Wicked City

I believe it was last summer, shortly after Readercon, that I read the first of Alaya Dawn Johnson's Zephyr Hollis novels, Moonshine. I liked it a lot! And yet, because my TBR list is an unwieldy monster of monstrous proportions, I just yesterday got around to reading the sequel, Wicked City, even though I'd bought the books at the same time.

Wicked City continues the adventures of Zephyr Hollis, chronically broke charity worker and activist, as she tries to find a way to break the magical bond that she accidentally established between herself and her mischevious djinn love interest, Amir, at the end of the last book. Not only is breaking the bond between a djinn and a "vessel" remarkably difficult, but her refusal to use the bond to make any wishes is causing a buildup of power that threatens to destabilize... er, something magical involving the djinni; I sort of breezed through that bit. Zephyr's quest is continually interrupted with other crises, the main one being that over a dozen vampires have mysteriously died after drinking the vampire liquor Faust, which everyone thought had been toned down enough after the last book to not be overly dangerous. Zephyr is also under investigation by the Other vice squad for harboring an illegal child vampire, in a bargain with the Mayor of New York City to bring him the slightly deranged child vampire Nicholas, and trying to help her investigative reporter friend Lily get scoops on the mysterious vampire deaths situation. Additionally, her roommate Aileen, an Irish immigrant with a touch of "the Sight" that seems to have gotten more powerful in recent months, is running herself ragged doing fortune-tellings for the Spiritualist Society. Oh, and her daddy, the infamous vampire hunter, has gone either crazy or missing or both.

Set in a dirty, glamorously gritty Prohibition-era New York City, Wicked City is at least as much fun as the first book, although I kind of wish I'd remembered more of the plot developments in the first book; apparently they didn't really stick with me and then the sequel was confusing at times. Zephyr is a stubborn, emotional, and ultimately likeable heroine; nearly all of the secondary characters are amusingly outrageous. I feel like the plot threads are balanced slightly better in this book than in the first one, and the book ends with a very intriguing setup for a sequel, although I don't know if Johnson has actually written a third book in this series yet.

I don't really have any sort of deep literary thoughts on this one, which is odd since it at least touches on basically every social issue that was around in 1920s New York, and invents some new ones. They're all kinda... familiar to me, at this point, I guess. None of them were handled in ways that struck me as particularly terrible; neither did they provide any sort of particularly astute commentary—it was just like "It's the twenties! Everyone is terrible to each other! That sucks; now let's go find some illegal gin and tonics to drink until we feel better!" which is fair enough, I suppose.

Originally posted at http://bloodygranuaile.livejournal.com/53615.html.