This is the second book in the feline wizards series by Duane, focusing on Rhiow and her team as they work to keep the Grand Central Worldgates running. There are some cool aspects of it, but overall I definitely preferred the first book.
The premise of this sequel is that the London feline worldgating team needs assistance, so Rhiow and co are told to head over there to help out. They are still adapting to having Arhu around instead of Saash and are not excited about this change, but they head out nevertheless. The London team consists of four cats, there’s Huff the leader, his mate Auhlae, their technician Fhrio, and the new wizard Siffha’h. Tensions are high between the two groups from the start, Fhrio doesn’t like having someone else look at his gates and Arhu’s attempts to flirt with Siffha’h are met with scorn. They figure out though that the gates have been depositing people in other times and that the one way trips have made timelines unstable as well as creating a new, dark timeline where the Queen dies and everything ends in nuclear Armageddon. The cats, along with Ith their dinosaur friend, and a boy Artie that they happen to take along with them while time traveling, devise a plan to protect the Queen of England from being assassinated. Along the way Arhu learns that Siffha’h is his twin sister reincarnated, she originally died by drowning when they were kittens and loathes him for surviving that. They manage to make up though, and her power pushes them through to time travel. Once they get back though, they find that Auhlae’s jealousy of Rhiow getting close to Huff has made her a tool of the Lone Power Big Bad, she kills Huff and then goes poof when Ith shows up with a spell where all of the Egyptian cat mummies wreck Auhlae. The New York team heads home while telling Fhrio they’ll check in on him as he rebuilds his team.
There are cool aspects of the story that I didn’t fully realize until reading the historical note at the end, all of the stuff from the uncorrupted timeline is accurate (except for one detail) and that’s really cool! There is also research that went into things like the cats disrupting Parliament and the reveal that Artie is Arthur Conan Doyle. All of which has respect from me as a researcher, that’s cool stuff.
Having said that, some of this feels tossed in for the sake of it. Why is it significant that Arthur Conan Doyle joined them? His most famous writings don’t involve magic or anything like that. It’s a fun snippet, but he didn’t meaningfully contribute to the plot or anything so I’m not sure why it’s there.
My biggest gripe is probably the ending. They get everything sorted out with time travel, then come home and have to kill off two characters. It is not even a meaningful conflict, there is very little set up for Auhlae to be that jealous so it comes out of nowhere. And killing off both her and Huff means that there are basically no consequences of this. Huff does not have to deal with his mate betraying them and Auhlae never has to make up for her mistake. It feels contrived in order for Ith to use the spell that got tossed in as well. What I really like about the Young Wizards series is that when a character dies it is motivated and it has consequences. This did not have that.
Then there is also the fact that the human characters I
enjoy are not in the book at all. It is just the cats mucking around in Europe.
So in a sense I was not set up to enjoy this book, but I think even beyond that
it is one of the weakest of Duane’s works. There is another book in the feline
wizard series, and I will check it out, but hoping that it ends up being
stronger than this.
No comments:
Post a Comment