The Demon Librarian

This is a bit of a weird one to review. Part of me really, really enjoyed it, the rest of me thought it was kind of silly.Let me try to explain.The things I really liked were the originality of the characters in terms of what they are. There were some great new ideas here- Ms Rowe is clearly a very creative lady and she has written some brilliantly imaginative creatures and beings. Okay, so we've heard of witches before and we've heard of a black widow before, but the four warrior guys in the story and their abilities - they were really interesting. The only way I can think to describe them is as human mutants. They've been tinkered with by the witch who has held them captive for the last century and a half, using Black Magic. The main character we follow in this book, Blaine, is a sort of fire warrior....think of The Human Torch from the Fantastic Four movies and you'll be close.The other thing I really appreciated was the overall plot. It was a great race against time thrill ride with high stakes and a love story that took place along the way. All good stuff.What kind of spoiled it for me, I'm sorry to say, was the writing style. It was written in a sort of conversational tone- only it was like a conversation with someone with really weird speech patterns and a hard to understand accent. I found myself having to do the literary equivalent of lip reading for the first 50 or so pages of the book. She would also miss words off the beginning of sentences and substitute words for slang phrases and I had a hard time trying to understand just what the author was trying to convey at times. Also annoying was the overuse of brackets. It was like (Hello? Use brackets much?) every other paragraph. And the Hello? thing would have been annoying all by itself without drawing a circle around it.Also, she just tried just a little too hard to be funny, to that point that it wasn't. I like humorous books, but it would be better if the humour was limited to the banter and dialogue between characters, rather than the entire prose sounding like some kind of comedy farce. I'm sure some people will appreciate the added humour, and to be fair, it did work in some scenes, but I personally found it was just trying too hard.In summation, I'd say it's still a good book and people that enjoy light-hearted PNR should definitely give it a go. I just think the author could have made something more of her ideas than this type of paranormal comedy romp. I'd love for her to write a straight up paranormal series one day, with her great ideas and creativity it would certainly be worth a look if she did.Originally Reviewed for Urban Fantasy Book Reviewshttp://urbanfantasybookreviews.blogspot.com/