A review by nineteen_adze
Angel of the Overpass, by Seanan McGuire
3.0
This was about 3.25 or 3.5 stars for me.
I may be a little harder on this one than I should be because my expectations were so high after
[b:The Girl in the Green Silk Gown|36384411|The Girl in the Green Silk Gown (Ghost Roads #2)|Seanan McGuire|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1508888585l/36384411._SX50_.jpg|58074353]. This book picks up where one of the later InCryptid books left off, and since I’ve only read the first book of that series, I wasn’t thrilled with the greater degree of exposition and leaning on something I might not get around to for quite some time. There’s a lot of backstory explanation in the early chapters (and in the middle chapters), often covering ground that we’ve gone over before, and it squeezes out some of the wonder that made earlier books work so well. Some chapters also feel like they would have fit better in the short story setup of book one than in a focused narrative like this one, in that they’re mostly self-contained and then don’t have much bearing (or any at all) on the rest of the plot, and a book based on a big "let's finish this" showdown doesn't have the bandwidth for that kind of detour.
The highs are high (Seanan McGuire casually throws in creatures and concepts that could anchor a whole book on their own) and it might be better in the middle of a series reread; I was just hoping for more out of Bobby Cross, who's been such a good villain before. This book seems like a very transitional reset button that gets rid of some old plot points that the author didn't want to deal with anymore (understandable, if you're building a universe from a scattered short story collection that was never intended to grow this much), and that reduced some of the tension and focus on what was happening in this book. The new status quo might be interesting in the next entry, though, and I'll go back to this series when/if there's a new volume.
The first two books in the series are absolutely worth reading if you’re interested in the idea of hitchhiking ghosts, American urban legends, and unusual types of folklore wrapping around each other in the shadowy twilight.
I may be a little harder on this one than I should be because my expectations were so high after
[b:The Girl in the Green Silk Gown|36384411|The Girl in the Green Silk Gown (Ghost Roads #2)|Seanan McGuire|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1508888585l/36384411._SX50_.jpg|58074353]. This book picks up where one of the later InCryptid books left off, and since I’ve only read the first book of that series, I wasn’t thrilled with the greater degree of exposition and leaning on something I might not get around to for quite some time. There’s a lot of backstory explanation in the early chapters (and in the middle chapters), often covering ground that we’ve gone over before, and it squeezes out some of the wonder that made earlier books work so well. Some chapters also feel like they would have fit better in the short story setup of book one than in a focused narrative like this one, in that they’re mostly self-contained and then don’t have much bearing (or any at all) on the rest of the plot, and a book based on a big "let's finish this" showdown doesn't have the bandwidth for that kind of detour.
The highs are high (Seanan McGuire casually throws in creatures and concepts that could anchor a whole book on their own) and it might be better in the middle of a series reread; I was just hoping for more out of Bobby Cross, who's been such a good villain before. This book seems like a very transitional reset button that gets rid of some old plot points that the author didn't want to deal with anymore (understandable, if you're building a universe from a scattered short story collection that was never intended to grow this much), and that reduced some of the tension and focus on what was happening in this book. The new status quo might be interesting in the next entry, though, and I'll go back to this series when/if there's a new volume.
The first two books in the series are absolutely worth reading if you’re interested in the idea of hitchhiking ghosts, American urban legends, and unusual types of folklore wrapping around each other in the shadowy twilight.