Part-Time Gods by Rachel Aaron
Part-Time Gods (2019) is the second book in Rachel Aaron’s DFZ (DETROIT FREE ZONE) series which is a spin-off of her HEARTSTRIKERS saga. You don’t need to read HEARTSTRIKERS first, but you’ll want to read the first book in the DFZ series, Minimum Wage Magic, before picking up Part-Time Gods.
After successfully solving a mystery and surviving the danger in Minimum Wage Magic, Opal and Nik have decided they work well together, so they’ve teamed up on their cleaning efforts. Each of them is so skillful that, under normal circumstances, they’d be raking it in.
Unfortunately, however, they are currently laboring under a curse set by Opal’s powerful dragon father. He wants Opal to fail so she’ll have to move back to North Korea. His curse ensures that she never succeeds. Thus, as hard as Opal and Nik work, something always goes wrong and they keep earning only about half of what they should be making.
As they try to figure out how to work around the curse, Opal and Nik end up in some pretty shady places in the DFZ and Opal learns that Nik has a mysterious, and apparently violent, history. This is worrisome.
By consulting some experts, including the avatar of the DFZ (who we met in the previous series), Opal is also learning about her own magical abilities, why she’s always been a terrible mage, and what the future of her mage craft might look like.
Part-Time God is another well-paced and entertaining adventure in the DFZ. Fans of the HEARTSTRIKERS series will be glad to meet up with some old friends in this installment. Tali (my daughter) and I still don’t love Opal and Nik like we loved the Heartstrikers, and Opal really annoyed us toward the end of this novel, but we’re still along for the ride. It was fun to watch Opal and Nik try to get around her father’s curse and we really love the audio versions narrated by Emily Woo Zeller. The cover art’s adorable, too.
Actually, Marion, if you search through our site here for my old review of "Blood Freak," you'll see that I…
I think one-and-a-half stars is the lowest rating I've ever seen you give!
Kind of you to say. I certainly like to think so!
BTW, Steve Sterner will be performing at seven films during this upcoming fest: https://filmforum.org/series/clara-bow
As far as I know, Bill, Steve Sterner is the only person who does the live accompaniment to silent movies…