Taltos revealed some important things. Still, it's not as great as The Witching Hour. ( )

Read it during my 'obsessed with Anne Rice' phase. It's a typical Anne Rice book, with lush, beautiful prose, and thank the gods, the plot actually does move along pretty fast. A good read and a more than adequate ending to the Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy. ( )

Rice's series on the Mayfair witches equals a good read; this is the third. ( )

Hmmm. It's impossible to write about the plot in a coherent manner because there are several intertwining threads:

As the title implies, this book is mainly about the Taltos--a race of beings we were introduced to in The Witching Hour. Ashlar is, or at least believes himself to be, the last of his kind. He's lonely, currently obsessed with dolls (collecting and manufacturing them), and when he discovers another Taltos has been seen, he drops everything to check it out.

And of course there are the Mayfairs, as this is the last book of the Mayfair Witch trilogy. Rowan seems to be following in her mother's footsteps at the beginning of the book, though she's not quite as completely catatonic--she walks, eats, dresses herself, etc., but doesn't speak, communicate, or acknowledge the presence of others.

The family seems to be turning to the 12-year-old designee of the legacy, Mona, who's pregnant with Michael's child.

Then there's the Talamasca. There's corruption within the Talamasca: Aaron Lightner is killed, and his friend and contemporary Stuart Gordon is behind it, motivated by his plan to resurrect the Taltos race. He has a female Taltos, and he plans to find a male so they can mate.

Contrary to the average opinions on Amazon, I enjoyed this more than I did The Witching Hour. The Taltos race was an interesting concept, and we got a lot more detail about them. (This was presumably also present in Lasher, but I haven't read it.) It also lacked a lot of the problems I had with The Witching Hour: it had a coherent plot--even if there were several threads, the story itself held together quite well; and while there were still a few tangential flashbacks, they weren't nearly as numerous or intrusive as those in The Witching Hour.

However. I was completely creeped out by Mona, and not in the way you're creeped out by vampires or spiders, but in a lose-my-lunch kind of way. The nonchalant way an "affair" between a 12-year-old and a man in his 40s was handled pushed my squick buttons hard. The affair was bad enough, but that it was presented as normal.... Added to that is the fact that she's treated as the head of the family, and everyone defers to her. She's 12. T W E L V E. Not 18, not 16, not even 14--12. She's a child. Nope, just could not swallow this. As with the other witches in The Witching Hour, we're told she's very powerful, which might account for some of the attitude, if we ever saw any evidence of that power, which we don't.

And then there was the stylistic choice that was seriously nails-on-the-chalkboard irritating. Mona becomes friends with her teenage cousin Mary Jane. I rather liked Mary Jane, but she talks like this:

I'll get it, you rest there against that tree, that's the tree I told you about, the cypress tree, oldest one in these parts, you see this was the pond out there, the little pond???? You know??? Where the family would go rowing??? Here, take the lantern, the handle doesn't get hot.

Grrrrr. Why use 3 and 4 question marks? One would do, really, to show the speech patterns. Just bugged the heck out of me. I'm not even going to mention the comma splices. Of course, if I'd loved the rest of the book, that would be a minor niggle.

Though I liked it better than the first of the trilogy, even if Mona had been 16 or 18, I wasn't more than mildly interested in the story. Mona at 12 just made me disgusted.

I have two more Anne Rice books in my TBR pile. They were, in fact, at the top, since they'd been random picks a while ago, but I'd postponed reading them until I read the earlier books (The Mummy and The Witching Hour). I picked up the next one to read--one of the vampire ones, I can't remember which--and found myself reading very skeptically, expecting to dislike it. So I put them both back on the bottom of the TBR pile until I get my annoyance with this series out of my head. ( )

I disagree with the many other reviews which opine that this book is not any good. I continued to enjoy the tales contained in both Lasher and Taltos, and do not think that they detract from the excellent narrative that is The Witching Hour. I like that Rice has created an entirely new species about which to write, having possibly exhausted vampire lore. I am fascinated by the Taltos and extremely interested in reading about them further. ( )