wrote it because she felt she had to. It is boring and lazy and destroyed Merry’s story. This series should have been shorter and finished by now.