Night Shift by Lilith Saintcrow
(Book #1 of the Jill Kismet series)
Rating: 🍁🍁🍁🍁
Overall: Dark, hectic, powerful and real.
The Good Stuff:
1) Jill - She's amazingly flawed and broken. And yet she's beautiful and strong. She struggles and fails and succeeds and tries. She just might be one of my favourite fictional characters now.
2) Pacing - How to explain the experience of reading this book...the action was non-stop, to the point where I felt exhausted by the time Jill wrapped things up at the end. There are no dull moments, that's for sure.
3) The World - I so enjoyed visiting this world, though I'm extremely thankful I don't live there! I've seen some people say that they wish they'd read the author's Dante Valentine series first, but I honestly don't see why. They're two completely separate worlds, as far as I can discern. It's a bloody, gritty world full of evil and good and beauty too.
4) Secondary Characters - It seems that you can always tell if a book will be good by the quality of its secondary characters (like how you can tell the quality of a restaurant by the quality of their tea, but I digress). Are they fully developed, or do they just serve to mechanically forward the plot? Will I remember any of their names afterward? I'm happy to say that Jill's friends, enemies and everyone in between are delightfully horrifying, inspiring, loving and well-rounded (as the case may be).
The Not-So-Good Stuff:
1) Repetition - If you were unaware of this before reading the book, you'll definitely know after that having a hell mark on your wrist hurts (or is squickily pleasurable, depending on the mood of the demon who marked you). Over, and over, and over, and over you'll be told this to the point where the hell mark almost becomes its own character.
2) Flashbacks - I have nothing against the use of flashbacks, and the ones scattered throughout this book were useful as sources for backstory that didn't resort to info-dumping. However, they were rather disorienting at times, as Jill dropped into them with little warning or differentiation from her present day.
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