Review: Kitty and the Midnight Hour, Carrie Vaughn

From the back cover:

“Kitty Norville is a midnight-shift DJ for a Denver radio station – and a werewolf in the closet.  Sick of lame song requests, she accidentally starts ‘The Midnight Hour’, a late-night advice show for the supernaturally disadvantaged.

After desperate vampires, werewolves, and witches across the country begin calling in to share their woes, her new show is a raging success.  But it’s Kitty who can use some help.  With one sexy werewolf-hunter and a few homicidal undead on her tail, Kitty may have bitten off more than she can chew …”

This is the first in the Kitty Norville series of urban fantasy books.  I wasn’t really sure what to expect from it.  I wouldn’t consider urban fantasy to be my genre exactly, but I really enjoy fantasy in general and thought I’d give them a shot.  I was really pleased that I enjoyed this book so much.  A great deal of it is set-up for the rest of the series.  In the beginning, Kitty is very submissive and the “cub” of her pack.  She does a lot of cowering around Carl, the alpha male.  I was a little disturbed to realize that this also included sleeping with him whenever he wanted, but it makes sense if half of the time the werewolves think in a wolf mentality and luckily, this isn’t a focus of the book at all.  

It made me feel uncomfortable to have such a weak heroine at first.  I was worried that I wouldn’t like Kitty and it would be difficult to fully enjoy books about a werewolf I didn’t even like.  Fairly quickly, though, with the help of her radio show, Kitty starts to discover her own identity and better link her werewolf and human sides.  She comes into her own, and that’s really what this book is about.  This book centers on learning about the world, getting acquainted with Kitty and her supporting crew, and setting up future conflicts.  

The plot was not as interesting and after the radio show got started, I wondered where it was going for about a hundred pages.  There are a few murders going on and it gets exciting towards the end, but I definitely feel that this was set-up, although executed particularly well.  In this case, since I know the series goes on for five more books and probably more, I don’t mind at all, particularly since I enjoyed the book and didn’t want to put it down.  I’m thinking about getting more into this urban fantasy genre, starting now with the rest of the Kitty Norville books.

Buy Kitty and the Midnight Hour on Amazon.