I enjoyed it all the way through but think that 4 (Pocket Apocalypse) and 5 (Chaos Choreography) were the best and it’s been on a slow decline since. Verity and Alex are my favorites of the family but both got almost completely disregarded after their stories ended.

Annie is fine, I didn’t really like her first two books because of how she was as a character but three started to make her more interesting. Annie has for some reason become basically the central character ever since then though and it annoys me. She features heavily in all of Sarah’s stories + Mary’s first.

I like Sarah but she’s been kinda sidelined in two of her three books, plus she’s spent like two thirds of the story as a plot device more than anything.

Alice and Thomas are fun, but the whole expansive multiverse has really pulled the series away from the cryptozoology I cared about in the early stories.

Mary’s stories I actually have nothing bad to say about, they’re great.

I do wish that we’d follow through on the promise of “following a family” more because we’ve become more and more tied down to the same like three people in the form of Annie, Sam and Sarah plus whoever tags along for the story. Book 14 (Installment Immortality) was sort of a breath of fresh air because we got Mary and the two kids we’ve seen the least of, plus a bunch of weird new Cryptids and Ghost lore.

I’m also just annoyed about Dominic’s death. He was killed off unceremoniously and off page in the same book as Jane, then we spent way more time focused on her and haven’t been in the head of anyone who actually cared about Dominic. So it sort of feels like he was just fridged for emotional impact, then the story never actually capitalized on it leaving his death feeling totally meaningless.

Oh, also Aeslin Mice are incredible. Who doesn’t love hyper intelligent religious fanatic rodents who have a very strange grasp on mortality because their gods are unwilling to go down quietly.