Opinions of a Wolf

Summary:
Miriam Black is on her own once again after sending her truck driver boyfriend to the curb.  She’s taken to periodically messing with fate by killing the killers she sees in her visions of the deaths of the people she touches.  When she gets an offer on Craigslist to read someone’s future death in Florida, it comes at a time when she can’t pass it up, as a recently homeless person.  She heads to Florida figuring she might also tackle the demon of her relationship with her mother. Two birds, one stone.  But Florida ends up being much more than a quick job and a quick visit.

Review:
I snatch up a new Miriam Black book the first chance I get because I so love the prose style of the books (I’m uncertain if Wendig’s other books read similarly, as I haven’t read any), and I also love Miriam as a character very much (I would definitely run the other way if I spotted her on the street at night).  This third entry in the series didn’t disappoint, although I periodically wondered if Miriam’s bad-assness would be sacrificed for character growth.

The urban fantasy world of Miriam Black continues to be slowly fleshed out in this book.  We meet a couple more characters with supernatural abilities, not exactly Miriam’s but similar in that they function in the mind.  We also start to understand what might cause such a thing to happen.  And how Wendig presents this information is beautifully crafted.  It is a part of the story, a wonderful example of showing not telling.

Miriam doesn’t just cause chaos and get away with it, and this book fairly clearly exists to show us that Miriam is not invincible, even if she may sometimes seem it in earlier books.  She’s a tough broad with a mental gift brutally acquired, and she’s trying to figure out how to function and do the right thing in this incredibly fucked up situation where she is battling unknown forces, particularly fate.

The plot forces Miriam to confront two bad specters from her past: an ex lover and her mother.  I was fine with confronting the ex lover, and how it went down made sense.  I was incredibly wary of her confrontations with her mother.  Her mother was established as a fundamentalist abusive ball of shit in the previous books, and I was deeply concerned that Wendig was going to try to either make it seem like it was all in Miriam’s head or offer redemption for her.  And the plot does sometimes dance on the edge of doing one or the other of these.  But the way Miriam reacts to her mother in their confrontations help keep it grounded and realistic that not all mothers are great people.  In one confrontation she tells her mother,

Don’t act surprised that I have this cyanide cocktail in my heart. Like they say on that old dumb-ass drug commercial: I learned it by watching you. (loc 1824)

On the other hand, an awful lot of the plot revolves around Miriam saving her mother from her untimely death at the hands of a kidnapper.  I just have a hard time believing, especially given the vitriol Miriam has felt for her mother this entire time, that she would actually care that much if her mother dies.  I get it that Miriam might very much not want the kidnapper to get away with it, because she hates him and he’s fucking with her, but I don’t think Miriam would actually get misty-eyed at the thought of her mother’s untimely demise.  It felt forced instead of being Miriam.  That said, the plot does manage to stick to its guns enough that Miriam comes out of the situation still seeming like her cyanide-filled self, so I can’t fault it too much for veering that close to the edge.

I would be amiss not to mention the fact that his book establishes the fact that Miriam is bisexual.  Of course, she refuses to use the term herself, and I’m fairly certain no one actually ever calls her bi.  Normally a bi character refusing to call herself bi would drive me batty, but Miriam refusing labels fits 100% into her character.  She doesn’t see the need to label who she fucks and other characters’ attempts to figure her out are met with disgust on her part but that’s how she feels about everything about herself.  Yes, I wish more functional non-cyanide cocktail hearted characters were bi, but I also am pretty darn happy that a character I enjoy so much is bi.  Plus, scenes of Miriam banging a woman were an unexpected utter delight.

The plot does a great job of being both a single book conflict and something that ultimately propels the overarching plot forward, which is exactly what one hopes for from a series book.

The writing style maintains its gritty sharpness that the series has enjoyed from the beginning.  Both the narration and the conversations are a pleasure to read.  Passages like those listed below are peppered throughout the book, accosting the reader with the knowledge that we are in Miriam’s world now.

Meetings are like black holes: they eat up the hours, they suck in the light, they gorge on his productivity. (loc 92)

I’m a certified bad-ass indestructible bitch. The sun tries to burn me, I’ll kick him in his fiery balls. I don’t need no stinking suntan lotion. (loc 2787)

Overall, this book brings most things readers have come to expect from a Miriam Black book.  A gritty female main character with hard-hitting prose and a plot with a touch of the fantastic and grotesque.  Some fans might be a bit disappointed by the direction Miriam’s relationship with her mother goes, but all readers will be pumped by the ending and eagerly anticipating the next entry.  Recommended that fans of the first two books pick this one asap.

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4 out of 5 stars

Length: 384 pages – average but on the longer side

Source: Gift

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Previous Books in Series:
Blackbirds, review
Mockingbird, review