Book Review: The Turn by Kim Harrison

I wasn’t sure about this “prequel” trend – suddenly it seems everyone is writing prequels to their established (or even finished) series… I was skeptical, it seemed like such a marketing ploy – a way to revive flagging interest, to bring new readers in and keep tired ones holding on… Still, I really enjoyed the Rachel Morgan series, so when I saw this one on NetGalley, I thought it would be worth a look at least. I’m SO glad I didn’t heed my skepticism – this was a great book, as either a stand-alone OR a way to answer a lot of unanswered questions from the series…

The backdrop of all of the action in the Rachel Morgan Hollows books is The Turn – the moment in history when supernatural creatures came out of the closet, in response to the decimation of the human population after a bioengineered tomato killed off vast swathes of humanity. Information is dropped in, here and there, but the full situation is never really explained. It’s history in the Hollows, and a history everyone knows, so there was never any need to go into detail beyond that needed to set the stage for the contemporary events. This prequel gives the history – and so much more. It is a marvelous stage-setting for the full series, but it also reads as a wholly original, free-standing, story of its own.

The story is well-developed, as are the characters. There are explanatory references scattered throughout: it’s exceedingly cool to learn how Al came into the picture, to get Quen’s background, to get a peek behind the curtain at the world of the elves. But they’re all handled as though this was the first time any of them were encountered. That must be tough to do in a prequel that follows thirteen books and numerous short stories, but Harrison manages it handily. I found myself eager to reread the series, to see how many other back stories I now understood. I haven’t read the books in a while now, and am sure there are questions that I now have answered that are long forgotten over the course of the thousands and thousands of pages of Hollows stories I’ve encountered…

Whether you are new to the Hollows or a native, this is a great story and a heck of an adventure.

My review copy was provided via NetGalley.