Kitty Goes to Washington by Carrie Vaughn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These books hit just the right spot with me– fun without being silly, balancing real world building and the issues that world would bring with an interesting, realistic cast of characters.

Summary of Kitty and the Midnight Hour via The Tattered Cover:

Kitty Norville is a midnight-shift DJ for a Denver radio station?and a werewolf in the closet. Her new late-night advice show for the supernaturally disadvantaged is a raging success, but it?s Kitty who can use some help. With one sexy werewolf-hunter and a few homicidal undead on her tail, Kitty may have bitten off more than she can chew?

Summary of Kitty Goes to Washington via The Tattered Cover:

Celebrity werewolf and late-night radio host Kitty Norville prefers to be heard and not seen. So when she’s invited to testify at a Senate hearing on behalf of supernaturals, and her face gets plastered on national TV, she inherits a new set of friends, and enemies, including the vampire mistress of the city; an über-hot Brazilian were-jaguar; and a Bible-thumping senator who wants to expose Kitty as a monster. Kitty quickly learns that in this city of dirty politicians and backstabbing pundits, everyone’s itching for a fight.

I don’t really have a lot to say about either of these books, other than the short bit I had at the beginning.

I’ve come to the world of paranormal fiction slowly and cautiously. I read Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden books a while back, and enjoyed them. Last year, I picked up Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse, which I liked once I accepted the basic silliness. I tried Kelley Armstrong’s Otherworld series, which was too violent for my mood at the time, but I mean to revisit her books later.

Then I met Kitty. She was snappy and clever. She was a normal person with a problem that she was trying to deal with. At the beginning of the book, she wasn’t even trying to fight her position in the pack or anywhere else in her life. Slowly, through her surprisingly successful radio show, she developed the confidence to take on all the problems she had, and more that came along since.

In the second book, Kitty once again took on the world, this time as an ambassador between the humans and the newly public supernatural creatures. This position brings with it some very unwelcome attention. Kitty is (reluctantly) up for the challenge. I don’t mind that she sometimes bemoans her fate– I’d do much more complaining in her shoes.

Audio Notes

Narrator: Marguerite Gavin was an effective narrator.  I don’t love her voice, but I also don’t mind listening to it for an entire book.

Production:  No issues come to mind.  I sometimes wonder if it is worth having this section, because there rarely is anything to say.

Audio or Print? I wouldn’t have gotten around to these books on paper, so I’ll continue with the audio version.  I think they’d work just fine either way.

Other thoughts

Other bloggers have looked at Kitty and her adventures, but most of them are reviewing the more recent books in the series. Let me know if you have a review of either of these two books I can link to.

• Dear Author (Kitty Goes to Washington)
• The Symposium (Kitty Goes and the Midnight Hour, Kitty Goes to Washington)
• Love Vampires  (Kitty and the Midnight Hour, Kitty Goes to Washington)
• Bitten by Books (Kitty and the Midnight Hour)
• The Movieholic and Bibliophile Blog (First four Kitty Norville books)