Review: Second Chance

Second Chance by Heather Brewer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this middle installment of The Slayer Chronicles - it wasn't going to be the very middle, but then Brewer shortened the series from five books to three - we pick up Joss McMillan's story once again about a year after First Kill, in the heart of another summer of slayage. This time around, though, Joss has a ton of baggage to take with him, and not the actual luggage kind - I'm talking emotional. The events of Ninth Grade Slays have come and gone, his friendship with Vlad and even his cousin Henry is over (for now), and the Slayers have him under what is basically the Doom of Damocles - hence this book's title - because of his having accepted an unofficial job from D'Ablo, which kick-started his presence in Bathory in Slays.

So what's a fourteen-year-old vaguely Johnny Depp-looking Slayer dude to do? Why, help the Slayer Society take on an apparent vampiric serial killer in New York. Along the way, he solidifies some friendships among the Slayers (though it's clear that they're all substitutes for the loving family ties he no longer really has), plays tourist while searching for Em (and visits Obscura, which always gives me a chuckle because I used to watch Oddities on the Science Channel from time to time), visits V Bar (and does NOT partake of the house red - and holy Lord, I forgot how much the V Bar secretly influenced some of my own work on a vampire-themed Gravity Falls fanfic), and occasionally sees the mysterious Dorian (a favorite of mine and August Graves' for a reason.)

Still, though, Joss is that most complex of Z Brewer creations, and even when he makes bad and/or boneheaded decisions, you still can't help but wish you could hug some sense into him.

One more Slayer Chronicles book left...these books are really short, it's true, but they're pretty rich for it. And size ain't everything. Look at the book I read before this one - 500 pages, and I didn't enjoy most of them. This one? 275 pages or so, and they were damn good ones. (Because they're Z's pages, of course.)

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