Obsidian Butterfly

Rating:
Summary: Where is the heat??
Review: I have really enjoyed reading the Anita Blake series up to this book, however, when I got to this book I felt like something was missing. I really enjoyed the sexual tension between Anita and her various men and fellow monsters. I got about half was through the book and really thought about just going on to the next book instead. I really love the relationship between Anita and Edward, the "this is what you are if you cross that line." type friction, but I think that this could have been covered maybe in a couple of chapters without having to resort to a full book that just drags you kicking and screaming through the whole bloody (pun intended) and somewhat disgusting book. The homosexual scenes I know I could have done without ever having read about. I may continue with the series just to see if Ms. Hamilton gets back to the normal writing that I am used to, but if there is another book like this, I may decide NOT to finish it for that exact reason. Unless you really, REALLY love and are desperately interested in hearing about Edward and his psychopathic tendancies, I would recommend just skipping this book and going on to the next one in the series instead.

Rating:
Summary: Just Ok. Could have had more impact if it were shorter
Review: I'm normally a great fan of the Anita Blake books but "Obsidian Buttrerfly is just Ok. Oddly, the story setup is very interesting and a lot of the scenes are great but the Edward character (the stone cold assassin type) that has been a peripheral character in other books is a much larger presence in this one. The author spends way, way too much time on interplay/scenes between Anita and Edward that are nearly word for word duplicates of each other talking about how "dead" each of the characters eyes are and how they'd like to hunt each other just to see "whose best". If it weren't repeated so much it wouldn't have bothered me but removing half of the redundancy would have made the story a lot tighter and the book 40 pages shorter.

Similar repetitiveness invades Anita's scenes with other characters. Otherwise, if that won't bother you, there is a lot to interest the regular Anita Blake series reader.


Rating:
Summary: Her best book
Review: For me this is the best Anita Blake book. I was totally absorbed from start to finish. The tension between the characters was really special, and Anaita really shows her stuff when the chips are down.

Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected.
Review: Like several of the reviewers, this was my first Anita Blake book, which I read because I like southwestern and Aztec stuff, and because, I admit, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. This book was okay, but is has definate problems. The charachterization was rather poor. Too many of the charachters were cartoonishly evil, often with no motivations other than that they're psycho and evil. I did not like the charachter Anita very much, which is bad, since she is the herione. Not only did her "tough girl" attitude usually translate to "unnessecarily antagonistic," but the constant whining about what a monster she was becoming and how she was loosing her humanity points got so tiresome that I just started skipping pages every time it began. Give me a break. I have read books by psychological profilers who interview serial killers for a living *in real life,* and they don't waste as much time whining like in this book. Combined with the fact that charachters kept getting their brains caught in their zippers when there was a murderer on the loose made this feel too much like a romance novel for my liking. I kept on going "Hello? there's a crime to solve, remember that?" I was warned that the series is very graphic and has a lot of gore and sex. Some of it was interesting, but some of it was just plain silly. This book did have some good points though. I liked the charachter Edward, and Ixpapalotl was an interesting charachter, even though her club was one of the sillier elements, and the crimes themselves were quite fascinating. So I can't say for sure if I will read more in this series. Perhaps I'll chech out the newest one if I have nothing else on my to-read list; I hear it features Edward...