Review by Vicky London
Curse the Dawn is the fourth book in Karen Chance’s Cassie Palmer series. Here’s the cover blurb:
Cassandra Palmer may be the all-powerful Pythia now, but that doesn’t mean people have stopped trying to kill her. Most of the supernatural power players don’t want the independent minded Cassie as chief clairvoyant—and they’ll stop at nothing to see her six feet under.
The Vampire Senate does support Cassie in her position, but their protection comes with a price: an alliance with the sexy master vampire Mircea, who has claimed Cassie as his own.
But even the vampires will have trouble keeping Cassie alive now that the self-styled god Apollo, the source of the Pythia’s power, has it in for her in a big way. To save her life—and the world—Cassie’s going to have to face down her creator once and for all.
Even though I skipped the third book in the series, Embrace the Night, I had no trouble picking up the story in this next installment. The entire series so far has only covered the span of two months. And what a few months it’s been for Cassie. My issue with these books in the past has been the pacing. The action is so frenzied that the story can’t breathe with all of the constant action. Curse the Dawn is a bit better but still full speed ahead.
Cassie is gaining more confidence in her abilities and her relationship with Mircea seems to be headed in a better direction (as long as he doesn’t decide to chain her up in his basement). Which brings me to the main reason why Cassie is not my favorite character. Her lack of common sense drives me absolutely crazy. She pretends not to know how she gets herself into such freaky situations and is ignorant as to the consequences of her actions. Everything always turns out in her favor at the end which is ridiculously fortunate considering how much of a ding-dong she is. Cassie needs to grow up big time and I don’t really see that growth anywhere on the horizon for her.
One pleasant surprise for me in this book was more back story on Pritkin and insight into what makes him tick. He has really developed into an interesting character that I want to now more about. Now that he’s decided not to kill Cassie, it’s kind of endearing that he seems almost half in love with her. I also enjoyed the part in the book where he and Cassie switch bodies and he really took having a female body in stride. I think it was quite clever of the author to have them walk a mile in each others shoes so to speak. Curse the Dawn is solid, straight-up, urban fantasy that I think will appeal to a lot of readers of the genre.
Release Date: April 7, 2009
ISBN-10: 0451412702
ISBN-13: 978-0451412706
Popularity: 5% [?]
Reader Ratings - Click On A Star to Rate This Book:
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
Loading ...
April 8th, 2009 at 6:19 am
I agree with the above. Pritkin is definately the most interesting and well developed character in the book. I find Mircea pretty appalling and Cassie acts incredibly stupid around him which in turn annoys me — I hope she chooses Pritkin when it comes to it. I thought Curse the Dawn wasn’t as good as the third book ‘Embrace the Night’ which is my favourite. But it was still well structured and there were some very nice character moments.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
I agree to Cassie annoys me she still needs to grow up alot. That being said im in LOVE with Pritkins character and although Mircea is okay i think Cassie should ditch him for Pritkin. Mircea just seems to clingy. I liked Curse the Dawn alot and cannot wait until the installment but with all the new characters in the book i just hope that Karen Chance doesn’t forget about the old ones.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
I Loved this book but my favorite from the series was definitely Embrace the Night. If you like Pritkin and like the fact that there is some back story about him here, you really need to read EtN. You will really get to know Pritkin there and the tension between him And Cassie is sizzling at times (although… its not so traightforward as it seems, you need to read it to understand).