One of my favourite stories ever. Manages adventure and intrigue without ever denigrating the life knowledge of a bunch of teenagers. ( )

One of the evil Chapel Hollow brats improves and grows up enough to appear in this YA coming of age novel. Kim is an artist with amazing visual perception. After a best friend gone bad experience in high school, she's been suffering a debilitating depression. Getting away to college and meeting Jaimie who can bring in powers that sense that something is attacking Kim is the start of the short novel - perhaps a little predictable and wish-fulfilling, but very enjoyable. ( )

An engaging urban fantasy for young adults, in which two young women meet as roommates their freshman year of college, and are transformed by their friendship, and the adventures they share. Kim Calloway, a young woman consumed by uncontrollable bouts of depression, hopes to escape her troubles by immersing herself in her college experience. Her new roommate, Jaime Locke, wants to learn about "normal" people, and is venturing outside her insular magical community for the first time. When the two learn that Kim's emotional distress is being caused by a creature known as a viri - a sort of emotional vampire - the two roommates, joined by Rugee (a household god) and two of Jaime's ilmonishti cousins, set out to defeat it...

Long-time Nina Kiriki Hoffman fans will be pleased by the author's return to the magical world of Chapel Hollow, which she introduced in her marvelous adult fantasy, The Thread That Binds the Bones, and in which Jaime play a minor role. But those who are reading Hoffman for the first time need not worry - this book stands quite well on its own. I found Hoffman's world intriguing, and will probably go back and read some of her earlier work. The writing was generally of a high quality, with occasional flashes of brilliance. The author's description of Kim's artistic process at the beginning of the novel, the interplay of image and word, and how the two function as competing languages, is simply beautiful. ( )

That is excellent. It's not _quite_ as good as The Thread That Binds The Bones, but in that class, as few books are. Much better than the middle book of the series. And now I have to read Thread again to figure out who Jaime was - this one is her story, or hers and Kim's. It's alternate chapters of Jaime Locke, of the Binder kin, and Kim Harrison, who isn't magic at all - at least, not in the conventional sense. However, she's beset by an addicted emotional vampire. The Binders and a sane vampire help her deal with it - and all kinds of new things open up. Even more than Tom, I'd like to see Kim's future adventures! This is the sort of story that makes me love Nina Kiriki Hoffman. ( )

Great concept, lackluster execution. It wasn't horrible, it was just utterly boring. I was going to give it 3 stars, but when it came down to it, I didn't "like it", it "was ok", which is what the stars say when you hover over them. :)The story takes place over 2-3 days, and we are supposed to just believe that these strangers all care so much about each other and will be lifelong friends, while never seeing anything to support these instant friendships. Lots of telling, little showing.But most importantly for me, the character development was sorely lacking. These kids felt like robots--there was nothing that made me care about a single one of them, and I actually found myself wondering on more than one occasion why they cared about each other. And there were many instances of someone saying something that was so stupid & dorky, no teenager would ever say it to someone he knew for 2 days, let alone 2 months. And the added "first week at college" backstory--so stupid. Here is this girl being pursued & attacked by something that feeds off her emotions and particularly likes her depressed emotions and has the ability to make her horribly depressed from a distance, so she's a sobbing idiot who just falls to her knees with no warning. But she is adamant about not missing freshman orientation. Whatever. Just dumb and forced. Ooh, the college experience.I didn't care about who hooked up with who, in fact, I found myself again questioning the attraction. The boys were boring & stupid automatons, even more than the girls.So, it wasn't bad enough to not finish, but I had less than 20 pages left and fell asleep reading it. Make of that what you will. ( )