Wraith by Phaedra Weldon

Zoë Martinique lives in a strange life. Her mom runs a tea/occult shop out of an old Victorian house, with the help of the ghostly gay couple that haunts the house and Rhonda, an urban fantasy cross between Penelope Garcia and Abby Sciuto. And Zoë herself is a strange character, possessing the ability to shuck her body and astrally travel about the city at will. It’s Zoë’s career path, auctioning her services as a super spy off on ebay, that leads to trouble when on an out-of-body spy mission she witnesses a creepy, Vin Diesel look-alike kill and reap the soul of a vice president of a major Atlanta company. Worse the creep marks her somehow, binding the two of them together and sending Zoë on a life changing mission to save herself and others.

I have very mixed reactions to this book. To begin with it was very hard to get into. Zoë makes a lot of TV/movie references, she speaks directly to the reader often and her attitude is rather childish. Zoë’s mother, the ghosts and Rhonda come off flat, and, honestly, annoying. The flow of the action, and therefore the tension, is consistently interrupted by Zoë’s comments to the reader or attempts to be funny (usually with pop culture references) which nine times out of ten aren’t. At one point, after the plot finally starts to be interesting, the flow is completely broken by a scene in which Zoë’s “loving” mother holds Zoë at gunpoint and forces her to submit to an exorcism. I very nearly stopped there. Even though she’s 28, Zoë’s mother, Nona, treats her like child, even to the point of drugging her and physically restraining her to keep her from following the plot. Not only does this make Zoë seems even more childish, and disrupt the core plot, dragging it out more than needed, but the later references to Nona only acting out of love just don’t coincide with her actions making the mother-daughter dynamic feel more like an abuser/Stockholm syndrome relationship.

However, there are some interesting ideas in Wraith. Primarily is the reoccurring theme of people using Zoë’s body against her. She gained her power during a traumatic rape and even after she becomes comfortable with it over and over people capture Zoë’s body while she’s out running around astrally and use it as leverage against her in a variety of ways. Whether Weldon realizes she’s layered this theme into Wraith or not I’m not sure, but I did find myself continuing, wanting to see Zoë overcome this problem as much as I wanted her to have beat off her original rapist.

The dynamic between Zoë and the two leading males in the book is also interesting, especially as unlike other urban fantasy books that stick closer to the romance Happily-For-Now ending this series seems poised to go into some very dark, rule-free territories that are interesting and new.

There’s also something to be said for the plot itself, which has unexpected twists of mystery, centers around planes of existence rather than the ways the character exist and spans into a multitude of human races that are sometimes missing from other urban fantasy tales.

I’m not sure I can recommend Wraith at this point, but I can’t exactly dismiss it either, making it one of the more difficult reads, and difficult reviews I’ve done in a while.