Three Kinds of Lucky

Three Kinds of Lucky

by Kim Harrison
Setting: Arizona
Genres: Fiction / Fantasy / Urban
Length: 15:38
Narrator: Marguerite Gavin
Published on March 5, 2024
Pages: 464
Format: Audiobook Source: Library

Petra Grady has known since adolescence that she has no talent for magic—and that’s never going to change. But as a sweeper first-class, she’s parlayed her rare ability to handle dross—the damaging, magical waste generated by her more talented kin’s spellwork—into a decent life working at the mages’ university.

Except Grady’s relatively predictable life is about to be upended. When the oblivious, sexy, and oh-so-out-of-reach Benedict Strom needs someone with her abilities for a research project studying dross and how to render it harmless, she’s stuck working on his team—whether she wants to or not.

Only Benedict doesn’t understand the characteristics of dross like Grady does. After an unthinkable accident, she and Benedict are forced to go on the run to seek out the one person who might be able to help: an outcast exiled ten years ago for the crime of using dross to cast spells. Now Grady must decide whether to stick with the magical status quo or embrace her own hidden talents . . . and risk shattering their entire world.

I picked this audiobook up purely because I’m a Kim Harrison fan from her Hollows series. If I didn’t have that goodwill for her I probably would have DNFed this one at the beginning.

There was a lot of very slow world building at the beginning. I’m a fan of world building but this was confusing and choppy. There are a lot of concepts introduced and for a quite a while you don’t have any sense of how this is going to all start moving together into the main story.

Once the main narrative kicks off it does get better. It just takes way too long to get there.

I always get grumpy when someone is described as “sexy” in a book blurb. Petra and Benny are on the run for a good portion of this book. I’m glad to say that there is no stopping in the middle of this for a romantic subplot. They seem to like each other but they are saving their own lives first and not worrying about that right now. That seems sensible.

Spoiler/TW Petra has a dog. I kept thinking that that wasn’t a good plot decision. He was a Good Boy but it is hard to be running from bad guys with a dog in tow. The dog is killed. A friend asked me if it was a heroic death at least when I was complaining about this. It was not. I don’t like dog-killing. Kill all the humans you want in a book but leave the dog alone.

I’ve done a lot of complaining about this story but honestly, I would probably listen to a sequel. It did get interesting in the end. It just took a while to get there. I always listen to Kim Harrison books on audio but maybe this would have been better as a book so I could have read it faster.