I had a great reaction to the first Odd Thomas book. I did not love this book. By the end of the book I was listening to the audiobook at like 1.6x. This is pretty fast. I basically hated it and wanted it to be over!
At the start of this book Odd is awoken by his recently dead neighbor, who is a doctor with a stepson Odd’s age. The son is missing, and the rest of the book is basically Odd trying to find Danny. I just remembered his name as I was typing that sentence 🙂
It turns out Danny fell in with a bad crowd, and the main girl is just a lot. She’s over the top and not fun. And there is an immense amount of story time dedicated to her. I actually accidentally fast forwarded through her demise by bumping my phone, but I rewinded and listened to that part!
There’s also so much of Odd trying to get into this one place where Danny is being held, and then so much of him trying to get out. This one just was not for me. Two stars.
This one (Book 3) was a lot more fun. Odd asked to go to a monastery / nunnery / I’m not religious, so I don’t know what they’re called. There are monks and there are nuns, so I think I covered the basics. He’s a guest there with a universal key so that he can calm down a particularly angry recently dead monk’s ghost.
There’s a lot of craziness, but so much more humor and good will in this book. Ghost Elvis is there a bunch, and also a ghost dog, which spoiler alert (it’s too late, sorry), I didn’t know until the very end that he was a ghost. I literally said to myself “Is Boo a ghost?”, which his name is Boo, so I’m slow sometimes. I wish he would’ve led with “Boo is a ghost dog”, because then I could’ve spent less time worrying that Boo would be harmed.
Like I said, there’s craziness – Odd talks to his deceased girlfriend through a basically comatose child, there’s a bone monster, a Russian librarian is a master baker… This one was a lot better than number 2, and I’m so glad because that one was a slog! 3.5 stars.
