Entice

November 1, 2010

Jones picks up directly after the end of Captivate (2010), when Zara allowed Astley to kiss her and turn her into a pixie. Being a pixie, never mind Astley's pixie queen, terrifies Zara—but she did it so she can potentially travel to Valhalla and retrieve her maybe-dead boyfriend Nick. The thrust of this third installment is that quest: Find Valhalla, recover Nick. Pixie king Astley helps Zara and loves her; she begins to reciprocate even while pining for Nick at every moment. Unlike most love triangles in the genre, this one's outcome feels refreshingly unpredictable. The small Maine town establishes a curfew and the FBI arrives, but evil pixies still murder teen after teen. Epic war approaches, on earth and in the gods' realm. It's hard to say whether Zara's burning need to find Nick either trumps her earnest desire to protect innocent people from deadly pixies or blends with it—Nick's a critical leader/warrior, after all. Fans of the first two will continue to swoon, enjoying prose that's idiosyncratically casual (Valhalla feels "ungettable") and indulgently, oh-so-teen-like angsty ("Your sigh smells like sorrow"). (Paranormal romance. YA)

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March 1, 2011

Gr 7 Up-Newly turned pixie queen Zara faces a dilemma. She changed from a human in order to rescue her boyfriend from Valhalla, where mythical warriors such as Nick are taken at death to prepare for the upcoming war among the faerie races. However, in order to change to a pixie, Zara bound herself to the pixie king. Astley's moral behavior leads her to question everything she's learned about pixies-are they really all evil? She feels warmly toward him, but cannot allow herself to forget Nick. Meanwhile, she must also face disapproval and hostility from her friends and family, particularly her mother, who was seduced and betrayed by Zara's pixie father. Tensions between rival groups of pixies in the area are mounting, and Zara and her supporters cannot find the route to Valhalla. Two costly failures make it plain that someone is acting in opposition to the group and will stop at nothing to keep them from achieving their goal. This book, a strong successor to Need (2008) and Captivate (2010, both Bloomsbury), is as full of action and romance as those earlier volumes, and readers will want to start with them in order to understand what has already happened to these characters. Zara is a strong and believable heroine, and though the touches of Norse mythology seem superficially imposed on the plot, this series will still hold a great deal of appeal for fans of urban fantasy and paranormal romance.-Misti Tidman, formerly at Boyd County Public Library, Ashland, KY

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