Review: Eldritch Sparks by Whitney Hill (Shadows of Otherside #2)
Title: Eldritch Sparks
Author: Whitney Hill
Series: Shadows of Otherside #2
Publication Date: November 20, 2020
Review Date: April 25, 2023
Rating: 3.5/5 ⭐️
Fantastic follow up to Elemental. Whitney Hill ups the ante with Eldritch Sparks, kicking things off a few months after the events of the first book. Our Air elemental main character, Arden Finch, continues to do her private investigator thing in the NC Triangle, but she now must balance the fragile alliance she started to build between the Otherside races while also continuing to explore her roots as an elemental.
No one wants to play nice with each other and they're going to have to because Arden is trying to unravel a significant threat to all of them: the appearance of a lich lord on the scene. Yes, we get zombies and necromancy in this one.
Hill has such a strong command over the characterization of Arden, and she is so believable as a headstrong but still growing 25-year-old PI/elemental. Arden wants to have a good (and quite spicy) relationship with her werewolf BF Roman, whose brother is introduced at the beginning of the book to mess up both the relationship and the Otherside politics.
Arden wants to be come into her own managing a tenuous alliance between the elves, weres, djinn, witches, and vampires. And Arden wants to organize her community against the local enforcer (and her sometimes boss), Callista, in revealing themselves to the "mundane" world before a local biotech company forces them to.
Arden also continues to have encounters with the gods, who make it clear that there is a greater, looming threat just off in the distance (we love to see those seeds planted). While contending with all of that, Arden must train and explore her elemental powers and work to save two elementals who have been captured by the lich. It's fantastic to see Hill spinning all these plates at once. They occasionally wobble, but at no point does she lose control over the story.
My one major note of criticism is that I feel like Hill fell into a common trap with Eldritch Sparks that a lot of UF stories fall into which is the setting feeling empty. This wasn’t a problem in book one, so I’m hoping this was a minor speed bump. What I mean by this is the Triangle doesn’t feel like it’s a real, living place in Eldritch Sparks.
Almost every person that Arden interacts with is a named, known character and most of those are also Othersiders like her. She doesn’t go to regular bars or see random software engineers in her WeWork (in fact, in Eldritch Sparks Hill makes the point that basically everyone has left Arden’s side of the co-working space and she’s alone).
Now, there is a reason to do this: Arden is feeling increasingly isolated, even from her new boyfriend. She’s also feeling the stress of managing the complex power relationships in her role as Otherside’s chief diplomat. But I think it’s a mistake to realize this isolation by removing the nuts and bolts of being in a city. It makes it seem like this story could take place anywhere, which is a shame because Hill really brought the Triangle to life as a character in book one.
But otherwise, this is a great sophomore book in a UF series.