Wormwood Mire
by Judith Rossell
Wormwood Mire is the second part of the Stella Montgomery Intrigue. In this one Stella is sent by her aunts to an old family house to study and live with her cousins. I'm not certain why she was sent to live with them for such a short period of time, but apparently it was necessary in the world of the book for some unexplained reason, presumably beyond just the aunts' desire to rid themselves of their troublesome orphaned niece Stella.
The book is interesting and continues Stella's search for information about herself, but there is no resolution to Stella's search in this installment of the story. The lack of resolution is both interesting and frustration. It absolutely means that the reader has to read all three books in the series. Many other series I read are written such that each installment has a self-contained element, so that if you read only that book, there is a sense of resolution of the plot, and any cliffhangers are secondary to the main plot of the story of that book. With the Stella Montgomery Intrigues, the orverarching plot is the main plot and the individual installment plots are the sub-plots to the books. This is somewhat unsatisfying and frustrating for the reader. I'm lucky enough to have all three books in the series, but many other readers may not be in that position and the struggle to find the other books may put them off reading this series, or in fact other series by this author.
Overall, Wormwood Mire was an interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying intrigue. The colored print in the copy I have was nice, but on the whole this installment in the Intrigues was not as much fun as the previous one. Anya was a great character and as a reader I would have preferred to get to know her more, she reminded me a great deal of Lyra Belacqua's dæmon Pantalamion, who was my favorite character in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. The other characters were interesting, but extremely secondary to Stella. There is no question this series is Stella's story and other characters are only there to assist Stella in her search, which leaves them to be a bit one-dimmensional.
One Bear's Opinion: Three cups of hot chocolate with some toast and jam
Happy Reading Everyone,
Oliver
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