Review: ‘Eye of the Storm’ by Emmie Mears

Earth teeters on the edge of a razor sharp blade.

With the Summit on barely-unified tenterhooks and hellkin bubbling into Earth with no sun to stop them, Ayala Storme has her hard-won family, an uncertain new love, and a team of allies — half of whom have betrayed her in the past.

When the cities of North America begin to fall to demon hordes, Ayala has to fight her way back into Nashville in a desperate hope to save her city. With the witches trying to find the original source of the imbalance that allows hellkin a tie to Earth and the Mediators ready to draw their swords every time they see a shade, time is ticking away.

The witches are working as fast as they can, but what they find may shake the foundations of everything Ayala has ever known — and the answers needed to salvage what’s left of Earth may only lie beyond Earth itself, in the sixth hell.

The battles are over. It’s time for the war.

Eye of the Storm is the fourth and last book in the Ayala Storme series, which is now one of my favourite urban fantasy/alternate Earth series out there. You can find my reviews of the first three books here, but if you need further convincing, I’ll give you some reasons why you should read the series. (Note: You really do need to read the series — don’t jump in at book four and expect to be able to keep track of all the characters!)

Some minor spoilers for earlier books follow.

Eye of the Storm is, as the blurb makes clear, about the arrival of the demon-induced apocalypse. The beginning felt a little awkward to me, in that I didn’t quite follow the reasons for Ayala and her crew leaving Nashville to go back to their cabin in the woods. (That might have just been because I stayed up past my bedtime several nights in a row and missed some crucial piece of detail.) However, once the action gets going, it really gets going.

I enjoy apocalypse fiction, and Eye of the Storm definitely delivered. There is a lot of emphasis on getting back into the city, on bunkering down and surviving, on attempts to work together even though the Summit is divided on how to deal with Ayala’s allies, the shades.

The witches, led by Gryfflet Ashberry, are trying to work out a spell to help them figure out what it is that allows the demons to create portals to Earth. Ayala isn’t big on the research — like I said in a previous review, she’s more like Buffy than Willow (except that both Ayala and Willow are bisexual, of course). Still, she’s involved enough that we get a sense for how his research is progressing — and once it gets to a certain point, she has to take finding answers into her own hands. By that point I’d already guessed what the big reveal/information would be, but I found what she got up to interesting reading nonetheless!

One big point of difference between this and most end-of-the-world stories is that, although we get a lot of monster-splatting action along the way, the book doesn’t end in a big smack-down fight but with more of a “witches’ ritual and epic speech” vibe. I was actually glad of the difference; it wasn’t that the big fight didn’t happen, just that we only got to see parts of it. And since there wasn’t some giant uber-bad to fight — a dragon to slay or whatever — if we’d seen more of it, it would’ve felt a little … samey?

This entire series is fast paced and full of action, sass, tender romance (though barely any sex), strong friendships and splattery fights. There are some swears if that sort of thing bothers you. If it doesn’t, read Ayala Storme. You won’t regret it.

Review: ‘Any Port in a Storm’ by Emmie Mears

After months of training a budding army of human/demon hybrids, Ayala and Carrick have worked out most of their differences.

Who gets to use the bathroom first in the morning. Who’ll feed the bunny before they go out to make mayhem. Who gets to keep the jeeling claw they found in Forest Hills. You know, the important stuff.

But when Gregor sends them out with their battalion of shades and the mission quickly lands on the wrong side of Ayala’s “don’t kill norms” moral line, she quickly discovers that maybe morality wasn’t the motivator behind Gregor’s pet project — or at least not when money’s involved.

And when a trio of shades starts murdering the populace in Nashville again and targeting places and people significant to Ayala, her desire to help her own comrade shades stay on the good side of the Mediators will place her at their mercy again.

With the Summit fracturing and demons closing in on the city, saving the shades and herself may cost Ayala everything.

This is the sequel to Storm in a Teacup, one of my new favourite urban fantasy series. (You can see my review of the first book here.) It’s fun, past-paced and clever, and Emmie Mears’s voice again doesn’t disappoint. The main character, Ayala, could sass for her country!

