I’m going to try really hard to stay within the bounds of truth rather than hyperbole. But the plain fact is that if I had a list of most irritating books I’ve ever read, The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker would be near the top.

The book picks up right where The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker left off. Percy and her fellow Guards are Victorian soldiers in the fight against evil, and they’ve just defeated Lucy the Gorgon. Percy herself just woke up from a coma, but now everything’s all right and she’s about to marry Professor Alexi Rychman. But random spirits keep popping up to warn them of a coming war.

Plenty more happens, and yet nothing happens. The first 200 pages were stultifyingly, mind-numbingly, anaesthetically boring. We get heaps of various POVs and one-note characterizations – the worst offenders are Percy and Alexi, whose goo-goo eyes and cooing made me want to vomit. The sap flows in abundance and, man, is it nauseating. As if that weren’t bad enough, Percy has to be one of the emptiest heroines I’ve read in a while. She is spineless. She is weak. She clings to the strong manly man.

And lest you think I’m finished, there’s more. The prose is by turns stilted, sloppy, repetitive, lifeless, or all four. Who uses “nil” as an exclamation? And I’m really hoping that Alexi’s “smothering intensity” was intended to be “smoldering intensity”, because otherwise there’s a problem. Maybe this is just Ms. Hieber’s style, so let’s just say it didn’t work for me. And as far as I’m concerned, the title is just a load of pretentious bunk.

But there’s a reason the book isn’t a D, and it’s because something strange happens around page 200. Percy grows a spine. Alexi learns not to be a caveman. The action speeds up. The secondary characters grow in depth. The prose relaxes. And it all comes together. Frankly, it’s way too late for me, but at least I know there’s hope for the author. And to be unequivocally positive, this second volume was easy to understand despite not having read the first book, and the mythology is interesting. The evil POVs are some of the creepiest I’ve ever read, and the author is in her element when she writes those scenes or scenes from one of the main secondary characters (poor Rebecca, you sure got the short straw).

Which is why I found the book so irritating. It made me feel the gamut of emotions, everything except love and hate, and whatever I felt wasn’t indifference, at least. So I’ll keep an open mind. With any luck this is the last book in the series, and if Ms. Hieber makes a fresh start I’d be willing to try her again.