Book: The Shambling Guide to New York City (The Shambling Guides book #1) by Mur Lafferty
Rating: 1 star
Review:
My excitement for this book slowly went out like the air seeping from a balloon with each page that I read.
This just wasn't as good as I hoped it would be. The story follows Zoe Norris desperately looking for both a fresh start and a new job, due to a bad incident involving her former boss at a publishing company in Raleigh, NC. She was now left jobless with depleting funds and looking for work in NYC.
But while she was perusing a very unusual bookstore, she saw a flyer for a job advertising for an up-and-coming publisher, Underground Publishing. The guy who was putting up the flyer just so happened to be the publishing owner, Phillip Rand who pretty much told her despite being qualified, that she was not right for the job.
That didn't stop her since she was so determine (as well as desperate) to get that job no matter what. The owner was finally willing to at least give Zoe an interview which ultimately lead to her finding out the real reason why he initially didn't want to hire her. He's a monster (or coterie as they prefer to go by) and there is a whole community of them throughout the city and not to mention the world.
Truly needing the job, Zoe was hired on as Managing Editor because all the experience she had at her previous job. She quickly needed to learn about the coterie world real fast and she got some help from a strange little older lady Granny Good Mae who was a known monster assassin.
So besides trying to work with the various coterie staff to create a travel guide she needed to figure out why all of a sudden she was being targeted by the company's new Coterie Resources employee (think human resources for monsters). That wasn't the only thing, the zombies were starting to act strange and there was a threat coming to NYC that had a connection to Zoe.
I guess the cover (which I love) and the description fooled me into thinking this was going to be a breezy, campy, horror book. There was only a few moments of humor in this and I was disappointed in the story because it didn't seem to have much of a plot, it was all over the place. The story wandered around with no real purpose except for constantly pointing out that some how there was something special about ordinary Zoe. I found most of the characters to be annoying, boring and useless which very much includes Zoe. The only characters I liked were the water sprite Morgen and the Death Goddess Gwen.
The ending felt rushed with everyone trying to stop this big bad that showed up. As the story went along it started to feel even more like a chore to finish this. The book was poorly written despite having all the material for a good story.
This had so much potential but it fell flat leaving only the small snippets of the travel guide included throughout the book as one of the only bright spots in this utterly charmless, dreary and very predictable book.
My interest in reading the second book has quickly diminished, a part of me still would like to read it only to see if it improves but I'm definitely in no hurry to find out.
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