Review – Dark Descendant

Dark Descendant (Nikki Glass #1)

by Jenna Black (Pocket Books May 2011)

I really enjoyed this book.  For a while I was thinking of it as Camp Half blood for adults, but there is a ton more to it.

From the first sentence “My entire world shattered on a cold, rainy, miserable night in early December.” things are dramatic and life shaking with the potential for some major earth-shaking.  Nikki Glass finds out there is more to her heritage than she thought, she is a descendant of Artemis and the other descendants of all sorts gods want her on their team.  I loved that we weren’t restricted to any pantheon of gods, but instead any and all are free game.

Nikki falls into a bunch of crazy and spends the whole book figuring out what to do, who to trust and how to get them to trust her.  It is even more interesting because Nikki has some hang-ups from bouncing around the foster care system as a kid.  Things like trust issues, fitting in, caring about people and all that good stuff, she has to figure it all out now.

Jenna Black is super readable and I flew through the story. I didn’t find a lot of quotes that blew me away though, but I really didn’t want to put the book down.  There is internal strife, a lot of revenge and evil meanie stuff.  Lessons are gruesome things and immortality is a LONG time when you fall in with the wrong people. Nikki learns, figures things out and even though she walks into some scary situations, she is smart about things and doesn’t rush stupidly into danger.  Was kind of nice.

There is no romance in this book but there are some super minor hints at something possible in the next few books.  Certainly not an easy match but I suppose that could make things fascinating as well.  There were some off-putting things as well, she calls magic “woo woo” and that always sounds funny, I think it got me to use that in writing recently too which is kind of embarrassing.  Also, their world-building backstory is great, but a character learns some stuff and rolled with the story without any disbelief.  Made the story move forward but I remember thinking, “Yea right!”

Enough happened in this book to keep the action up, but a hornet’s nest has been stirred and some trouble is on its way. I am interested in seeing where Black takes this storyline. I will be tracking down the next book, Deadly Descendant pretty quickly. 4 stars shooting like lightning bolts from Zeus.