a_cubed | Books – The Weather Warden Series (Reply)

I started re-reading Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden urban fantasy series just before new year. I had the latest (and it turns out, probably last) in the series and I often though not always re-read the entire series with a new book. Since I can’t remember which ones I finished before the new year and which ones after I’m just going to give a qick description of the entire series. Particular now that Total Eclipse appears to be the last in the series, this seems appropriate. These nine books are a nice little urban fantasy series about people with elemental powers to control earth (includes healing), fire (may include electricity) and air/water (weather). The viewpoint character (Joane Baldwin) is an interesting mix of shallow fashionista with a somewhat incongruous love of and knowledge about fast cars. She’s very powerful and goes through a Jack Chalker’s Dancing Gods series of adventures periodically losing some or all of her powers (sometimes along with her memories) but gradually “powering up” to become one of the most powerful humans on the planet. Alongside these humans are the Djinn. Caine does a nice job of taking the arabic djinn myths (including the afrit variants) and building a rationale for the binding of very powerful entities into breakable bottles. Baldwin occasionally does stupid things in the furtherance of the plot and many of the NPCs (human as well as Djinn) are rather overly venal, but the action races along well enough that mostly this can be overlooked. It’s pretty well-written and has a very good sense of continuity given the fairly complex system Caine posits. There’s a romantic sub-thread running through all nine books, but it only descends into masturbatory sex scene descriptions twice or so. To me this series definitely falls into the “urban fantasy with a romance sideline” “rather than the “romance set in an urban fantasy world” genre. Well worth a look if you like light urban fantasy.

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