My Familiar Stranger by Victoria Danann

 

My Familiar Stranger by Victoria Danann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I wasn't quite sure about liking this book. Elora Laiken travelling to another dimension was cool, and I love me some warriors. But this seemed to be a more typical romantic triangle. Well, at least until the action started, and it turned out that Elora was more than able to hold her own against the big guys of Black Swan. There's potential, and I'm enjoying the interaction between the characters. So we'll see.

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I first read this book set back in 2014, and decided to revisit it as part of my quarantine comfort-reading foray. That turned out to be a very good idea.

While I was non-committal in my initial review and first reading, unlike most other books I read in the intervening time, I had flashes of this series come back to me without me having looked at the pages again. That makes it part of my comfort list - not least because every flash of memory was accompanied by a tiny twinge of happiness.

This is quite the combo of urban fantasy (yes, there are vampire and werewolves), sci-fi (inter-dimensional travel), paranormal (that comes later in the series, so I won't add spoilers, but there's definitely magic involved) and butt-loads of action (not just from the alpha males, either). There are berserkers, elves (and their hated enemies, the fae) and, of course, humans, in a world that's familiar but also just different enough from our own to be somewhat off for our heroine, Elora Laiken, who's thrust into a device best described as a cross between a tumbledryer and an iron maiden, crossing dimensions before arriving in our world as a battered, barely human mess.

Speaking of alpha males, I'm not generally a fan, and it took me a while to warm up to the lot in this bunch, but I'm a sucker for teams, loyalty, and people who make each other into families, so once again, I fell hard. I'm also grateful that while there are sex scenes, they're not integral to the story (and the love triangle - or quadrangle? - is kinda important for the way the rest of the series plays out, so I got over my distaste for that particular trope).

The whole storyline with Blackie the dog is outright wonderful (also the way one world calls his breed an Alsation while the other calls him a German Shepherd).

The writing is stellar and the action scenes are excellently written, but for my money it's the quips between the characters that make this a series I'll read over and over again.

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