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A review by nightshade_novels
Spook's: Alice by Joseph Delaney
3.0
This book follows Alice as she journeys through the realm of the dark to find the third blade that Tom needs to defeat the Fiend.
There was so little plot to this book. 50% of it is flashbacks (I counted the pages), and while I am normally a huge fan of back stories, this was too much. It was clear that Delaney didn’t have enough content about Alice’s journey through the Dark to fill a whole book, and therefore filled the rest with backstories to explain why the people Alice was meeting in the Dark held grudges against her. The first flashback was regarding Alice’s relationship with Lizzie and Betsy and was nearly 40% of the book by itself. There seemed little point to this flashback other than to establish why Betsy would want revenge on Alice and to engrain the skelts in the story a bit more (which I did enjoy as I like the skelts as a creepy creature). The second flashback was based around Alice’s Testing to become a witch. This was far more interesting, but ultimately just used to explain why Raknid would want to kill Alice. The last chapter manages two things:
I enjoyed the world building that Delaney added to this book. We got to see several more of the realms of the Dark which was really interesting and we got to learn a bit more about the witches and some of their methods and rituals. It is nice that he is still able to bring something new to the world in the twelfth book in the series.
There weren’t many characters in the main storyline of this book; basically just Alice, Thorne and a series of enemies trying to kill them. I was nice to see Thorne again as I quite liked her character and it was interesting to see what has happened to her since the events in I Am Grimalkin. We did get to briefly see Pan, and in payment for him helping her, Alice promises to provide him with help whenever he should need when he calls her. I expected this to become important in the final book of the series as you don’t just make promises to a god, but it is never mentioned again. Obviously the most important character in this book is Alice and it was nice to get a book from her point of view seeing as she has been such a key character in the series for so long. You get a bit more of an insight to her thinking, although it also shows how unsure she is of anything.
Overall I think this was one of the weaker books in this series and I am looking forward to returning to Tom’s story in the next book and finding out how all of this is concluded.
There was so little plot to this book. 50% of it is flashbacks (I counted the pages), and while I am normally a huge fan of back stories, this was too much. It was clear that Delaney didn’t have enough content about Alice’s journey through the Dark to fill a whole book, and therefore filled the rest with backstories to explain why the people Alice was meeting in the Dark held grudges against her. The first flashback was regarding Alice’s relationship with Lizzie and Betsy and was nearly 40% of the book by itself. There seemed little point to this flashback other than to establish why Betsy would want revenge on Alice and to engrain the skelts in the story a bit more (which I did enjoy as I like the skelts as a creepy creature). The second flashback was based around Alice’s Testing to become a witch. This was far more interesting, but ultimately just used to explain why Raknid would want to kill Alice. The last chapter manages two things:
Spoiler
to simultaneously make the rest of the book pointless while hopefully making the previous book a bit more relevant.I enjoyed the world building that Delaney added to this book. We got to see several more of the realms of the Dark which was really interesting and we got to learn a bit more about the witches and some of their methods and rituals. It is nice that he is still able to bring something new to the world in the twelfth book in the series.
There weren’t many characters in the main storyline of this book; basically just Alice, Thorne and a series of enemies trying to kill them. I was nice to see Thorne again as I quite liked her character and it was interesting to see what has happened to her since the events in I Am Grimalkin. We did get to briefly see Pan, and in payment for him helping her, Alice promises to provide him with help whenever he should need when he calls her. I expected this to become important in the final book of the series as you don’t just make promises to a god, but it is never mentioned again. Obviously the most important character in this book is Alice and it was nice to get a book from her point of view seeing as she has been such a key character in the series for so long. You get a bit more of an insight to her thinking, although it also shows how unsure she is of anything.
Overall I think this was one of the weaker books in this series and I am looking forward to returning to Tom’s story in the next book and finding out how all of this is concluded.