Book Reviews: Shadow Wars and The Demi-Monde: Summer, by Rod Rees
First, a brief explanation. Rees is British, and in Britain, the first three books in the series are called Demi-Monde: Winter, Demi-Monde: Spring, and Demi-Monde: Summer, respectively. What with me being an uncultured American, I read the US versions of the first two books, with the revised titles of The Demi-Monde and Shadow Wars, respectively, before I bought the UK version of the 3rd book because it isn't out in the US yet. For the sake of simplicity, I'm just gonna refer to all of them as the first, second, and third books, and you'll just have to deal with that.
ANYWAY, on to the reviews. If you read these reviews I do regularly, you'll know that I absolutely loved the first book in the series, giving it an 8.5 out of 10 and calling it the best book I'd read in months. I also compared it with Catherine Fisher's Incarceron series, which contained similar themes and started out excellent before jumping the shark halfway through the second book. I had high hopes that Rees would be able to avoid a similar fate, and he did, but it was a close thing.
The trouble with all fantasy/sci-fi is that suspension of disbelief will only take you so far. If you want to make bizarre and fantastical things happen, power to you, but the more bizarre and fantastical they get, the more you have to check your consistency and the rules of your universe to make sure everything is still ok. Fisher didn't do this in Sapphique, and it's one of the reasons I hated that book, and Rees tiptoes pretty close to the line in the second book in this series. (Spoiler alert, ho) I mean, the book is about a futuristic computer simulation, and yet, smack in the beginning of the second book, Rees hits you with vampires. At that point, I buried my head in my hands and began to weep softly at such a promising series being cut down so early. (End spoilers) However, having walked the series to the very precipice of lunacy, Rees then spends the rest of the book getting back to what made the first one so good.
Recall from my first review that what I loved most about the first book in the series was the hyperrealistic immersion of the DemiMonde itself. It was well written, that's where all the interesting things and people were, and it was great. In the second book, Rees shunts all of that great stuff off to the side and writes entirely too much about the real world, and his real world stuff is much less interesting. By the end of the second book, he'd more or less found his stride again though, and so I suspended judgement on the series. I would read the third book before deciding whether the series was one that I recommend to all my friends or simply one that I just enjoy by myself.
And thank god, Rees came through with the third book. While not quite on the level of the second book, he gets back to sticking to the happenings of the virtual world and continues to flesh out and introduce new and interesting characters. Character development abounds, as do plot twists, and while I hesitate to say too much for fear of spoilers, the ending of the third book is damn impressive.
Summing everything up, I give the second book somewhere in the 6.5-7 range, with the third one scoring a solid 8/10. I'm super hyped for the fourth and final book in the series, which is unfortunately not out yet, but the series stays on my solid recommendation lists. Buy them, children. Buy them all
