Pacific Fire by Greg Van Eekhout

I really enjoyed California Bones, I felt I knew the characters, enjoyed them and was ready for a sequel with an equally dark and satisfying crunch. We pick up some ten to fifteen years on and sadly I felt something could have been made of that missing time as I really felt little connection between this book and the last in terms of flow and continuity.

Daniel has a golem of the previous Hierarch, called Sam, who he has raised like he would his own son but Sam’s powers don’t seem to be growing at the expected rate due to his inability to store enough magic in his system. Daniel is now the parent and not the vengeful teen and though he is doing his best we don’t know to what extent his own magical properties are clouding his decisions or how the last decade has made him change. There is a sense of a real relationship between these two but the surface is only barely scratched and considering the openings to explore this father/son/I ate your dad’s heart thing they have going on, a bit of an opportunity was lost.

Daniel takes it upon himself to attempt to stop Otis rebuilding a living Pacific Firedrake that would be incredibly powerful and this is the crux of his plot. On the way he encounters some of his old friends and puts together a plan for destroying the magical monstrosity involving other Osteomancers and some fierce poison that that might be able to melt the beasties hide.

Despite initial intentions, Sam, as far as I can tell, is on a journey to do the same thing and winds up with another Golem called Emma or Em, who is one of many Emmas, kind of like Nurse Joy from the Pokemon series. They all look alike but this one has chosen to be a bit different and separate from the hive mind mentality they seem to have. She kicks a great deal of ass and holds her own with lines like “I throw like a girl…and by that I mean with strength and accuracy” and then proceeds to absolutely bean three guys. She is actually one of the strongest characters in the book, and reveals much through small intimate goings on, showing that when Greg does dig deep into a character he comes up with the goods. I wish we got more of that.

There were a few interesting scenes in the build up to the big bang and when it happens things do go pretty apeshit though it is all over pretty quickly. There are some nice revelations, plot twists and one or two huge actions scenes but there are also answers to questions I had not yet asked and this harks back to my earlier comments about just scratching the surface in terms of the plot and character development.

Overall it was a decent book but not a great one. I am willing to concede it probably lost half a star because I read it on a e-book and I kept picking it up and putting it down over and over again. I will say that I am more invested in where the third book will take us than I was during most of this book so despite being not everything it could have been, it does make me want to read on, maybe to see some of those characters developed further and some subplots given their due weight in terms of page time.

My final thought. I did not like the use of the character Sofia Bautista. To create a someone, make her really lovable, show that her kids depend on her and her husband loves her so much he would die to protect her and will kill to avenge her and then simply kill her off as the pilot in a plane crash annoyed me. She had very little time with the readers so felt overly manipulative and cheap and was tottered out every time emotional weight needed to be added to a scene.

3 Stars

This book was provided to me by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review