Menagerie

Menagerie by Rachel Vincent is a book I've been wanting to read for a while, and I finally got to it. And I'm glad I finally read it! Chock full of paranormal creatures, and featuring an interesting protagonist who loses everything, only to find hope again after a very brutal story, this is a definite keeper. Not without it's problems, but I still enjoyed it very much. I feel like I'm becoming a bit of a Rachel Vincent fan, as well, after trying her work now across several different series. But here we're talking about Menagerie, so let's dive in.

Delilah Marlow hates the traveling carnival, or menagerie, of cryptids that comes through her small Oklahoma town, but she goes anyway after her fiance gets tickets. Something happens at the carnival though and she discovers, to her horror, that she is more than human as well. Captured and imprisoned, she is soon put on display, and stripped of all rights in the process. She is effectively little more than an animal now, in the eyes of the law, and other than a taciturn handler named Gallagher, she has no friends or allies. This is not a spoiler, by the way, since it's in the blurb, although I still hate to give away even this much information. Suffice to say this is about the journey for her, and how she comes to grips with her role in Metzger's menagerie, as well as the relationships she forges with the other prisoners.

The backdrop of all this is a world where cryptids have been outed and stripped of all rights after something called the Reaping happened. There's a fae element here as a number of human children were taken and replaced with fae children, or cryptid children of some variety, and the government responded by revoking cryptid rights and taking all they could find away to laboratories. So you do not want to be outed as a cryptid! Unfortunately that's exactly what happens to Delilah. In her case though they don't know what kind of cryptid she is, so the menagerie keeps her while they try to figure that out.

This kept me turning the pages, and I was expecting a very dark story as I had seen this referenced in numerous reviews. Maybe it's me but I didn't think it was that bad- I mean clearly life wasn't going to be wine and roses for anyone in that situation, but I can see where this might be a tough read for anyone who has suffered abuse or knows someone who has. As you might expect the imprisoned cryptids, including Delilah, are not treated well, so there is that. Delilah is not one to give up though, and I loved her toughness and perseverance. Don't mess with her! And her relationship with Gallagher and certain others gets very interesting, but not in a romantic way. In fact there really is no romance in this one at all.  

There is, however, a ton of cryptids. I mean the sheer variety here is awesome. There are succubi, fae, gryphons, centaurs, even a minotaur. Seriously, a lot of creatures that are pretty rarely seen even in urban fantasy, even though not all of them show up to do a lot. Just seeing them mentioned was a treat. I mean how often do you run into a lamia, or dolphin shifters? So I was here for that. Oh, and djinn as well, including sub- varieties (ifrit and merid- which I only know from roleplaying game books). So that was a big plus for me.

So I highly recommend this for urban fantasy/ paranormal readers, with the caveat that it can be a tough read in the sense of the abuse, although it wasn't nearly as graphic or bad as I had expected. I enjoyed the variety of characters, the cryptids were amazing, and while I thought the villains of the piece could have been a bit more nuanced, this mostly worked for me. And now I'm chomping at the bit to get to the next one!