Review: Sweet Shadows

SWEET SHADOWS (Medusa Girls #2)

Tera Lynn Childs
Paranormal Young Adult
328 pages
Katherine Tegen Books
Available Now
Received from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)

Three teenage descendants of Medusa, now united, must claim their heritage to fight the monsters escaped from the abyss.

Gretchen may have known she was a descendant of Medusa long before her sisters--after all, she's spent her life fighting the monsters that escape the abyss--but that doesn't mean it will be easy to teach the other girls the ropes.

Greer has pressing social commitments on her plate and precious little time to train in her newfound powers. But that wretched second sight won't leave her alone, and her fabled heritage seems to be creeping into her fashionable life.

Grace has worries closer to home--like why her brother, Thane, has disappeared. He's hiding something. Could it possibly be related to the secret heritage the triplets share?

MY THOUGHTS 

The second book in a trilogy featuring the triplet descendents of the Gorgon Medusa, Sweet Shadows picks up seconds before the action-packed concluding pages of Sweet Venom, thereby yanking us back into Greer, Gretchen, and Grace’s world with thankfully little preamble. Once Ms. Childs ensures she has our undivided attention, she then oh-so briefly recaps a few of the more important revelations of book one, giving us just enough information to jog our memories without weighing us down with unrelenting repetition. Though this second installment starts strong and is an easy, flowing read, it doesn’t necessarily incite a frantic need in us to devour it’s pages, instead we’re able to read it leisurely and at times set it aside, the desirable sense of urgency we feel with some other books notably absent.

One of the more interesting aspects of the series is the multiple point of views we’re privy to, with Greer, Gretchen, and Grace so vastly different in personality as well as their approach to the monster-fighting destiny they share that we can’t help but be grateful for the amount of time we spend with each of them. There’s never any question as to which sister were with at any given time, and Ms. Childs successfully makes sure that each point of view feels vital to the story, with no sister a superfluous addition to the overall story. Our emotional attachment to each young woman is a bit weaker than we might wish at times, as the desire to see them succeed as a group is far stronger than our connection to any of the three individually. We know each girl—her point of view familiar and comfortable to us—but we don’t know them intimately, instead we are more strict observers than friends or confidantes, and the feeling that they are an indispensable and imperative part of our lives remains elusive.

My complaint with the romance in book one carries over to this second installment as well, the presence of Milo as a love interest for Grace seeming unnecessary to the overall story. Nick’s presence and his relationship with Gretchen is significantly expanded however, changing Nick from a question mark into a vital piece of the supernatural puzzle, but it also reinforces Milo’s apparent extraneousness to the girls’ mission as a whole. Sweet Shadows is an enjoyable read despite those few drawbacks though, and it concludes much the same way as its predecessor with the girls surrounded by violence and seemingly at the mercy of fate to have us itching for the next book.

Rating: 3.5/5