Reliving the Past Doesn’t Always Work Out

Blitz is on the one hand pretty good with the characters and world building, but on the other less amazing with trying to combine two plots. The gist is that there is a group of ladies who are all Checquy members during the WWII bombings of London (hence the title) and then a modern day new recruit to the Checquy and her struggle to learn a new world, new abilities, and figure out how to also keep her family together. Both by themselves are interesting, but the pacing seems to be such that either one or the other story gets all the attention, and the other one kind of gets set aside to the point of it being nearly forgotten. Certainly, there is the eventual inevitable connection between the two, but that doesn’t get a lot of attention. It mostly feels like Lyn’s story of going on the run to avoid being killed for murders done by an unknown person with her same power, and the hunt/mission Bridget and then Pawn Wattleman go on are the centers of the story. But, Pamela’s the one who brought down the Nazi plane, and she totally gets ignored for most of the story. Bridget and Lyn are definitely the same character in different times, with one facing a future of building her career and the other a future of possibly building her family. The world of the story adds a good bit of interesting backstory, including a moment in which a character tells you how to pronounce the organization name. It does feel like some previous favorite characters, like Myfanwy and Odette have cameos just for the same of it. Those are good characters, but they should have at least some purpose for showing up. Odette’s makes a little more sense plot-wise, but Myfanwy, given her reputation as noted by Lyn, could be a throw-away; anyone could have done that part. There is at least some continuation from previous novels, and this one is not a stand-alone exactly, but it sort of feels incomplete. Generally still a good adventure, mostly entertaining, but a few signs of trying to re-live past successes in some ways. For example, that really shows with the letter that’s two chapters long. Letters feature heavily in the first novel for a good reason; the one here doesn’t really add all that much and is visibly an info-dump. Some of it is good interesting info, but the dumping should be disguised just a little bit more.