EDIT: Okay, I persevered, finished it and ended up kinda liking it. Scared to try the next one, though. We'll see. If I can't find anything else, I may give it a go. I'm in a reading desert right now where nothing appeals.

EDIT: Well, I tried it again, 4 years later and still can't get thru it. Funny---its not bad, its just not good enough to keep going.


Did not finish, maybe I'll come back to it. ( )

This was a difficult read ( )

There is something utterly fascinating about someone who owns up to their profession and freely admits they are a bad guy. Not that Gin is 'evil' exactly, the past kills she mentions tend to be people that had it coming (rapists, murderers, etc), but she acknowledges that she has done bad things and is likely to continue to do bad things. She's an assassin, not a school teacher.

The world that Estep creates, or the slice of the world that Gin and her cohorts inhabit at least, is full and richly detailed. Sometimes Estep breached the line of 'telling' not 'showing, especially in the beginning as Gin explained the mechanics of magic users, elementals and everything not fully human in between, but as the book went on Estep grew more confident in letting Gin's narration and insights color her surroundings. The story is told from Gin's POV, and she admits (many times) that she leans more towards the pragmatic amoral gray side of life, so the tone of the book is darker than if it was told from a third person standpoint.

My only true complaint is that despite saying that she needs to move past the tragedy of her childhood, not drudge up the very violent deaths of her mother and two sisters, plus her own torture, Gin talks about it. A lot. Usually something will trigger the memory, she'll morosely reminisce, berate herself for becoming emotional over the past and then move on. In the first 10 chapters alone she mentions it half a dozen times. But that's a trend in the book itself--a plot point of significance will be brought up (her bad memories, Mab's uber-powers, Finn's avarice, Caine's hellbent streak of wanting Gin dead...) and then beaten to death. The book is a tad longer than I am used to for UF's (almost 400 pages long mmpb), but not so long that I'd forget highly useful information like that within a chapter of reading it!

It's also worth mentioning that due to Gin's job, plus her quest for answers as to the set-up that led to her handler's death, tend to lead to violent moments of violence. Gin perfectly epitomizes 'She plays as hard as she works'. She does nothing in half-measures, or if she has to for time reasons she makes up for it doubly the next time. This includes killing, injuring, and sex. Her daydreams are hot, but what she does is even hotter.

That all being said, this is a great start to an entertaining new urban fantasy series. I like Gin, I like her honesty and her emotions despite herself. At the end of this book things begin to change, but the teaser for the next book Web of Lies (due out in May 2010) promises that Gin won't be quite as peaceful as perhaps Fletcher wanted for her when all is said and done. ( )

The entire plot just doesn't quite fit together. It feels like trying to build a puzzle with parts from two different puzzles depicting the same image while having half the pieces from each.
If you roughly put every part where it belongs you can recognize the image from afar but as soon as you take a closer look nothing quite fits together properly. Mainly logical conclusions are frequently a bit off or in conflict with other facts that are not being associated directly by the narration.
These inconsistencies radiate throughout many different parts of the story because many of them are such integral parts of the plot and there are lots of these inconsistencies.
Usually, I am the kind of person that has a ready fix for most of the plotholes that I encounter almost immediately but I have to acknowledge that at least some of the ones I recognized in this one weren't easily fixable.

Another problem this book has is the tendencies to talk in extremes and absolutes especially if it tries to portray badassery. You can not have THE stone-cold killer if another is the stone coldest killer and yet another is the liquid helium coldest-est killer.
This happens quite a lot in various contexts and it has the opposite effect of what it intends.
If you want to differentiate characters you have to give yourself wiggle-room.
For differences you need weaknesses.

The MC has the unfortunate habit of withholding information that potentially could resolve a lot of conflicts but that would progress the enemies-to-lovers plotline prematurely...

This story tries to eat the cake and have it too quite a lot with character traits.
Being emotionless and compassionate. Having seen everything, yet being shocked by cruelty.
Your MC doesn't need to be emotionally involved for the reader to experience the appropriate emotion. You can have surrogate characters for that and in many cases just reading well-written scenes is already enough to get emotionally involved without an empathetic connection to the MC.

On a related note, the story tries too hard to make the MC out to be the good gurl. "I am an Assassin! UUUH badass. I murder for money! But listen, I am a good assassin! I only kill bad people, most of the time... See?". Misdirection is partly to blame here as this series actually should be called "Elemental Vigilante". But there had to be "Assassin" in the title for the extra coolness factor.
The story tries way too hard to justify questionable thing the MC does by showing us e.g. how much of a bad person the killed guy was. I've seen much worse examples of this but it's still pretty noticeable in this book too.

The power levels are completely out of whack. The main character's strength and competence specifically are completely arbitrary based on what the author needs at the moment to create stakes and tension.
This is particularly jarring because the MC is supposed to be this world-class assassin but she can be bested one-on-one by some nobody if the plot needs it.

It all goes downhill towards the end.
The final plot resolution was a real dumpster fire. Far-fetched is probably the nicest way to describe it.
It became suddenly very sentimental to the point of being uncomfortable and cheesy which was unexpected and a jarring shift in mood which in turn made me cringe that much harder.
The entire cast starts spouting sentimental pseudo wisdom at the end.

The story tries to make sure the reader remembers stuff that was mentioned much earlier in the book but goes overboard and ends up endlessly going in circles around the same things constantly.

All in all the end after the climax is a total break in the atmosphere. The story can't decide what it is even trying to be until the bitter end.

So, enough complaining. The longer I think about it the more I find to complain about but I must stop somewhere.
In conclusion, my enjoyment continually went down throughout the book. Before the disastrous ending, I probably would've rated this a high 3-stars but after... 2 stars it is.
There is a great story underneath if you cut away the bad parts but I just don't have the tolerance necessary to overlook so many weird out of place details. ( )

Book source ~ Purchased at Audible

Gin Blanco is known in assassin circles as the Spider. She’s a Stone Elemental which means she’s connected to all things stone-ish. She’s just going about, doing her job when an Air Elemental kills her long-time handler. All bets are off now as Gin goes after the one responsible and anyone who gets in her way.

This sounded like an action-packed book that would be right up my dark alley. And it kinda is. Gin is a badass of the first order. She’s got skills and a cool innate talent with anything resembling stone. The secondary characters are great and the plot is decent. It’s the writing that puts me off. It’s repetitive as fuck. And if I had to hear about eye colors one more time I would have had to put my own blue eyes out with a sharp implement. So, in my opinion, it could have used additional polishing to take the rough edges off. Otherwise, it’s a unique take on the paranormal. The narrator also does a great job, so I would definitely listen to more of Lauren Fortgang’s audio works. ( )