Sadly for her, she’s instead stuck killing demons, and trying to avoid getting sucked into the sort of intrigue that inevitably pops up when you have a large group of people working together — even if those people are Mediators, people destined from birth to be unpaid monster-hunters. And political intrigue isn’t the only thing she could be sucked into: the demon-infested swamp that is encroaching on Nashville (where the books are set) and the maws of the demons themselves are also ongoing concerns.

Any Port in a Storm doesn’t stand alone, so if you haven’t read the first book, you’ll be very lost with this one. (Go read the first book. We’ll wait.) It continues some of the plot threads from the first book, introduces some new ones, and continues the meta-plot that is the looming threat of the demons’ overall plan — whatever that turns out to be. There is a conclusion of a sort, but as with the first book some threads are left untied to continue in the next one. (Think of it like a season of Buffy: the monster of the week is more or less dealt with, but the season’s Big Bad soldiers on.)

Any Port in a Storm contains some swearing, but there’s no sex or even kissing. The relationships revolve around friendships and family, which I found a refreshing change; urban fantasy, unlike paranormal romance, isn’t all about the love interest. And although I didn’t mind Mason in the first book, I didn’t ship him and Ayala, so him being gone didn’t bother me so much.

I enjoyed this book enough that I one-clicked the third book in the series, Taken by Storm, and can’t wait to get my teeth stuck into it. If you loved Buffy, you should definitely check out Ayala!

Review: ‘Storm in a Teacup’ by Emmie Mears

Mediator Ayala Storme handles PR by day and kills demons by night. She avoids Mediator luncheons and a fellow Mediator who’s been trying to get in her pants for years. She does her job. She keeps her sword clean and her body count high. But when a rash of disappearances leads her to discover that Nashville’s hellkin are spawning a new race of monster in human hosts, Ayala will be the first line of defense against these day-walking killers.

That is, until one of the creatures saves her life.

Ayala’s new knowledge of the hybrids’ free will challenges everything she’s ever known about her job. Racing the clock while trying to outrun her comrades and enemies alike, she’s not sure who will catch her first…

I got the ebook of Storm in a Teacup last year, and it kicked around on my Kindle for a while, until I began to crave a fresh new urban fantasy. And boy, does this series deliver.

Despite a couple of somewhat cheesy elements (the main character’s surname being one, and the fact she and the other Mediators all have violet eyes being the other), Storm in a Teacup gave a fresh face to the idea of a society of demon hunters in an alternate USA.

The violet eyes indicate that a person is destined to be a Mediator; they are taken from their parents and trained from a young age. The means by which they get their supernatural powers — whether they are inherent, or bestowed during the training via external means — aren’t addressed in the first book, but hopefully will be down the track. One of the side-effects of that power is quite sinister and makes me wonder if the Mediators’ origins are less than pure. The “taking babies from their parents” thing is another sign,  as is the euphemistic name. They don’t really “mediate” anything that we see; they are basically the world’s pest control, trained to slaughter any demons that stick their noses out of hell. And they don’t even get paid for it, which I found even more appalling!

Ayala is a strong female lead who knows what she wants. She has a taste for luxury in the privacy of her own home, and orange hair … although I never pictured her that way due to the book’s cover. (Also, orange and violet? Poor girl!) Far and away my favourite thing about the book was Ayala’s voice. She is clever, sassy and fun, and tells her story in a first-person, conversational and often hilarious style that totally drew me in. I’d recommend this book just for the voice!

As far as the plot goes, it starts out in a fairly conventional “monster hunt” way, with the demons being the usual, icky and irredeemable evil. As the blurb foreshadows, though, the results of the demons’ new project aren’t as black and white as all that, and Ayala is quickly thrown between the rock of her Mediator indoctrination (demons bad) and the hard place that is her moral code (don’t kill the innocent). I saw the main plot twist coming, but was happy to be taken along for the ride.

Although there is a lot of violence, the sex scene is of the “fade to black” sort, making this book a fairly clean read for anyone from their late teens onwards. (I don’t remember there being swearing, but I tend not to notice that as much.) The story resolves itself, so I was left satisfied, but there are enough elements and questions left that I’ll be reading on to find out more about this intriguing world.