Review: Carpe Demon by Julie Kenner

I’m way behind on book reviews, so I’ll try to do one each day for a bit. Empha­sis on the try. I’ve read some great stuff late­ly that deserves the attention!

I’ll start with the most recent book, Carpe Demon by Julie Ken­ner. It’s the first book of the Demon-Hunt­ing Soc­cer Mom series. I don’t actu­al­ly remem­ber any soc­cer games, but yep, Kate Con­nor is def­i­nite­ly a soc­cer mom in the sense that Clin­ton used the phrase.

I can’t remem­ber if it was Michelle Sagara West or Tanya Huff who said it, but either way, I agree with her that the best way to sum up this series is to imag­ine that Buffy the Vam­pire Slay­er grew up, got mar­ried, and had kids, but did­n’t tell her fam­i­ly any­thing about her past. Kate works for the Vat­i­can instead of the Watcher’s Coun­cil, has an Ali­men­ta­tore rather than a Watch­er, and isn’t the Cho­sen One—there are sup­posed to be many demon hunters. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the youth of today aren’t as easy to recruit, accord­ing to the Church, and an old demon hunter is usu­al­ly a dead demon hunter.

Kate and her part­ner, Eric, had retired and moved to a place they iden­ti­fied as hav­ing very lit­tle demon activ­i­ty. They had a child, and after Eric died (we don’t learn how in this vol­ume), Kate remar­ried. Stu­art Con­nor is an attor­ney with polit­i­cal ambi­tion. Remem­ber how Sab­ri­na had so much trou­ble pre­tend­ing to be a nor­mal exec­u­tive’s wife in Bewitched? Take it up sev­er­al notch­es, and you know where some of the book’s humor comes from. The nov­el is def­i­nite­ly a nice depar­ture from the para­nor­mal romances that have a lot more romance than action, although I have yet to fig­ure out why Kate would ever have set­tled for Stu­art. And yes, I’d have to say she set­tled.¹Of course, so did Sabrina.

I’ve put the next two books, Cal­i­for­nia Demon and Demons are For­ev­er, on my wish list. I’m look­ing for­ward to find­ing out how Ken­ner devel­ops the char­ac­ters, and whether Kate starts fill­ing her kids’ water bot­tles with holy water (I would). I’m not a big enough fan to put the rest of her books on the pile, but I haven’t ruled it out yet.