Scourged Review

Title: Scourged
Author: Kevin Hearne
Date Purchased: 10/28/2019
Price Paid: $8.47
Date Finished: 10/5/2021
Rating: 3/5

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again before this project is done: the genres of books that I read tend to be trilogies, sagas, series, etc. It’s rarely a standalone novel. This can present some challenges for the reader, and Scourged falls prey to one of these problems.

I first found the Iron Druid Chronicles thanks to my friend Daniel, and read the first few books back in 2015. Urban fantasy has always tickled a soft spot for me, and this one was pretty decent so I kept up with the series. Over the next year or so I was able to devour the first seven books, and picked up the eighth as soon as it came out. This was, for all intents and purposes, a pretty short time span so it was easy for me to keep up with the story.

The problem is that this book, number nine (and the final book), didn’t come out until 2018. So there was a two year gap between numbers eight and nine…which turned into a five year gap when I didn’t get off my ass and read the thing as soon as I picked it up.

As a result, I was pretty lost at first. Hearne does an admirable job with bringing the reader up to speed on things at the onset, but this was the culmination of sizable series and without the prior knowledge being fresh in my brain I had to do a lot of mental scrabbling to remember the overall plot.

While I do realize this is solidly a “me” problem, it really cut into my enjoyment of the book as whole. I felt quite removed from the story and really didn’t have the buy-in I would have if this had been read right after the previous books. It was a decent book, and Hearne definitely doesn’t take the easy way out with some of the stories that he’s set in motion, but I was just a bit checked out.

Final Thoughts: I may go back and read this series as a whole unit – I think that would improve things.