Lauren's Bookshelf

I didn’t dislike this book, I was frustrated by it quite a bit, but I didn’t dislike it and I still feel a little like the review feels more negative than I intended it to be. It’s one that felt like it could be more than it was, and I think that was my big issue with it. I want to see Kim Harrison write outside of urban fantasy at some point, I think, it feels like she could do solid horror. This one is thanks to the nice folks at Ace. Here’s Kim Harrison’s Three Kinds of Lucky. Enjoy!

Mages split light to use magic, creating dross as an unfortunate side effect, but their magic allows them to do such glorious feats that it has to be worth the occasional pop of bad luck if a bit of dross breaks on them. And if they do not want to deal with the dross, there are always sweepers to deal with it. Petra Grady is a sweeper first-class, excellent at her job, she knows how dross works far better than most. Perhaps better than she would like when she is recruited to help a particularly oblivious mage, her former friend, Benedict Strom, with research into the nature of dross and a potential way for mages to render it inert without the need for a sweeper’s help. Research that leads to a horrific accident and Grady chasing shadows in the desperate hope of finding the only person who might be able to help set things right. The only person who might be able to explain the strange new abilities that Grady seems to be developing. The man who got her father killed during his own experiments using dross for magic.

I find Kim Harrison’s Three Kinds of Lucky entertaining and frustrating by turns. There are ideas that are fantastic and that I looked forward to seeing more of, like the whole mystery of what was going on with Petra’s power and the shadow that seemed to be following her. But then Harrison also had a habit of feeling like she got bogged down in details that did not help the book or that made the characters much more frustrating than it felt like she intended, much of Strom’s early characterization made him feel less like an oblivious mage and more like a brilliant idiot with no idea of how bad his testing process really was. There were moments when I wanted three sequels and a movie from this book and moments where I wanted to be reading literally anything else.

The pacing does the book no favors here and likely added more to my frustration than anything else. Petra being angry at and unwilling to work with Benedict while also regularly expressing attraction to parts of him, like his butt or his smell, gets really old. While she brings up reasonable issues with his methods that really should have been looked into, due to the accident being listed in the blurb, it is clear that Petra, the subject expert forcibly dragged onto the project, will not be listened to no matter what. But then, said horrible accident that kicks off the plot does not happen until something like half way through the book, leaving the lead up to feel less like Harrison setting the world up for her readers than like she was marking time. Unfortunately to my mind, the time is used driving it in that Benedict is totally the love interest and that there is something off about Petra’s friend Ashley and that mages are irresponsible idiots about their use of magic and the sheer amount of dross they create. It gets old and it drags on in a bunch of little ways that left me a little worried that Three Kinds of Lucky would not actually get an ending of its own.

Similarly, the character development felt fairly strange. Bendict Strom goes from being oblivious to how dangerous his method of rendering dross inert is, and how bad an idea it would be to release it to the public at large after what seems like a bare week at most of non-lab testing, to this trusted love interest who Petra is going to do whatever she has to in order to keep him safe and who believes in her more than anything. Ashley feels so low key vicious about sweepers and having to deal with dross at home in the lead up to the plot that it feels absolutely unbelievable that she worked with Petra for two years, much less shared an apartment with her. And then we have Petra herself, I like Petra in concept, she is this magical cleaner who is excellent at her job and proud of her work. She has co-workers she likes and cares about, but is ever in a sort of haze of frustration at mages for not paying attention to how much dross they create and how snooty they are. Her anger at Strom feels, if not entirely reasonable, earned based on how he acts, how other mages treat her, and what the reader is told about their shared past. But she is a solid person at her core, so her saving Strom makes sense but the falling for him feels unpolished, like a switch was flipped. Her feelings towards her strange and changing powers feel a lot more natural, slower and more fluid with backsteps when something unexpected happened. I enjoyed seeing how Petra’s power developed and how she reacted to it.

Honestly, the whole set up of mages, sweepers, weavers, and mysterious Petra related other is pretty fascinating. There are pat bits, mages looking down on sweepers for not being able to use magic for one thing, but the ideas are at the base quite interesting. We are repeatedly reminded that much more dross is made now than has been in the past, that without dedicated sweeper organizations working pretty constantly there would be enough gathering to draw shadows in, never mind how much trouble it could cause in a modern setting. There are spinners, sweepers who have some degree of magic that makes them more capable of turning dross from a threat to something useful for gathering more dross, and I find myself feeling like going more into them would have helped somewhat in building what Petra is out a bit more, but that could also just be that they feel like a sort of odd job out that I wanted to see more of to try and figure out their niche better. If mages do not respect sweepers for not being able to use magic, then what do they feel about a spinner who can? Likewise, the shadows, dreaded beings drawn to overabundances of dross, dangerous to anyone who gets too close to them, but also more. The nature of them is forgotten by design but the design feels incomplete, too simple in some ways and too much like a commentary on the upper one percent in other ways. It is fascinating but clumsy in ways that it feels like Harrison could go further into.

Three Kinds of Lucky feels very like a book from about eight years ago when urban fantasy and supernatural romance got cross shelved quite a lot. The characters are solid enough to function, and function well in some places, but have absolutely locked in types that will be hammered in. The magic system is fascinating in concept but feels like more could be done with the workings of it on page. Likewise for the setting and magic society. Harrison is clearly a practiced and talented writer, but the book is very much the start of a series and has the stutters that can come with that. So, for all my complaints, I find myself wanting to see what comes next and feeling like the next book is likely to have a lot of the expansions I was hoping for here and that it might move a bit faster now that things are set up. Frustrating and fascinating by turns, I feel like Three Kinds of Lucky earns a three out of five and look forward to the next one.