Stars: 3.5
These two books encompass the trials of one Verity Price in New York as she tries to balance her ballroom dancing and cryptozoology careers in an effort to make a decision about her future – now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write, I mean: ballroom dancing and cryptozoology?! The author has taken this unusual combination and made it work and viable as giving Verity some anxiety about what her future holds.
Verity comes from a family of cryptozoologists, and she’s in New York to research the incryptid population there and become a successful dancer.
And Cryptid is a noun referring to the things that go bump in the night, the creatures that are part of urban legend and tall tales, but their existence has never been proven.
I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard and been on the edge of my seat at the same time during both these books. The comedy here is laugh-out-loud good, and my advice, be prepared for strange looks on the train to work when you start giggling.
After finishing book 2, I found to my surprise that book three will feature a different character, Alex Price, her brother. But, thinking back on these two books, I realise what I’d been reading was a tightly written character piece, with some comedy and cryptids thrown in for good measure.
Verity, in book 1, is at the beginning of an identity crisis, determined to make her life-long passion of ballroom dancing into a successful career. She’s chafing at the expectations of the history of her family (they’re hiding out in America from the Covenant of St George, the monster hunting fraternity they were once part of) but, before long we see that she’s very good at being a cryptozoologist and saving the day.
To her horror, Dominic De Luca, an agent of the Covenant comes to NY in book 1, to sweep the city to see if it should be purged – that is, should Convenant agents come to clean up the Cryptid population, and yes, purge is just as frightening as it sounds.
Then there’s Sarah, her cuckoo cousin – as in she’s a cousin by adoption and in reality a creature (slang: cuckoo) with immense telepathic power and no conscience to speak of, usually. Sarah, raised with a family, is different.
Three very different characters, but all are figuring out who they are through these two books.
Book 1 is an introduction to these three characters in that we get to see where they are in their lives, and who they’re trying to be. Above I mentioned Verity’s struggle, but Dominic I would argue undergoes a far great change in book 1 – he finds Very (her nickname) and she changes his entire perception of the world according to the Covenant of St George, and it’s the only world he’s known: incryptids are meant to be destroyed. And Very, this infuriating, talented and dangerous woman throws that all out of whack.
By the time book 2 comes around, we see that she has changed him, but when the Covenant sends agents to check up on him, she begins to doubt him. They have not yet defined their relationship and he still calls himself a Covenant agent, so the doubts come for Verity. Dominic is torn between her and the world he knew, and though we do not get to see the depth of his internall struggle, he is enough of a straight-talker in the book, that we see enough. He knows he is struggling with everything he thought was right in the Covenant world, and he knows it’s because of her. But, until he is ready to admit he loves her, he cannot take that final step to her side.
Sarah sort of snuck up on me. In book 1 we see her powers – her telepathy and how hard she works to control them because influencing people is so easy for a creature of her power. In Book 2 though, she gets to narrate a few chapters and we see how brave she can be, despite her desire to not be noticed and that she can wield her more in ways she didn’t even realise when Verity is in danger… but, don’t be mistaken, Sarah is an anomaloy in her species – cuckoos usually killers and are ruthless, and if it’s so easy for her to wreak havoc like she does in this book… what does that say about her? Sarah’s story is the one left unfinished in this book, which makes me think we’ll be returning to her at some point.
The worldbuilding in this book, and the wealth of creatures that appear are, in all honestly, mesmerising. And throw in some modernity with those creatures, their powers and their cryptid quirks and the result is such a spellbinding mix.
The comedy in this series is brilliant, so much so that after laughing, I had to go back to read sections to understand how they fit into the story. It was well worth the strange stares I got on the train!
