Elitist Book Reviews

Garet James is the last in a line of women "watchtowers" who protect humanity from evil--particularly the magic kind. In BLACK SWAN RISING she had to learn about her unknown powers and save New York City from destruction. She had the help of fairies, goblins, as well as that of the rich and handsome vampire Will Hughes. But he has disappeared, leaving clues for Garet to follow.

If you remember my review for BLACK SWAN RISING, I had a hard time with the love story between Garet and Will. It was sudden and inexplicable and emotionless--it's hard for a romance to be believable when you don't understand why two characters love each other. So when the second book, THE WATCHTOWER so depended on their love in order to explain Garet's motivation to follow Will...it didn't bode well.

Garet must travel to Paris and find the path to the Summer Country to find Will on his quest to cure himself of his vampirism. Those details are interesting and creative as Carroll draws out the history and lore surrounding the magic of the Fae and their lives in Paris. Carroll also does well painting a picture of Paris itself and its view from an up-close street level--much like was done successfully with New York City in SWAN.

Unfortunately, that's the best part of the book, and it's not enough to keep the reader interested. Instead, we get the love story of Will and Marguerite (Garet's grandmother+great I don't know how many times, it wasn't clear) of 400 years ago mixed in with Garet's present-day search. What's wrong with that, you ask? Carroll already told us how that particular story ends in SWAN. So I'm reading a story of a spoiled and emo 19-year-old Will falling in swooning love at first sight, and I already know what's going to happen...and, yeah. Had a hard time enjoying that. Add on the fact that Garet and Will spend the majority of the book apart, and when they're together I'm still not sure why they love each other.

If I had liked Will more, I might have been more interested in his origins, but he behaved so erratically and took Garet's stuff only to leave her behind in SWAN, so going into THE WATCHTOWER I would have been fine if she'd washed her hands of him. My other question is: Why name the book THE WATCHTOWER if Garet doesn't do watchtower-ish things? Sure she is clever and able to follow the clues, but she leaves the hard stuff for others in the end. Again. Maybe the book is about Marguerite the original watchtower? But we don't see Marguerite protect the world from evil, she just moons over Will. Now I understand where Garet gets it from. But I still don't understand why.

And then the Summer Country and time travel and magic watches and...I just got confused at where the story was taking me. Why the characters did the things they did. Why magic worked the way it did. By the end I just wanted it to be over. There will be a sequel. I don't plan on reading it.

Recommended Age: 16+
Language: Very little
Violence: Some, although without detail
Sex: One brief scene

This book is the second in a series:
BLACK SWAN RISING
THE WATCHTOWER

Garet James is different, but she doesn't know it. She leads a pretty normal life for a mid-twenties New Yorker: runs her elderly father's gallery, has made a decent business for herself from making jewelry, hangs out with her friends.

Until she finds out that the debts on her father's gallery are suddenly due and she doesn't know how they'll ever repay them in the current economic crisis. On the way home from the lawyer's, she wanders into an antiques shop to ask for directions, and the mysterious owner asks her to help him open a sealed silver box using her talents. How could she refuse his generous monetary compensation?

But the box turns out to be important, a sort of gate to the supernatural, and when Garet opens it, demons are released to wreak havoc on New York.

Garet learns she's descended from a long line of women 'watchtowers'--those who stand as guardians on the border between humans and magic. And it will be up to her to stop John Dee from using the magic box and destroying New York and eventually the world.

As a result, Garet must learn the elemental magic from the Fae around the city: Ariel and wind, Melusine and water, Noam Eardmann and earth, Ddraik and fire. Her guide is Oberon. Do any of these names ring a bell? There's an assortment of supernatural creatures: fairies, gnomes, and of course a vampire love interest.

Garet has a lot to learn before she'll be ready to face John Dee. As a result Garet spends a lot of her time traipsing through New York and learning magic--so much time is spent on it, in fact, that there's little time for deeper characterization and explaining the magic. Garet spends half of the novel learning about the different elemental magics, so my logical conclusion was that this knowledge would be used in the climax. It wasn't. The over-saturation of magic throughout the book all dissipates during the last chapter, after the climax, as though it's not important anymore. Almost as though there weren't consequences to the demons unleashed, or her learning powerful magic, that it has no room in her mundane life. Which was rather a let-down.

Garet, as the main PoV character could have been better developed. I did like that she wasn't a kick butt brassy typical urban fantasy heroine, but having spent the whole novel building up for her confrontation with John Dee and have it fall so flat means that she doesn't really progress as a character. A problem I had with her was she would make random decisions, without really thinking about it, mostly for the sake of the plot's tension for her to have trouble to get out of. The other secondary characters, while interesting and important to Garet, were also shallowly drawn. The 'romance' between Garet and rich vampire Will Hughes, while starting out fine, progressed awkwardly and their interactions were disappointingly emotionless. By the end of the novel, there was left a big enough hole in their relationship to leave room for sequels.

The prose and plot are very straightforward; and while the pace is pretty consistent, the flow lurches in places making it hard to follow as Garet travels from place to place, mostly because she moves around a lot through New York. However, I did enjoy the glimpse at New York, without making me feel like an idiot for never having been there. I was able to follow Garet's movement through the city easily enough.

I read BLACK SWAN RISING pretty fast. It was fun, Lee Carroll obviously spent time researching in order to add the supernatural elements to the book, which made it fun to point out and look up later. But it's similar in depth to other urban fantasy books, and may even be a fresh departure from the other uber-powerful heroines out there.

Recommended Age: 16+, this will appeal to older YA readers, as well
Language: Infrequent, and not very strong at that
Violence: Some peril and blood, but nothing intense or graphic
Sex: A brief scene

Lee Carrol is the pseudonym for the collaboration between mystery novelist Carol Goodman and her poet husband Lee Slonimsky.