Debbie's Spurts

BUDDY READ starting January 2, 2014, if anyone cares to join us!  Just add buddy read tag to your status updates and look for ours to join in the conversations.

A kind friend warned me I might want to read Scent of Magic closer to the release of this Taste of Darkness because it ended on a cliffhanger.

No kidding.  And, while hooked on the series, I still have mixed feelings on how author did that and some of the dead-missing-resurrected-stasis-notdead-??? stuff that went on.  I think if I had read right away and had to wait a year for this book, I would have been irate.

The first few pages of Taste of Darkness is spent with lots of melodrama searching for the missing Kerrick.  

In cover thumbnails, I couldn't tell that Avry was holding a goblet and thought it was a giant peace lily (goblet being a closed bud and the fold of her cloak a huge giant lily stem) so I paid closer attention when the lilies were described:

"Giant white man-size flowers topped thick green stalks.  Thorny vines jumbled below...Get too close to a Death Lily and either the petals snatched you or the vines ensnared you and pulled you in."

The flowers by her feet are definitely also not adult lilies.

Avry, despite Kerrick's friendship for and loyalty to Prince/King Ryne, is still not thrilled with him.  And he's still using her as involuntary bait in situations he doesn't tell her about. 

I'll close this start of the Buddy Read on nook editions page 36 of 346 with Avry's own thoughts:

"And once we reached HQ, I would get to be pissy to Ryne in person."

Reader, at my current progress point 20% in, knows more about what happened with Kerrick.  Avry doesn't.  Honestly, if this turns into a love triangle with her, Ryne and Kerrick I may not finish the book.  I don't think it will; there's no indication of feelings between her and Ryne.  And, author doesn't usually do love triangles.  I've just been burnt a lot with love triangles in lots of formerly enjoyed series so I always have a little flag that goes up when a lover is missing presumed dead and there's tension between two characters of the right sexual persuasion.