How have I never read an Ilona Andrews book before? Why have I delayed long on picking up one of their books? Where can I find more? These are the questions running through my head as I type this. It is 11:00 pm on a Sunday night. Tomorrow morning my dog will wake me up at 5:30 for a morning walk before I try and get a quick gym workout in, followed by the daily onslaught of questions that comes with teaching 11 year olds. My bedtime was an hour and a half ago, and I probably won’t fall asleep until midnight.
The Inheritance touched something inside me. Not anything particularly deep or meaningful. No, this book touched the ‘holy shit that was so much fun’ part of my brain, which is a part of my reading life that’s been a bit neglected recently. I want more, and I want it now. The rest of the series has not yet been published, which is a grave injustice for which I have no remedy.
Read If: you want popcorn fantasy with a middle-aged mother in focus, badass German Shepherds sounds appealing,
Avoid If: overly tragic backstories piss you off, you want characters to slowly grow in power and skill, you’ve got a phobia of bugs and spiders
Comparable Media: Solo Levelling, Mage Errant, Dungeon Crawler Carl
Elevator Pitch:
Ada is an Assessor. When portals to hostile alien worlds began to open up and humans got magic powers, corporations discovered a lot of money could be made from alien ecologies. The government employs Ada to use her magic powers to identify useful materials in the Breaches and keep the guilds from underpaying taxes on what they collect. When a mission goes wrong and she gets stuck alone in a Breach with nobody but Bear the Dog, she knows survival will be nearly impossible. Thankfully, something super special happens that gives her a fighting chance, and possibly the single most important human being alive. Meanwhile, Elias (the guildmaster for the recent mining expedition) is gathering a team of experts to try and close the Breach as he realizes that the survivors might not be totally honest about everything that happened leading up to the catastrophe.
What Worked for Me:
There’s nothing more American than a character taking a job and justifying it to herself by reciting the healthcare benefits it provides while staring into a yawning void that will probably kill her. This is where we begin in The Inheritance: with a divorced mother risking death so that her kids can get dental care. It’s one hell of an opening sequence, and sets the tone for the whole novel. Ada’s caution towards both the government and the guilds is a recurring theme in her decision making, and I’m excited to see the political tangle get explored more as book 2 will (presumably) take a little bit more time in the real world.
The reading experience of The Inheritance is very smooth. This book took me back to reading Manga under the covers at night. It moves quickly, uses simple language, is highly emotive, has a lot of badass stuff happening, and has just the right amount of humor to keep me going. This was (another) single day read for me, and it was just addictive. There’s not a lot of meaty thematic tie-ins during this book, but it is a phenomenal example of what readable fantasy can be like. It was nostalgic, addictive, and wonderful for a Sunday evening when I wanted to avoid thinking about work the next day.
It’s worth noting that this type of writing is typically reserved for young male protagonists. Shonen Manga, Light Novels, and Progression Fantasy don’t have exclusively male leads, but it’s a damn sight harder to find female protagonists and authors (though Ilona Andrews is a mixed-gender team) in these spaces, and they almost never have middle-aged parents taking center stage. Ada has all the worries and preoccupations that you’d expect from a 40-something mother of two. She’s worried about whether her knees are going to give out while sprinting for the exit, has prepared a ‘Death Folder’ for her kids in the event of her own passing, and spends a decent amount of time thinking about the political ramifications on Earth of her own perilous situation. Even her prep while exiting the hell-portal she got stuck in was ‘I need to let the government know I’m alive as soon as I return to Earth so the guild can’t kill me to keep this quiet,’ and damn if that wasn’t a cool moment to read. Ada relies on life experience and pragmatism to tackle problems, not just the power of friendship.
My big takeaways from this book are that I need to get back into some Shonen Manga, find more books that have this attitude with an older protagonist that I find more relatable, and need to make sure I’m keeping popcorn fantasy on my shelf to read when I need something lighter.
What Didn’t Work For Me
The Romance genre has really burned me on asshole families and seeming lack of connections with the world. It’s a common enough trend in any wish fulfillment genre, since we love being an underdog. However, I had to roll my eyes at just how comically alone Ada is. Both her husband and her mother abandoned her completely with almost no worries. She has no friends (like, none at all), including the parents of her children’s friends. Even her ex-husband’s parents wanted nothing to do with her. It was … a lot. Then I went over the same thing all over again with Elias’s monumentally tragic backstory. At least he has some positive life connections but is similarly free from family ties. The main-character energy in both is massive. I can admit this is part of the charm of a series like this, but I think Andrews laid it on a bit thick during their backstory exposition sections.
Conclusion: Pure, undiluted fun and joy
Marked for Plot 