I’m not entirely sure how this book advances the larger plot, really, but it was interesting and I enjoyed it. Stockholm syndrome must be catching. ( )

Really liked a lot of this. ( )

I could happily have skipped this episode of Kitty. I felt a little like I'd entered the Underworld myself and mostly, I just wanted to leave.

"Kitty In The Underworld" starts well, with Kitty enjoying her life and me enjoying listening to her interview a Vampire stripper on "The Midnight Hour".

Then Kitty gets kidnapped by a very strange bunch of people for even stranger reasons and almost all of the rest of the novel happens underground.

The problem with a plot in which your hero is a captive, spending much of her time in solitary confinement, is that it is essential static and quickly begins to feel claustrophobic. Kitty's captivity is well written but it's not even a little entertaining.

The plot draws on Underworld myths from many cultures. This was initially interesting but I began to feel too much as if I were reading research notes rather than a novel. The links between Kitty's plight and the Underworld myths seemed to me to be heavy-handed and a little forced.

The four main characters that Kitty interacted with remained mostly pencil sketches. Partly this was because the oldest of them was a sententious bore who took so long telling his story that I no longer cared and partly because the other characters were trying so hard to be avatars that they concealed their true selves. The downside was that it was very difficult to engage emotionally with any of them.

I'm hoping that Kitty is done with the Underworld and that the next novel will move me forward into starting to resolve Kitty's struggle with Roman.
( )

This series is a consistently light read designed only for light amusement... assuming that preparing to war against an ancient vampire in our modern world, setting up allies between other vampires and werewolves and magicians to fight this war is a "light read".

Well, to be honest, it is. This is a UF dealing with social masked social issues, sometimes even coming back to Kitty's radio talk show, but more often of late it's all about killing Roman.

This particular novel takes a weird dark turn, getting her kidnapped and pressured into a cult-like magical ceremony with possibly deluded weres and vamps that SHOULD be Kitty's natural allies.

Was it kind of a mess? Yeah, a bit. And the whole identification with captors bit was a bit ... difficult... but this is, at its heart, a LIGHT UF.

I didn't hate it. But then, I don't usually take this kind of thing too seriously, either. :) ( )

The and a half stars. This particular Kitty Norville installment felt very different, tone-wise, from event up until this point. It was radically more introspective, which I quite enjoyed. She spent a decent amount of time ruminating on various myths, and the nature of stories that survive through the ages. It was thoughtful, and I appreciate getting that in a primarily-action series. (Not that there wasn't action, obviously--that terrifying wind demon returns briefly--but this particular book differentiated itself from the rest of the series in an intelligent way.) ( )