JacobsBeloved: Review: Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs

Friday, July 9, 2010

Review: Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs

Book Details:
Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson, Book 5)
by Patricia Briggs
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Published April 2010, Penguin Group
Hardback, 342 pages
ISBN: 9780441018192

Synopsis:

When mechanic and shapeshifter Mercy Thompson attempts to return a powerful Fae book she'd previously borrowed in an act of desperation, she finds the bookstore locked up and closed down.
It seems the book contains secret knowledge-and the Fae will do just about anything to keep it out of the wrong hands. And if that doesn't take enough of Mercy's attention, her friend Samuel is struggling with his wolf side-leaving Mercy to cover for him, lest his own father declare Sam's life forfeit.
All in all, Mercy has had better days. And if she isn't careful, she might not have many more to live...

This plotline delved more deeply into the interplay between wolf and man in the werewolf, which is interesting since Mercy does not have that issue with becoming a coyote. It also explored the way that being connected to a pack could either help you or hurt you. The complexities and interplays were fascinating, especially since Mercy had to learn to fight only "in the mind." It kind of validates being intelligent as a viable form of defense. What I did find annoying was when Sylvia and her brood would use Spanish to communicate, and their words were not translated. I studied French in high school, folks, not Spanish. It's poor form to put a foreign language in your book and not at least roughly translate it. Moving on.
I thought the way that the fairy queen operated was, put simply, stupid. She got so many basic things wrong that it did not even make sense that she was even living in the modern world. For instance, she really should have thought of the capabilities of cell phones. As "bad guys" go, she was rather pathetic, and even Bran, the Marrok agreed with me, calling her "stupid fairy queen." I loved that the fight against the fairy queen brought a past love of Samuel's to the forefront, thus giving him a reason to want to live, as well as giving me a different female character to root for. I'm also hoping that Ariana will stick around in future books.
This was not my favorite book in the series, despite centering around an actual book in the plot, as well as showing a bit more "bonding" between Adam and Mercy. The climax seemed less "climactic" than normal, thanks to a less believeable villian, but there was lots for me to like about this book despite what it lacked.

The Cover: I like this cover the most out of the series - and why not - she's holding a book! There are also stacks of cobwebby books on either side of her, which refer to the glamour over the abandoned bookstore. I sure wish one of these books would explain the obsession with tattoos that grace every cover of the series, since only briefly is a single tattoo referenced in the entire series.

First Line: "The starter complained as it turned over the old Buick's heavy engine."
This is a nice segway into Mercy's day job as a mechanic, but it is still rather mundane and gives no introduction into the actual plot of this novel in the series.

Favorite Quote: "I knew he would never leave me, never let me down-because the man had never abandoned anything in his long life. If I hadn’t taken the gold rope of our bond, I knew Adam would have sat on me and hog-tied me with it. I liked that. A lot."