|
Spiral Hunt (Evie Scelan) |  | Author: Margaret Ronald
Publisher: Eos
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy New: $3.50
as of 7/30/2010 23:08 PDT details
You Save: $4.49 (56%)
New (31) Used (24) from $1.99
Seller: peggyannp
Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 14087
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Edition: Original
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.6 x 4.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0061662410
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780061662416
ASIN: 0061662410
Publication Date: February 1, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Some people have the Sight. Genevieve Scelan has the Scent. They call her "Hound," and with her unique supernatural sense Evie can track nearly anything—lost keys, vanished family heirlooms . . . even missing people. And though she knows to stay out of the magical undercurrent that runs beneath Boston's historic streets, a midnight phone call from a long-vanished lover will destroy the careful boundaries she has drawn. Now, to pay a years-old debt, Evie must venture into the shadowy world that lies between myth and reality, where she will find betrayal, conspiracies, and revelations that will shatter all she believes about herself and the city she claims as home. When the Hunt is on, the Hound must run . . .
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 24
 3.5 stars - It didn't grab me by the throat, but it's an above-average UF debut July 12, 2010
Rebecca Baumann
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Plot Summary: Evie Scelan has an ability that she must hide from the `magical mafia' that rules Boston, or her life won't be her own anymore. Since childhood, Evie has possessed the talent of a bloodhound. She can track any object, or find any person by scent alone, and she uses her skill in a quiet sideline business as a "finder," but when her old boyfriend goes missing, it becomes personal.
(EVIE SCELAN SERIES: BOOK ONE)
Spiral Hunt is a solid urban fantasy debut. There's much that I liked about this story, and some things I didn't, but I think it has potential. I can say without equivocation that fans of Boston, the Red Sox, or baseball will find extra reasons to feel drawn to this particular story. Those little tidbits will help this one stand out from the crowd, and that's a good thing, because it started a bit slow for me. Too much of the `coolness' was held over until the end, and it took me two days to read this book instead of my usual one-day devour. So that right there shows that it didn't leap out of the starting gate, and I think that's a flaw.
Some of the character's motivations and fears weren't explained to my satisfaction, and I wish I'd been clued into what happened to Frank (the missing ex) a lot earlier. Bad guys don't seem so bad if I don't have an inkling as to their crimes, so the threat from the Brotherhood wasn't a looming presence until the last quarter or so. Evie herself is subtle for a UF heroine. She's fairly grounded considering that she has a one-of-a-kind magical ability, and even though she's not going to stand out in my memory, she did feel real. I'd definitely like to see more of her personality come out. I loved how she was beloved by all dogs, and in her dreams she chases rabbits. Those were great details.
There was no real mystery to solve since the enemy was not exactly a secret, but I did admire how several of Evie's relationships were ambiguous. She didn't know who to trust, and that became a problem later on. I was kept guessing too, and I was happy to be surprised here and there. It's always great when that happens. Book two, Wild Hunt, came out earlier this year, and there just might be a romantic entanglement to complicate things even more. I certainly hope so.
 Excellent debut book about the city of Boston July 12, 2010
Rabh Marrach (OK United States)
Evie Scelan makes her living by day as a bike courier throughout Boston, living a life uncomplicated by the magical underground which her mother has taught her to avoid. However, her paranormal skills of sniffing out lost objects and people, while building her fledging private investigator business is going to land her smack dab in a nest of trouble.
A mysterious phone call from an old lover, grabs us from the first chapter and then the hunt is on.
Spiral Hunt, like A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin), is one of the best books I've read in the Urban Fantasy genre that actually uses the city itself as a character. Too many books are just doing an "insert city here" kinda writing. Instead Spiral draws you into Boston - the location, the city, it's streets, its' architecture, it's people...
Evie encounters the magical and the mundane side by side. This duality of what we know exists vs. what an author creates is why I begun to read Urban Fantasy long ago, starting with Emma Bull's War for the Oaks.
In Spiral, you don't get wizards who want to rule the world - they can barely function in the world on their own. However, the Bright Brotherhood has found a way to harness loci that seem to fuel an endless supply of raw power. Evie will have to deal with gods and goddesses, resolve the pain of her mother's passing, and inevitably decide that it will be up to a Hound to bring down the Bright Brotherhood.
One thing I'm discovering is that an author that I want to read again and again, takes time to build some substantially good side characters. Spiral's Sarah, the New Age shop owner is the only Wiccan character I've read this year that I actually want to read about again! Sarah tries to deal with the politics of her own Coven, showing a human side of how people behave that further makes this world realistic.
Nate and his sister, Katie, are interesting but not cloyingly so. Nate takes a bigger role in the sequel, Wild Hunt, slowly developing as Evie's love interest. The villian (who I won't name due to it being a spoiler) is a disgusting piece of slime that needed to get his. The plot pace is good and we reach a satisfying end that uses Evie's power in a manner that stays true to her character.
