Lately, I’ve been binge-reading neural fluff and mind candy, thanks to Kindle Unlimited’s vast supply of urban fantasy. Most recently, I blitzed through Michael Anderle’s How to be a Badass Witch series, followed by the just-released How to be a Badass Vigilante that kicks off what is presumably the next trilogy.
The books are promising. Kera discovers a book by the same name as the title, in part to get her mother off her back about wasting her education and life as a bartender. It’s not long before she discovers that the powers described are real. While she’s determining how her new skills can help people, she starts eating quite a bit as there’s an energy cost to her actions. She also brings down the wrath of local gangs.
The gang warfare is a touch that adds unexpected complexity to the series, especially as there are multiple competing gangs with different perspectives and styles. However, Kera’s predominant cost to her actions is a ridiculous appetite. It’s seldom that a reader feels she’s ever really in danger from her vigilante actions, because she’s able to to fend off increasing amounts of bad guys. Although she also takes up martial arts again and combines her fighting skills with magic, the tension is perhaps not quite as strong as it could be.
That said, the knowledge the good guys will win and the main character won’t get seriously hurt makes this a fun popcorn read. Not by physical violence, anyway, not really. Kera increasingly feels the threat of the group who put out the book – a group of mages who are looking for the perfect recruits, and wipe out powers upon signs of individuality or resistance. That’s sufficiently terrifying tension for me! The short-term solution here that gets the mage group to leave Kera alone feels a little convenient, but it’s well done and (more importantly) works.
I do think Kera’s personal choices about mind-wiping others with a forgetfulness spell should make her feel more personable, but don’t. It comes off as power-tripping rather than prone to human judgment. I’m not convinced she’s as regretful or repentant as she should be. Perhaps that’s my own personal abhorrence at the idea coming into play – and that means the author is doing his job by evoking emotion – but her love interest has less repulsion than anticipated as well. The last book also has some humbling of the mage group, which is comes just in time.
Overall, I enjoyed the Badass Witch trilogy, easily titled Books 1, 2, and 3. The Vigilante book felt like a transition, but ended on a sufficiently exciting note that I’m looking forward to the next two books.
