A Spoiler Free Review
A snake, a snake
Snaaake! A snaaaake
Oooh, it's a snake
Sorry, couldn't help myself. Had that stuck in my head as the beginning of this review since I started reading this afternoon. Half-Off Ragnarok is filled to bursting with snake cryptids, most of them sapient. It was actually a lot more fun that I had originally thought upon starting my read.
I enjoyed getting to know Alex and the Bakers. Alex isn't nearly as outgoing as Verity, but he definitely knows how to handle himself, so that was good. I find it a little odd that he's as bad a liar as he's made out to be, but we don't really see that, only hear about it from other characters. Angela Baker's probably my favorite of the extended family aside from Sarah and I'm immeasurably glad she's looking after Sarah. I mean, having adopted Sarah in the first place, I would assume that'd be the case, but still... I like her and I'm glad she's around.
Of the other new characters introduced, I definitely loved Chandi right off. Yeah, she's entitled and all, but I like spunky little girls who take no shit and give plenty of it back. I liked Dee from the beginning. Not much to say about her character though, she's there and likeable enough. Shelby though... I really did not like Shelby for the first third of the book. I wrote my initial notes about her right before she was revealed to be a fellow cryptozoologist... she just rubbed me the wrong way with how she treated Alex and her views on relationships. Sorry, but the view of "Any woman in the world will tell you that one date cancelled is too many" is both barf-inducing and patently untrue. Shelby did grow on me some over the course of the book. I like that she's so delighted by cryptids and takes Alex's lead in situations where he clearly knows more than she does. And that's not a sexist thing. It's smart to follow the lead of people who you know, know more than you do.
The story itself was a semi-interesting who-done-it. I always like seeing cultures that don't exactly match up with our own and Half-Off Ragnarok had that in spades. At least three differing cultures (assuming you count the "fringe" gorgons as different than the main ones) on display here, not including the Price/Baker family dynamic. The who-done-it villain, though I won't say who it is, was basically an incel/boomer cross, which, ya know, was fun, I guess. The motivations on them were... yeah, just a lot of anger at everyone and everything and definitely came from the most hinged of minds. Most definitely.
But anyway, Half-Off Ragnarok was surprisingly hard to put down. I'm not sure why I found that surprising, but I do. Seanan McGuire's work has an almost Netflix-like quality to it, in that you just want to keep going and going as long as there are words on a page. It's really no different here and there are less divisions in the narrative than the first two Incryptid books had, so that almost adds to that feeling. I did finish Half-Off Ragnarok in less than a week so... yeah. Pretty dang good.
Favorite Lines
"I'll never understand the human idea that children are invariably more valuable than adults," said Dee. "If you have twenty adults and twenty children, and half of them are going to die, you can't save just the kids. They'd starve to death."
"The world could end, and anything morphologically feline would find a way to take a nap." - Alex Price
"The natural world has a place for everything. It's just that some of those things make me think that Nature isn't very fond of people." - Martin Baker
"Tweed is a lifestyle choice," - Alex Price
"Rules only matter if everyone understands them, agrees to them, and can be trusted not to break them. Bearing those irrefutable facts in mind, rules never matter at all." - Thomas Price
"a sulking sister, rewarded for her efforts, will proceed to push her sulking to ever-greater heights, until an entire platoon of pigeons could perch on her out-thrust lower lip." - Alex Price
"Being smart isn't good enough. You need to be educated, and you need to be open-minded, and you need to remember that what you don't know can most definitely hurt you." - Martin Baker
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