Women of the Otherworld by Kelley Armstrong
A Mostly Spoiler Free Overview of the Series
Okie dokie, let's get this started. First off, I am going to attempt to keep spoilers out of this overview. Cannot promise anything, so if you're worried about being spoiled for this *checks notes* 10-ish year old book series, I would maybe stay away. I will definitely be discussing characters who don't appear until later in the series, so there's is that. Probably not going to be discussing events, though, because it's been months since I've read the series and a lot of the specifics have left my brain.
Anyway, Women of the Otherworld/The Otherworld (as it was so cleverly re-titled at some point apparently) is a largely ensemble series. Each book focuses on a different character or set of characters, kind of like a comic book series does. Mainly, we encounter Elena and the Wolf Pack and Paige and the Cabals. However, the end focus is most definitely Savannah Levine, who we see grow up over the course of the series through the eyes of other characters. She interacts with all the main book characters to some degree throughout the series but really comes into her own in the last three novels.
I really enjoyed each of Armstrong's characters. Thought they were fleshed out well, even if some of them took a little longer for me to like than a single book. That said, there were some glaring (or at least I thought they were glaring) issues with things like diversity and the wealth of the characters. I'll start with the wealth thing as I've got less of an issue there and probably less to say about it.
Each of the main characters is, to some degree, independently wealthy. None of them really acts like this is the case, in fact Paige and Lucas have some money issues to begin with that then get swept under the rug by Lucas' father. But yeah, there is definitely a whole thing with the characters all having freelance jobs and yet, no money issues that generally come with those jobs. It does give them a degree of flexibility that I think is helpful to the overall plot and is by no means a detriment to the story. I didn't even really think about it until Waking the Witch, when Savannah just off-hand mentions the money she's got. It's not bad, and not something I think most people are going to think about in terms of their stories, after all, no one really wants to have to interrupt the flow of their story for an 40 hour work week.
The diversity issue. Let's see, there's one main character who's specifically not white, three secondary characters who are specifically not white, and a single, I wanna say tertiary, character who's gay. I didn't really think about it during my first read, but during this second read through, it stuck out to me. Okay, so, you've got Hope, really my least favorite character, who's the main character and is half-Indian and half-demon, oft described as a "Bollywood princess." She's actually pretty under-served as a character, getting both the most boring book and the most annoying book before being relegated to a pregnant plot device (an issue in itself). The secondary characters are Lucas (half-Mexican, half-Spanish), Jeremy (half-Japanese, half-white), and Damon Peltier (African-American). Lucas's heritage is a non-issue aside from his brothers' not being very charitable toward his mother. Jeremy's heritage is also a non-issue except for the odd mention in the main series of his looks and his thing with weird runes. Jeremy's heritage is fleshed out more during a couple of the short stories, one of which involving his father being really racist toward his mother. Damon is the series' sole African-American character and he's dead the entire time. Also in my least favorite book: Living with the Dead. The single gay character is Sean Nast, Savannah's brother, who spends 99% of the series in the closet. There are a couple of other random non-white characters in the series, but they're pretty much tiny blips on the radar. Honestly, the only other one that jumps immediately to mind is Zoe, who is a Japanese vampire living in Toronto. She's barely in the main series and has a couple of short stories in which she stars. Uhm, yeah, not great on that diversity. Again, not really something that I noticed in the first read through, but I've grown since the early 2000s and really noticed it this time.
Alright then, let's move on to some stuff I did like. Jaime Vegas was a revelation this time around. I came to really love her character and would have loved to see more of her. Savannah's whole thing in the last two books about not having magic was interesting, but I'm not really sure the motivation behind robbing her of her powers worked out in the long run. I grew to enjoy Elena and Clay's relationship. It was really rocky and actually quite annoying in Bitten, but smoothed out quite well after that. I was really happy that they didn't become super kid-focused after the twins were born. It's been pointed out to me recently that there's plenty of media portraying women being hyper-focused on their kids because women NEED to be focused on their kids to be fulfilled apparently; Women of the Otherworld is surprisingly devoid of that. There's not even any pressure on any of these women to have kids in the first place, which is nice.
One bit of diversity Women of the Otherworld has in spades is its supernatural races. You've got the bog-standard vampires, werewolves, and witches. You've got angels and demons and then half-demons because demons must have sex if summoned, apparently. (Not really how it works here, if you read the series, but it's enough of a trope that I gotta mention it.) You've got sorcerers and necromancers, which don't often get any sort of appearance in most fantasy novels I've read aside from "another word for magic-user" and "probably evil because messing with the dead is evil." Oh, and ghosts. Can't have necromancers with out ghosts. And I have to mention the clairvoyants... they are my least favorite of Armstrong's supernatural races and featured heavily in my least favorite Women of the Otherworld book so... yeah, not fond of them at all. They exist. Makes a nice change from series that go "Oh yeah, we have these three things and not much else because reasons." I did like the different takes on each "species" though there were some mysteries left as to the origin of witches and how exactly Cassandra became a vampire and how exactly vampires work anyway... but overall, I have no real issues with any of it.
The "villains" of the books were mostly alright, from what I can remember of them. Elena's antagonists were mostly written as very distracted by her being a female werewolf in almost the same way Bella Swan is described in The Twilight Saga. She just smells so good to them, it throws them off. Oh, that and most of Elena's antagonists are ragingly sexist assholes, so it's always fun to "watch" them get the beat down. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, a good chunk of Armstrong's antagonists are quite misogynistic assholes. Creepy af, in one way or another. Tyrone Winsloe was gross, Carlos Cortez is gross, the whole clairvoyant thing was super gross, Jasper Haig is the grossest of them all... Just a lot of gross. I almost liked Leah, for as murderous as she was, she was a nice departure from the grosser antagonists.
I definitely recommend reading the series in order, including the novellas and short stories, if you can. The short stories and novellas really flesh out the world, though they mostly focus on the Wolf Pack, some members of which we don't get to see "on screen/stage" at all in the main series. These are mostly available in a few collections of anthologies with a few available for free on Kelley Armstrong's website. My only issue with the anthologies is the lack of chronological reading order in some of them. They're collected together with other Women of the Otherworld novellas and short stories so I don't understand why they're out of chronological order. This bugs me so much. I know you're not really supposed to read anthologies cover to cover, which is fine, but if they're basically supplemental to a series, put them in chronological order, damnit. There is a list of the series in order over on Wikipedia, if you're interested. Again, highly recommend reading it in order with the short stories and novellas.
That's pretty much all I have to say about Women of the Otherworld/The Otherworld. Let me know what you though of the series in the comments. I haven't talked to anyone about this series (other than to rant to my non-reader boyfriend) nor have I read any reviews, so I'm interested to see what anyone else thinks about it.
