Another cracking InCryptid adventure. We’re back with Verity and Dominic this time and Verity’s back to dancing. Quite a fun ride with a couple new Cryptid friends in the mix.
I was honestly unprepared for Alice Healy-Price. I figured she’d keep popping up in the series as a long-running family legend/inside joke kind of a deal, but I was unprepared for her to actually show up. I thought the second woman on the cover was Antimony, not Alice. I did really enjoy her, though. Learning the little bits and pieces about her life just adds more to McGuire’s skillful world-building.
Speaking of world-building, we got a bit more about routewitches and other cryptids. I’m still not totally clear on what exactly routewitches deal with, but it’s interesting enough that I want to know more. I also enjoyed the bits about what cryptids were doing in LA before the humans got there. Finding out about the bogeymen, hidebehind, and ghoul city under the city was a shock when revealed but pretty cool upon later reflection. That sounded pretentious, but I’m mot sure how else to put it. Anyway, the world-building was great.
I was glad Dominic had more to this time around. He got to show off his Covenent skills as well as how he’s loosening up now that he’s out.
I’m pretty sure Malena is up for my favorite new character. I like her personality and her Chupacabra-ness is pretty cool. I felt like Pax was just kinda there as a blood-detector. Lyra… she was alright, but really faded into the background for most of the book. Anders had a really abrupt about-face there at the end that was surprising for both Verity and the reader.
The following paragraph contains spoilers.
And this brings me to an element of Chaos Choreography and actually InCryptid overall that I’m not so happy with: the bad guys. The threat of the bad guys looms over the entire plot but they don’t get much play throughout the books themselves. Their reveals are almost last-minute twists. It makes them hard to talk about and hard to feel much about. The only exception to this was Clint’s creepy dance with Verity… every other bad guy was just blah. Jessica was so obviously a bad guy that it was both surprising and not that she actually was. Lamp-shading it didn't make it better.
End spoilers.
Anyway, I thought Chaos Choreography was an overall fun romp. I’m chomping at the bit to go on to Magic for Nothing so I’m gonna go do that.
Favorite Lines
"Turning into a giant snake is never the solution to your problems," I said. "It actually ranks somewhere between 'cut off own hand, replace with chainsaw' and 'summon indestructible dream demon.' Bad plans one and all." - Verity Price
"And lo did the Violent Priestess speak unto the congregation, and she did say, 'Ain't Nothing Wrong with Most People which couldn't be Fixed with a Good Smack Upside the Head,'" - Aeslin Mouse
"Your real friends will love you for who you are, no matter how many heads or limbs or ovipositors you have." - Evelyn Baker
"Coincidence is just another word for an accident that doesn't kill you." - Alice Healy-Price
"HAIL!" rejoiced the mice. "HAIL THE LACK OF STABBING, SHOOTING, AND FLAME."
"Profanity is the universal language." - Verity Price
In Other News
I finished another OviPets Project! Majiramon is based on the Digimon of the same name. I made the tattoo depicting their clothing. Majiramon took me 9 months to complete.
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