The Spirit Eater

3,5 stars

The cover of this is still horrid. Like look at that, it's supposedly a picture of Nico, but what's with the raccoon liner? That wonkyass eyebrow? It just looks like Nico was supposed to be a high school goth girl with questionable fashion sense. Also, it's kind of cheesy romance novel. Absolutely hilarious.

In this one Eli and his team of misfits gets caught up in stuff while they are looking for Slorn, the bear-headed Shaper man. Demon creatures come and start to devour everything to grow, we also get closer to the origin of demonseeds and see more of the creatures of this world. Josef has to fight to death yet again and Nico really needs to think about what she is and what she can do about her situation. Miranda is useless as always, I see no function for her, I'll talk more about that part later.

You know, I think this book was just way too long. Miss Aaron at this point in her career was definitely not ready for introducing so many different storylines and powers at the same time and yeah, you can notice that in this book. The whole thing feels just a bit bloated, things get messy because we have to keep an eye on all the different powers at play and it is not graceful.
I personally like complicated worlds with a lot of elements, with a lot of different characters and conflicting powers, but if you do that it means you have to be exceptionally good at finding the balance between busy and still somehow neat and possible to follow without feel like you are being ripped apart.
Here... yeah. Things just happened. Especially during the climax I felt like the fluidity between the elements just wasn't there. For a book this length, the end was pretty damn rushed and I would have worked more to somehow untangle that before publishing. My opinion, so yeah.

Another issue is how the writing can be wonky. Back in middle school my teacher kept telling us we are only allowed to use a word twice on an A5 page and you lost points if you did more. Sure, that is a really rigid rule and I can understand that certain writing styles and things just make you unable to follow that, but at the same time Miss Aaron seems to be extremely prone to repeating the same word over and over again. There was a part where I swear every second sentence had the word ‘fissure'. At one point she described someone with calling everything about him long, multiple times in the same sentence.
These things are easy to notice! You don't need some special skill or education to realise that saying horrible multiple times in a sentence looks crappy.
It feels like certain passages didn't get enough attention. I'm sorry, I am not trying to be a jerk, but it is true.
(She also makes Eli think about using the fire demon that... is Miranda's, mixing up the names. It's killing me.)

I like the characters, though. I was right in my old review of the first novel, you need time to get attached to them, but they are pretty sweet and I'm warming up to them. The new characters, like the ridiculously flamboyant Sparrow or the now a bit more utilised Slorn were great. I just want all of them to be around more. (Gimme more Master Banage, though.)
This is my problem, though; Miranda is useless. She is this flawless brat who is so magical and I just don't connect to her at all. She can do no wrong and even if she basically deserts and in any normal society that is frowned upon, here she just goes “my master would have told me it's okay”. With her constant blabber about responsibility and all, she is just doing whatever she feels like and getting away with it. I have no idea what Miss Aaron is doing with her.

Again, I see potential. I see interesting things forming, good ideas. I love the magic system, I love the Shaper magic, I LOOOVE Eli's ability of being able to sweet talk the spirits, I love Dead Mountain with the cult and monsters coming.
Just... get better at technical things, please. That's all I ask. A bit more grace and a bit more attention to these little mistakes.

I'm definitely going on with the series, I want to know what's going on and I'm probably reading the author's newer, kind of dragon-y series. I'll want to give it a try and I'm hoping for a more polished final product.

Have a nice day and keep your spirits high!

Just as the series was getting too predictable, Rachel moves it to a different direction with battles now being fought with Inner demons. Series becomes less about Eli and more about Nico but lets not forget that with Nico comes Josef and the final sword fight is pretty well staged. But its the inputs of Tesset and the way that Nico uses them that is always in focus. Sparrow and Tesset are interesting additions and the seris is shaping up nicely as more and more reveals start to fill out the overall picture. Onwards

Nico has been growing on me over the first two books, so I was happy to see that the third book would be “her story”.
We also get to meet a couple of new characters (whom I would like to read more about, btw), and we get to know the usual suspects a lot better.

What I really like about Rachel's characters is that they are very consistent (even if their motives may not always be clear to the reader at the time).

Looking forward to book #4 in the series! :)