The plot has a number of good and logical (though unforeseen) twists, another hard to find element in fiction today. Fantasy writers have gone down too many formulaic roads and finding someone who can give a satisfying read while keeping that element of surprise and delight is almost next to impossible to find.
mythology-rich tour of a grim and gritty boston June 21, 2010
mlle. x (California)
Urban fantasy novels can go in a couple of different directions, and this one tends towards the gritty and grim. In Margaret Ronald's alternate Boston, almost all the magic users are addicts living marginal half-lives, consumed by paranoia. The magicians who aren't flat-out bums fit into another, even more unsavory category: they're evil. A group known as the Bright Brotherhood keeps a mafia-style chokehold over Boston's supernatural population - if you're not with the Brotherhood, you're against them; and if you're against the Brotherhood, your days are numbered.
The novel's heroine, Evie Scelan, is par for the course in the genre but very easy to like. She's a part-time bike messenger who's starting up a fledgling business in finding lost items. Her attitude towards her own magic seems a little schizophrenic. On the one hand, we she spent most of her adult life hiding her abilities; she knows it's dangerous to be recognized as a magic user in Boston. On the other hand, her new business is all about advertising, and using, her unique magical talent. She's a "Hound" - she can find lost things, trace scents where there's no physical trail. Pick a pebble up off the ground for a minute, and she could trace the magical residue left on it for miles.
So the plot heads off in a few different directions, which all converge neatly at the end. First, Evie gets a phone call from an old flame - he's been forced to work for the Bright Brotherhood, and he's going to make a run for it. They didn't part on good terms, but Evie's determined to find him and help him get free. This already seems like a fool's errand, but there's more. Her good friend Sarah, a white witch, asks her to hunt down a collection of "chain stones" - stones with magical properties. Evie doesn't realize it at the time, but these stones are very, very important to the Bright Brotherhood. And then, to make matters worse, it soon becomes clear that she probably won't need to look very hard to find the Bright Brotherhood...because they're already hunting her. Her magic has come to their attention, and now they want to force her into the fold.
Evie spends most of her time taking two steps backward for every one step forward. She gathers information bit by bit, and all the while the Brotherhood is attacking her and her friends. For every clue she finds, someone she loves is kidnapped, or some potential informant is killed. This makes the book a real page-turner, but it also casts a shadow over all of Evie's small victories, because the price of progress is pretty steep.
Bizarrely enough, while Evie's day-to-day reality is relentlessly grim, Ronald's mythology is complex, gorgeous, and incredibly charming. At the end of the book, the author notes that she got a lot of her material from a college course on Celtic mythology, and I'm thinking that's why there's such a richness and depth to her references here. But the most charming thing of all - the most wonderfully Bostonian aspect of the book - is the way that Ronald incorporates the Red Sox, and the team's mythology, into the plot.
The only thing that really didn't work for me here was the romance. It's hard to say much about it without giving spoilers, but Evie's relationship with both of her potential suitors rang false to me. On the whole, though, Spiral Hunt puts down a solid foundation for a series. The second book has already been published, and I'll be picking it up as soon as I can.
Mixed June 13, 2010
Jacob Glicklich (The American Midwest)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book started so well. An urban fantasy that was refreshing in several ways:
-Immersion in the urban setting, in this case Boston. It's traces an elaborate background of Irish immigration and makes that fully compatible with the background of magic elements described here.
-Taking the magic system in a nuanced layout. Rather than a stark division between full-blooded magic people completely aware of the magic world and clueless mortals, the book traces spectrums
-Having a gritty first person noir protagonist that doesn't make me want to smack said person. (Take note, Dresden Files and Rosemary and Rue)
It's a good setup and has a nice sense of momentum in the main premise. I didn't care about the inevitable mystery the main characters were focused on, but I wasn't indifferent to the characters themselves or the way they set about trying to deal with the challenge. Unfortunately the plot implodes in the last third of the book, all kinds of craziness with kidnapping, pursuit, weird rituals, and gods running around with their avatars. A major failure in that aspect, and it weakens a lot of what I found most appealing in the initial setup, making for an cosmic clash of extreme magical forces that feel much more conventional as well as making less sense. It's a stronger disconnect than I get in a lot of books--I was very fond of the general atmosphere, the beginning and much of the characterization, but was very turned off by the eventual turn of the plot. On a basic level it seems I didn't want to go where Ronald's story lead, which despite all the strengths makes me disinclined to seek this author out again.
Similar to and better than: Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire
Similar to and worse than: Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente
 My Mistake June 7, 2010
Lily of the Valley (Pacific Northwest, USA)
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
I made the mistake of not reading the sample pages of this book before ordering it. Right there on page one I would have seen the first element I find off-putting: profanity. I am hugely disappointed that things only deteriorated from there. I was (and still am) very curious about the plot line I'd read so much about in the other reviews. Unfortunately the story seems to take place in a base world filled with hard, unhappy people. I couldn't read beyond page 38. The world we live in has enough filth and muck in it; I don't want to spend my recreational hours slogging through more, even if it is fictional. It's a real shame the author couldn't find a less coarse way to tell what sounds like a very intriguing tale. This book will be recycled with last week's newspapers instead of being passed on to other readers.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 24
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME.
| |
