(originally posted July 23, 2019)
I just finished reading the last book in Dana Marie Bell’s Maggie’s Grove series, Hour of the Wolf and wow. Just wow. I’m not talking about just the last book. I’m talking about the entire series as a whole. I honestly tried to talk about these stories separately but there’s an overall villain plot in them that is so connected it’s almost impossible not to lump them together to keep from giving away major spoilers. Probably the only way I may try to do some posts on each individual book is to highlight each couple and their relationship. So consider this a series overview.
This author really knows how to build communities. Seriously great communities. As much as I love her community found in the Halle Pumas & Halle Shifter books, I really, really love the magical supernatural community of Maggie’s Grove. She had me hooked in the first book with a vegetarian vampire moving into Maggie’s Grove in Blood of the Maple. Parker is simply a hoot as a very eccentric vampire and an excellent choice for introducing the community. You’d think there would be no way to top that. But she does.
With the unfolding story in each book, the reader gets to go deeper and deeper into this extremely interesting if wacky community of very diverse supernaturals. We’re talking vampires, dryads, shifters, witches, elementals and more that just need to be surprises all on their own. So many of them deserve their own story which is something I don’t say often because I do not like series that go on and on and on and on………..
You know the ones I’m talking about. Yes, you do.
But this is such a large community that both individual and groups of books could be drawn from it over time. Please. I don’t want to leave Maggie’s Grove anytime soon. Like I said the community is key here and it’s just fun. I like fun. No, make that I love fun books. So, these are basically catnip to me.
But there is also danger. And a couple of scenes that almost verge on downright scary. Not hard-core horror but freaky all the same. After everything they’d gone through in the earlier books, I actually got a little antsy at how the last one was going towards the end. I mean, I knew they would win. We are talking romances after all. But I wasn’t sure how they were going to accomplish it considering who the ultimate villain was.
Oh, and there’s also an inside joke at the very end for the fans of the Halle books that I literally snickered over. I think it was something that had been mentioned in passing in one of the earlier books but it wasn’t something to take seriously. Or so I thought. Now I want more books in Maggie’s Grove just to read about that. What, I’m not saying. Ahem. Okay, a clue. Maybe.
Finally, here are the books in order:
