Discount Armageddon

I've dabbled in a lot of Seanan McGuire's work over the years. She's incredibly prolific, and I read and enjoy her blog. I mostly like the books of hers that I've read, though I tend to get a bit nitpicky about them. But I think I've finally found something of hers that I'm going to fall in love with.

Discount Armageddon is the first book in her Incryptid series, which follows a family of cryptozoologists straddling the thin line between protecting humans from cryptids and cryptids from humans. They exist in a grey area in a world that insists these matters are black and white. The first book follows middle daughter, Verity Price, who is spending a year in Manhattan to study the locals and figure out what she actually wants to do with her life.

Verity filled a Buffy-shaped hole in my heart that I hadn't even known was there. I didn't realize how much I missed that wit and snark, that endless training that leads to exhilarating fight scenes, that reliance on her family for the book-based research, the push and pull between the supernatural world and a more mundane life. Throw in a forbidden romance with someone who looks like an enemy but maybe isn't, and it almost feels like this book was written specifically for me (and the millions of other girls who grew up asking themselves "What would Buffy do?")

All this to say that I'm hooked. From Verity's very first quip to her frustration when her dance audition gets ruined to her determination to save the city from a dragon (!) and the snake cult that's trying to wake him up I was all in. I'm so glad that there's a lengthy series of books following this one (no joke, I ordered the next two when I was barely 100 pages into this one, I was so excited).

This isn't a series I'm going to be rational about. This is a series I expect to love deeply. I can't wait to meet more of the Price family and see more monsters. But mostly I want to watch Verity kick butt in a cute outfit with a wisecrack on her lips.

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