The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty
(Book #1 of The Shambling Guides series)
Rating: 🍁🍁🍁
Overall: A refreshing take on UF, thoroughly enjoyable as long as you can suspend your disbelief and embrace the nonsensical.
The Good Stuff:
1) The premise - A human travel writer who accidentally stumbles into the "coterie" (a.k.a. supernatural) world when she's hired to write a series of travel books for them? Yes please! One of my favourite things about the book was the excerpts from the actual "Shambling Guide to New York," the book Zoe and her crew were working on throughout the events of the novel.
2) The tropes (or lack thereof) - I enjoyed the author's take on several traditional UF tropes: vampires, succubi, etc. But especially the zombies! I like that they're functional, to varying degrees, and very much a part of coterie society.
3) Zoe - What a great character! While the "using a human unaware of supernatural to introduce the reader" thing is certainly not new, Lafferty uses it well with Zoe. The fact that she doesn't just take it all in stride - in fact, she freaks out and faints on a semi-regular basis - made me exceedingly happy.
4) The Guys - Yay for supernatural males who aren't automatically perfect, sexy alphas! With the possible exception of John, the succubus, they're pretty much regular guys. Zoe's vampire boss is balding and has a belly. And even John, when he's not hungry, isn't anything to write home about.
5) Good Grannie Mae. That is all.
The Not-So-Good Stuff:
1) Secondary Characters - As much as I like Zoe, almost every other character was pretty flat. They basically existed for the sole purpose of moving the story along, rather than having independent stories and motivations to make them real and individual.
2) Holy coincidences, Batman! - Seriously, it seemed like every aspect of Zoe's life was weirdly connected to a degree that not only crossed the line of believability, it didn't even seem to know the line existed!
3) Arthur - For being Zoe's main love interest, he wasn't really that appealing. He also seemed kinda dumb, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but didn't work in this case.
4) World-building - As refreshing as the concept behind the story is, it could have been executed better. There were a lot of inconsistencies in what we're taught about the coterie world, and what the story demonstrates. This may go back to my first point, that the secondary characters only seem to be guided by what the story needs them to do, rather than the story being informed by the characters. Does that make sense?
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