Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of Staying Dead (Retrievers, Bk 1)

Staying Dead (Retrievers, Bk 1)
reviewed on + 164 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1


Very good! I really liked this! The characters were fun, and the story line was pretty unique which was one of the things that attracted me in the first place. And you can always tell how much I like something when I want to fix the little problems as if I were the editor or something!

It just seems that with a little tweaking this could have been even better (either that, or I just have no real love of subtlety!). The history behind Wren and Sergei's relationship was a nice twist -- it's always a nice change to find characters in a fantasy novel that aren't ingenues -- but the romantic tension could have been kicked up a few notches. There also seemed to be so much more potential for action than what actually happened. Magic, bad guys, vigilantes, thieves, and demons abound, so you'd think the characters would spend more time involved with some of them. This is the first book in a series, so of course there's a lot to set up and room left for more action later, but I still just want to tell the author not to be afraid of her story! Mayhem is so much more fun when it runs wild instead of happening just outside the main context of the story! Why was there a sense of restraint?

This can be read as a stand-alone novel if you're thinking of sampling this series (trilogy?). The main storyline does come to a conclusion -- it's just the characters who go on to new adventures in the following books.