Here I am with the last installment of the Mayfair Witches series, that I’ve posted previously about these past few weeks. After the decidedly disappointing *Lasher,* how does *Taltos* do to provide a satisfying conclusion to this whole adventure?
Not great. While the makeup of this story did recall back to a lot of what I enjoyed in *Witching Hour,* it doubles down on much of what I found tedious and distracting in *Lasher.*
What I fell in love with in *Witching* was the southern gothic atmosphere, the mystery of the ghost of the witch clan, and most importantly, Rowan and Michael. Their relationship together in spite of all this baggage around them was interesting and inspiring and charismatic. They were a hot power couple that had witch powers. They were challenging! Rowan with her stubbornness and dismissal of Michael’s abilities to help her against Lasher. Michael’s simultaneous devotion to Rowan and baffling decision to have the affair with Mona. After the hell Rowan goes through in her decision to try to take on *Lasher* alone, I was excited to see what they could do together once more, with Rowan being and active character once more and Michael accepting of his own status as a witch. Alongside Mona they all had a love forged through adversity that was their own and unique that I really enjoyed. Rowan’s steadfast claim of Michael to Mona was great, as was her understanding of Mona and what having a child would mean to Michael. It was a love that was all their own, nothing fairytale or conventional. It fit so well with what we know of Mayfair history. That kind of acceptance of the strange and different. The scene of Ashler first meeting them in London, the way he sees them together, intimidated by their power together, and their attractiveness, that was great!
But for most of the adventure, these two powerhouse witches just end up getting lsidelined and oredumped either by the surprise new character Stuart Gordon that we needed to have the Talamasca conspiracy, or by Ashler himself. I just picture these two staring blankly at these narrators for hours. This kind of mid-action narration seems to be a trope of Rice’s writing so far and while the File of the Mayfair Witches was dense in my opinion I found it much more bearable than these other loredumps. Michael needed to read the file to understand Rown and the danger she was in. There was urgency and purpose. Gordon and Ashler, and Julian and Lasher in the previous novel, lack any of that urgency and immediacy. Especially with the languid meandering way they’re written. The way Rowan and Michael are described as being enraptured by Ashler enough to love him and be engrossed in his tale, I felt none of. The pacing of these books has been a challenge to say the least.
Any moment of the relationship between Michael and Rowan made the novel worth reading at the end of the day. As well as the way Mona and Mary Jane interacted with one another. The Mayfairs might perhaps be the most interesting and relevant characters to the story of the Mayfair Witches and it’s odd that the two sequel novels seem to forget that.
I’ll always have the love I developed for these Mayfairs, so it’s sad to know this is just about it for these characters. I think Mona shows up eventually in Vampire Chronicles somehwere but I know that’s a whole big thing to jump into.
I’m left with that kind of sad nostalgia most of you are probably familiar with after finishing a book or series when we have to say goodbye and the lives of the characters go on only in our minds. Any stories that can make me feel that way are worth it. But *Taltos* was more of a relief on completion than satisfaction.
by C_The_Bear