Tame Trickster

Trickster's Girl by Hilari Bell

* I received this book via Star Book Tours

This book gets 2 gnomes and a gnome hat out of five gnomes for having an innovative concept with looking at Native American mythology but doesn't explore the mythology as much as it could have.  One fun aspect of the book involves the curse words of the future.  These curse words made me feel like a real trendsetter, like carp, I say carp all the time because it tended to get me in less trouble then saying the original word.

The story starts very slowly.  It takes place in the future but I think it might have had an even stronger message if it had been set in the present.  This would work because people are more pro-environmental now and security it tighter, it's interesting to read about this future but there could have been more to it.

The reader first meets Kelsa at her father's funeral.  She was much closer to her father than her mother, she doesn't have the best relationship with her mother.  Raven, the trickster god, finds her as she's burying her father's ashes.

In this future time there's a tree plague that was released by terrorists that is killing all the trees.  This isn't the only problem since their have been bad environmental practices before this but the tree plague is kind of the last straw.  Apparently all these environmental problems are weakening or continuing to weaken the ley lines of the world, these lines are where magic comes from, so they are destroying this world and the world where Raven comes from.  Raven believes that only a human can fix the damage.

It takes Raven some time to convince Kelsa that she's the person that can heal the Earth through fixing fixing different ley lines at various nexuses of power.  She is suspicious of Raven a lot and Raven doesn't really see humans as being very capable.

The story really picks up and grabs for your attention after Kelsa finds out that the enemies Raven talks about that don't want them to succeed are real.  Things get more enjoyable and fun to read once they are on the run.  I was kind of uncomfortable at one part where she decides to make herself look completely different by essentially putting on blackface in the form of really dark concealer.

I might have given this book a 3 gnomes out of 5 if it weren't for the ending.  It has the kind of ending where I was questioning why exactly things had to happen this way.  In the end the reader is left with no idea what's going to occur next and not a clue to who the main characters will be.

Overall I expected more magic to be involved but everything is more natural then magical except for the whole shapeshifting part.  Also was some humor throughout though no romance even though it is kind of implied by the cover and title of the book.