Review Royal Street by Suzanne Johnson
As the junior wizard sentinel for New Orleans, Drusilla Jaco’s job involves a lot more potion-mixing and pixie-retrieval than sniffing out supernatural bad guys like rogue vampires and lethal were-creatures. DJ’s boss and mentor, Gerald St. Simon, is the wizard tasked with protecting the city from anyone or anything that might slip over from the preternatural beyond.
Then Hurricane Katrina hammers New Orleans’ fragile levees, unleashing more than just dangerous flood waters.
While winds howled and Lake Pontchartrain surged, the borders between the modern city and the Otherworld crumbled. Now, the undead and the restless are roaming the Big Easy, and a serial killer with ties to voodoo is murdering the soldiers sent to help the city recover.
To make it worse, Gerry has gone missing, the wizards’ Elders have assigned a grenade-toting assassin as DJ’s new partner, and undead pirate Jean Lafitte wants to make her walk his plank. The search for Gerry and for the serial killer turns personal when DJ learns the hard way that loyalty requires sacrifice, allies come from the unlikeliest places, and duty mixed with love creates one bitter gumbo.
I’m always a huge fan of urban fantasy novels set in New Orleans. Its one of my favorite cities, and so reading a novel set around New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, its amazing. And one of the great things about this book is the background and the world is SUPERB. Its fantastic and its created so well. Its amazing. It is written so fantastically well. It sucks you right into New Orleans, both pre, post and during Katrina. Its simply fantastic. I loved everything about it.
The characters on the other hand, who boy. I thought that DJ was annoying. I get that she is supposed to be growing up and changing, and maturing but I didn’t see that. I didn’t see the maturation. I saw the intellect and the intelligence, and the potential, but the not thinking, the complete lack of understanding WHY responsibility was necessary and WHY accepting of her purpose was necessary after all evidence was presented and lives were on the line, it was just too much. After some time, I want to see the characters mature and grow and become grown ups, not continually whine and rail and do the whole WHY ME saga. Its not funny after awhile, and its no longer cute.
I enjoyed the novel and the story, yet at the same time, I wanted a better stronger heroine, I wanted a heroine who was capable of growing and learning. I wanted just a better heroine.
Overall Rating: B-
