Shadowlander, by Theresa Meyers, had an absolutely terrific first 15 pages. I totally got hooked on the teaser pages. Consider me duly teased.
Catherine O’Connell can see the fae that inhabit our world. Except for her three sisters, no one else can. And it would be very, very dangerous for the fae to ever find out that she can see them. So, when ferretlike fae sample her best friend’s food at an outdoor cafe, Cate has to pretend she doesn’t see them. When a fae practically climbs into her friend’s cleavage, Cate can’t even let herself look, no matter how much she wants to go, “Eww,” just before she squashes the little perv like a bug.
But when the guy her friend Maya hooks up with after a personal ad online turns out to be a big, bad fae, Cate has a really big problem. Because Maya doesn’t know about the fae, and her so-called date abducts her right through a rift into faery realm.
Cate has an even bigger problem. Since she turned 16, she’s had her own personal fae stalker, named Rook. Rook follows her everywhere, all the time, and she can’t ever let him know that she’s perfectly aware that he sits behind her when she’s reading and breathes down her neck, or that she likes it. Or that she thinks he looks like he belongs on WWE, or that she thinks he’s hot.
Or that she’s just heard him tell one of his fae groupies that her best friend was abducted as a “war prize” for the upcoming “Invasion”.
Except that now she needs a way into the faery realm. And letting Rook know that she can see him might just be her ticket inside. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she’s been dreaming of his touch for years. Does it?
And Rook. He is beyond astonishment when Cate reveals that she can see him. He’s been watching her fourteen years, since she turned sixteen. But Rook is much, much older than that. But knowing that she can see him changes the game. He had intended to capture her as a warprize, but if she can see him, then she is a Seer, a high-caste prize. Higher in caste than the Prince that he is. And he does not want to give her up to the Court. Rook wants her for himself.
Cate just wants to rescue her friend. These goals are not compatible. Not at all.
Escape Rating C: This is the teaser book for a longer series and it shows. The set up of the “Uplander” world (our world) was interesting, where the fae were here, but most of us couldn’t see them. The picture of the havoc they could wreck while we suspected nothing was both funny and nasty.
The fae world needed a LOT more explanation. Cate was a Seer. Because she could “see” the fae in the Uplander world. I got that part. What I didn’t understand was why that made her high-caste in the fae world or why all the Seers before her had chosen to stay in the fae realm. The book was too short for the world-building required. I would like to have seen it, I was definitely intrigued.
The next book in the Shadow Sisters series will come out in the Fall of 2012. Cate’s sisters will each get their own story.
