The Anxiety of Kalix the Werewolf

November 11, 2013
Kalix MacRinnalch, the titular fretful lycanthrope, is 18 years old, directionless, unhappy, and borderline bulimic. Empress Kabachetka of Hainusta wants to kill Kalix and her family, but this plot never goes anywhere exciting. Much of the book is devoted to Kalix and her friends hanging out, going to the movies, and shopping. Meanwhile, her beautiful older sister, Thrix, chums around with Queen Malveria of the Fire Elementals, talks about ex-boyfriends and Vogue, and gets into a fashion-off with the empress. Millar spends more time on the characters’ hair than on the plot. The few action scenes are anticlimactic and brief. Even the attempts at humor fall flat; Kalix’s best friend is devoted to a band called Yum Yum Sugary Snacks and the anime Tokyo Top Pop Boom Boom Girl, the “joke” apparently being that rock bands and anime series have wacky names. No interesting characters or worldbuilding enliven this meandering, slow, and extremely long story. Agent: Malcolm Imre, Imre & Davis.

January 1, 2014
Life is tough. It's tougher when you're a werewolf, or so this lumbering yarn, the third installment in Millar's (Curse of the Wolf Girl, 2010, etc.) Kalix Werewolf series, assures us. And not just any old werewolf, but a Scottish werewolf in London, living on the fringe, depressed and drugged. Kalix is just 18, but she's already killed plenty. In fact, at the top of her "Werewolf Improvement Plan" list of resolutions is the notation, "be less violent." That's not so easy to do when a secret sect of werewolf hunters, the Avenaris Guild, is after you and yours. (And why secret? Because werewolf hunters have to be, one guesses.) That, plus the fact that Kalix has drawn werewolf blood, too, in what threatens to develop into a lycanthropic civil war. Whatever the case, she's a force of, well, supernature: "Her speed and power were abnormal, even by the standards of her fellow werewolves. The madness in battle was just part of her general insanity, according to her detractors"--though it could have something to do with the odd circumstances of her birth as well, with which Millar opens this too-long tome. There are some nice hipster/waif touches in his narrative: Kalix digs the 1970s tough-girl group The Runaways, the humans she falls in with are the pimply arty punks from whom great things may emerge, and the London she inhabits is a playground for all kinds of malevolent critters, including one particularly resourceful fairy. Still, even allowing for all the pop-culture slyness ("The Fire Queen...felt herself to be on the defensive ever since Kabachetka had ingratiated herself with the editor of Vogue by sponsoring the ball") and pomo irony, there's not much stuffing in this overstuffed book; the action scenes, though suitably bloody, come too few and too far between, and the principal characters are much too talky for the busily disruptive creatures they are. Fans of Millar's work, who are legion, won't object, but newcomers may want to take in their werewolvery by other means.

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February 1, 2014
In the brilliant third entry in Millar's Kalix Werewolf series (Curse of the Wolf Girl, 2010), Kalix MacRinnalchthe laudanum-addicted, self-destructive youngest daughter of the ruling Scottish werewolf clan, turns over a new leaf. Living in London with university students Daniel and Moonglow, and Vex, heir to the throne of elemental Fire Queen Malveria, Kalix has embarked on a self-improvement scheme involving eating, exercising, cutting down on self-cutting, and improving her literacy skills. She even finds a new boyfriend. When she makes a trip back to Scotland with her very proper (for a werewolf) cousin to kick the laudanum habit, however, they find the werewolf enchantress who was going to help them slain by werewolf hunters of the Avenaris Guild. With Kalix intent on taking out the guild, the action heats up as Queen Malveria's greatest rival, the Empress of the Hainusta, provides assistance to the guild. Millar uses frequent fast breaks between scenes set in different dimensions and various locales to keep the action moving in this humorous, if violent, romp featuring quirky characters and situations.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)