Daniel Potter

Originally posted on Tales to Tide You Over

I met Daniel Potter at BayCon 2018 and based on his pitch, gave Off Leash a try. The book took a bit to reach the top of my pile, but when I started reading, I expected to be entertained and wasn’t disappointed. This novel introduces a world in which magic and mundane exist on top of each other, the magic concealed with a veil created in early history by the Fey. The veil has the interesting property of extrapolating a mundane answer to display to show more those blind to magic based on cues from the magical people. This is not the only aspect of the world Potter builds I found intriguing either.

The writing has rough spots and the main character is everything I should find annoying, but between Thomas’ character growth once attaining his “true” self and the mix of a chirpy tone with heavy questions, it worked. I even enjoyed how Thomas (the first person main character) narrated events with a grumpy, often sarcastic, tone. Watching him come to terms with his new reality, and his reactions to the setup everyone magical accepted (no matter how reluctantly) as the way things should be were well worth the stumbles.

The description is creative and fun. For example, Thomas has to reinterpret everything about the town he lives in once he is transformed into a familiar. A puma might be coveted by the magi, but becoming one leaves much to be desired. He has to navigate a mundane world full of police officers and humans who find a large predatory cat disturbing all the while trying to figure out who is on his side, or at least not actively against him.

Despite my comment about rough writing, the plot seeding is well done. I could guess at some answers because of the clues left in the text and experienced Thomas’ confusion about who was trying to help or harm him as though I shared it. Without understanding the situation, he doesn’t know who to trust or whether the person “protecting” him from someone is working in his best interests. I’m avoiding names so you can have the same experience, but it was worth going through it to get a nuanced picture of the power struggles in the magic world.

Speaking of Thomas, he starts out as a whiny, sarcastic puma…who tries to eat other people when hungry (and the puma instincts overcome the person). He’s a self-proclaimed doormat, especially where his girlfriend is concerned. I could have stopped there, but at the same time, his base principles of loyalty and how to treat people are solid. From the first chapter, we see him holding a door for his elderly neighbor, for example, a simple act, but one not every person would bother with.

I think it’s obvious I enjoyed the book a lot, so I’ll leave with this: The resolution was better than I’d expected in some ways, on both the global and personal level, and yet it still worked within the book and the world nicely. The novel is both silly and campy. Thomas is really dumb at times, but his stubbornness, even when he doesn’t know what’s going on, makes things possible that weren’t before. I barely noticed the depth underlying the story because I was enjoying the world and fun tale, but it’s there when you want to see it. show less

A good read. It's a neat angle on "normal human becomes aware of the magical world" - for some reason, certain (non-magical) people randomly become a) magical and b) animals, and are then greatly prized as familiars for mages. Thomas Khatt (and the one thing that was missed was that he should really have been exceedingly bored with cat jokes about his name...) becomes a puma and a prize - and despite his self-avowed laziness and accommodation to others' desires, he pushes back when people show more start pushing him. It's interesting that since Thomas doesn't know anything about anyone, he has to judge by words and actions - and some people start out looking pretty good and turn out to be rather nasty, and some vice versa. Thomas just does what seems right to him, and tries to avoid being controlled - and he ends up making some serious changes in his own destiny and a good many others. I found the book better than I expected - I expected good, light entertainment and I got that along with a solid dose of thought, some _excellent_ worldbuilding, and a self-contained story that still made me really want to read the next one. Oddly, the first 2/3rds of the story were very well edited - I didn't catch a single typo - but the last third had quite a few; words that weren't words, words that didn't fit the sentence, and at least one sentence that...I'm still not sure what the author intended to say, but that's not what it said. It didn't seriously detract from the story, but I did notice it. The copy editor got too caught up in the story to catch the errors? Good book, and I definitely want to read the next in the series. show less

I got this book as part of a bundle, rather than picking it up deliberately, so I hadn't had particularly high expectations. In fact, I found it fun and gripping enough to devour in two sittings including staying up too late to finish it. The early stages - notably the squirrel - coupled with the cover art made me think it'd be a slapstick affair, but it develops into something a bit more serious (though still not taking itself too seriously) as Thomas gets to grips with his situation. The show more realisation of the real killer was fun. I was a bit puzzled at the end when we learn Certain People are going to hold a permanent blood grudge against Thomas, considering literally everything that's happened between them is their unprovoked fault, and even their injuries are all in self-defence (not even necessarily by Thomas), and he's actually done them a massive favour. But sure, character interpretations can vary. show less

I expected an urban fantasy story with a somewhat well-defined magic system and a story about the MC being drawn into fae affairs. Which is technically what the book is about.
But what I actually got instead is a drug trip induced by strong hallucinogens that fits best into the "Magical Realism" genre if anything.
It's a weird amalgamation of urban fantasy where Fae start to return to the human realm setup with loose bits of classic body horror sprinkled in and real-life anime human-animal show more hybrids like catgirls even including general online otaku culture. Even the wish-fulfillment aspect of that genre is somehow present but falls strangely flat because it doesn't fit into the story of a straight FMC at all. It instead shows the sexy cat girls to the book audience which comes across very weirdly. It also borrows a lot from Japanese mythology and mixes it with the traditional european Fae folklore as well as lots of random pop culture from all over the place. There are enough individual ideas in the first half of this book to fill an entire 4 book series.
Quite a few sections really read like an LSD trip gone wrong with no rhyme or reason. It's just this weird soup out of anything and everything with no real direction and no logical consistency to anything. It sways back and forth between your classic high-octane fast-paced urban fantasy and ponderous whimsical magic.

My biggest problem with all that is that none of this is my genre. It is a book that spectacularly misses its target audience with its presentation in terms of cover, genres, and blurb.
I am sure there is an audience that can appreciate this kind of story. It's not particularly badly written but it's chaos and not my kind of story at all. show less