I'm going to be perfectly honest--or at least as honest as an Unseelie can be--this book made me laugh. For all it's faults I could not bring myself to dislike the work. While this is a sequel to The Gates (which I highly suggest reading first), I'll give you a brief overview of the events. In the last book, The Great Malevolence gained power and tried to take over Earth, using his agent Mrs. Abernathy (or rather, a powerful demon using the form of a woman who in life was Mrs. Abernathy). The Great Malevolence was defeated by a young boy named Samuel, his dog Boswell, and Nurd (Scourge of the Five Deities). Now we return to the current story where The Great Malevolence is cowering in the bowels of Hell and Mrs. Abernathy is in utter disgrace for her failure to take over Earth. She knows that the only way for her to get back in the good graces of The Great Malevolence is to capture Samuel and drag him down to Hell, a task in which she succeeds (with the second part at least). So through a series of events involving the Hadron Collider, Nurd and a car stolen from Earth, and several evil dwarves who would prefer to be called elves, we traverse the wasteland of Hell.
Overall Merit: The saving grace of this book, if you pardon my irony, was the humor. Connolly did a wonderful job inserting witty quips whenever I felt myself falling into a lull. Unfortunately, the plot isn't anything so novel and neither is the image of Hell, but if anything this book gets a decent score on pure chuckle power. The only true negative is the occasional use of scientific terminology that gives me a headache, but it's easy enough to ignore those footnotes for the most part. Score-8
Characters: No one really stood out as anything super special, although I couldn't help but love Nurd, he was by far my favorite character in the two books. The main protagonist, Samuel, was kind of non-descript. The best I could do for him would be to call him a slightly nerdy, awkward kid, which I could use to describe basically 80% of characters in young adult fiction. Mrs. Abernathy, the main antagonist was funny too in a quirky sort of way, and she was actually difficult to dislike to the point that I found myself liking her better than Samuel at times. Score-6/7
Blush Factor: N/A
Structure: The story had a linear plot, which switched between three or four main perspectives. It was easy to follow and the only thing that was kind of distracting was the constant usage of footnotes. Score- 7
Plot: Nothing new here. It was a typical protagonist gets put in a sticky situation, gets help along the way, and vanquishes evil. The end. The strong points were really the supporting characters (Nurd) and Mrs. Abernathy. Everything else was rather trite. Score-6
Overall Merit: The saving grace of this book, if you pardon my irony, was the humor. Connolly did a wonderful job inserting witty quips whenever I felt myself falling into a lull. Unfortunately, the plot isn't anything so novel and neither is the image of Hell, but if anything this book gets a decent score on pure chuckle power. The only true negative is the occasional use of scientific terminology that gives me a headache, but it's easy enough to ignore those footnotes for the most part. Score-8
Characters: No one really stood out as anything super special, although I couldn't help but love Nurd, he was by far my favorite character in the two books. The main protagonist, Samuel, was kind of non-descript. The best I could do for him would be to call him a slightly nerdy, awkward kid, which I could use to describe basically 80% of characters in young adult fiction. Mrs. Abernathy, the main antagonist was funny too in a quirky sort of way, and she was actually difficult to dislike to the point that I found myself liking her better than Samuel at times. Score-6/7
Blush Factor: N/A
Structure: The story had a linear plot, which switched between three or four main perspectives. It was easy to follow and the only thing that was kind of distracting was the constant usage of footnotes. Score- 7
Plot: Nothing new here. It was a typical protagonist gets put in a sticky situation, gets help along the way, and vanquishes evil. The end. The strong points were really the supporting characters (Nurd) and Mrs. Abernathy. Everything else was rather trite. Score-6
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