Patricia C. Wrede‘s Thirteenth Child trilogy is a very slow burn; don’t go into it expecting a hero’s journey. Instead it’s closer to an alternative history slice of life series, with each book being ~90% focused on the protagonist’s daily interactions/activities and only the last chapter or two providing an opportunity for her to do something that catches everyone’s attention. There are also a number of loose ends relating to the world’s metaphysics and the tendency for a chapter to end with a dire proclamation only to have nothing come of it in the next is a consistent annoyance. Yet despite all that there’s just something about Wrede’s dialog style that makes the journey entertaining enough to forgive the open-ended and somewhat anti-climatic conclusion.
Elise Kova’s Golden Guard trilogy is less a trilogy and more a loose collection of short stories. The first is a bit of an action-mystery, but besides that is hard to pin down. The second is a painfully generic paranormal romance story minus the paranormal. The third is something of a buddy comedy. All three together are about the size of one normal book and honestly I can’t recommended bothering with them since they add nothing to the sequel.
That sequel being her previously published Air Awakens series. Interestingly enough the genre here is different from all three of the short stories mentioned above, with this being something of a combination hero’s journey paranormal romance. It starts out slow, picks up in the second book, begins to fall apart in the third, completely falls apart in the fourth, and takes a hard turn into pitch black tragedy in the the fifth: Human mutation, cannibalism, incest, miscarriage, and mental corruption/degradation all make an appearance. Ultimately I can’t recommended this series either due to all the inconsistencies surrounding the protagonist.
Unrelated to the the two works above (though almost immediately recognizable as from the same author due to the fondness for using names over pronouns), Kova’s Loom Saga is a relatively straightforward paranormal romance story for the most part which quickly brought to mind Lilith Saintcrow’s Dante Valentine series. This series leans more toward steampunk instead of cyberpunk though and takes place in its own fantasy world. While the first book is pretty good and the second is decent, the third comes across as very unfocused and almost offhanded in how everything gets resolved; what ends up most interesting about it is how Arianna ends up ceding the protagonist spot to Florence.
