I'm very conflicted about this book. I had heard great things about it, and when I started it, it was immediately clear why so many readers sing its praises. It's beautifully written, and the Wood is the most chilling, most disturbing, and most imaginative villain I've ever encountered in literature. I also loved the bond between the narrator/heroine/Chosen One Agnieszka and her best friend Kasia, which is the central relationship in the story. (This book easily passes the Bechdel Test.)

And yet, as I read, I developed some serious reservations that lead me to warn that this book is not for everyone. First, it's pretty gruesome and violent. That doesn't bother some readers as much as it bothers me. It wasn't gratuitously violent, and the violence was in keeping with the plot, but it was disturbing enough that I couldn't read this book before bed -- and since bedtime is when I do the lion's share of my reading, it took me about five times as long to read Uprooted as it usually takes me to read a book of this size. That always reduces my enjoyment a little, because the more I have to stop and start, the more disjointed the reading experience feels.

The second thing that really, really bothered me, was the "romance" aspect between 17-year-old Agnieszka, and the Dragon, the centuries old wizard who takes a 17-year-old girl as a servant every decade. Because of the age difference and the vastly differential power dynamic between the two of them, the physical aspect of their relationship was super squicky and inappropriate. It also wasn't very believable or compelling. The Dragon was grumpy old goat, and Agnieszka could have admired his wisdom and guidance without wanting to get in his pants.

I liked the first book in the Psy-Changeling series, Slave to Sensation (despite the awful title and even worse cover), but I couldn't get into this sequel at all. The story was too similar to the previous book (emotionless Psy woman falls for hot-blooded Changeling man/cat, thereby waking her scary, dangerous emotions, plus sex, plus murder), but the hero and heroine of this book weren't as interesting as the main characters in the previous book. Also, the previous heroine, Sascha, had a very real fear that if she gave in to her emotions, the other Psy would find out and lobotomize her. That made for a much better conflict than this story, where Faith is just afraid that if she gives in to emotions she's going to break her brain somehow. I got bored and annoyed with Faith's weird mental fragility.

As with the prior book, there's lots of sex here. Neither book is covering any new ground, but while the sex scenes in Slave to Sensation didn't wow me, the sex scenes between Faith and Vaughn actively turned me OFF. I was annoyed by Faith making advances only to back off whenever she started feeling too much (which came across as the worst kind of teasing), but I was also annoyed that Vaughn made clear his intentions to push her into physicality regardless of whether she was ready (which set off consent alarms, though nothing in this book amounts to rape).

Finally, I was confused and irritated by all the talk of the PsyNet and how it works, and all the Airy-Fairy business of psychic connections and powers. I think this series is not for me.

... and I'm not loving it so far. I'm disappointed that this story is so similar to the first book in the Psy-Changeling series, Slave to Sensation. We've already done the emotionally-stunted Psy falls in lust with a uber-manly alpha shifter thing. I don't feel, so far, like this book builds upon the world-building Singh started in the previous book, and that's such a disappointment, because I feel like we've barely scratched the surface of the potential stories to be told. What about humans? Where do they fit into this world? What about other Changeling packs? What happens in this world outside of California?

I don't read a lot of PNR, but everyone says if you're going to read PNR, read Nalini Singh... so I checked this out (doing my best not to judge the book by that seriously hideous cover). I liked the writing and the world-building, which felt fresh even though it employs several tropes that are so common in paranormals as to be almost cliché: the heroine seems like a plain jane until she develops her secret surprise special snowflake superpowers, the hero doesn't want to trust her or even like her much, but after just a few meetings he realizes she's his fated mate and he'll die without her, their bond is threatened by forces outside their control and death seems almost certain... 

I didn't completely follow all the scenes about the PsyNet (the psychic network of minds) that the heroine's people (the Psy) use to communicate and store information, but I liked the scenes about the Changeling pack dynamics and intra-pack politics. As is usually the case, I was a bit annoyed about the mystery subplot (a Changeling woman has been kidnapped and will be killed if her pack can't rescue her in time), because I knew Whodunnit from the very first scene in which the killer made an appearance in the story, and so the only mystery was "why" (which wasn't really answered to my satisfaction). However, the mystery was only a plot device to contribute to the tension between the Psy and the Changelings, and solving it really wasn't the point. 

I'm a sucker for stories in which a main character is prepared to sacrifice his or her life in favor of the greater good (for example, my favorite scene in any book ever is probably Harry Potter's solitary walk into the Forbidden Forest to meet Voldemort during the Battle of Hogwarts, which slays me every single time I read it), and this is such a book, so I found Slave to Sensation very emotionally satisfying and will definitely read on in the series. 

When I pick up a new series, especially in the fantasy/paranormal/steampunk realm (and Moira Roger's Bloodhound series is all of these), I'm willing to put up with a fair bit of disorientation initially, until the world-building fills in the gaps of my understanding. I'm not a fan of info-dumping, and I'd rather figure things out as I read along, so it was totally okay with me that for the first half of this book, I didn't know what was going on.

Less okay is the fact that by the second half, I still didn't know what was going on. Indeed, I reached the end, and I feel like I still have only a very sketchy sense of what the writers were trying to do. I understood the general plot: Satira teams up with Wilder to rescue her mentor, Nathaniel, from evil vampires. I had a sense of the setting: a steampunky American Wild West where there are a whole lot of brothels and shanty towns on the border between the Deadlands (aka Vampire Territory) and the not-so-civilized American Frontier. Beyond that, though, the details get very, very vague. In addition to vampires, there are creatures called Bloodhounds, who seem to be some kind of shifters whose natures are controlled by the phases of the moon: in the full moon, they get really strong and violent, and in the new moon, they get the Epic HornyPants and their sexual needs are so all-consuming the hounds go mad with frenzy and they need experienced women to sate them (hence all the brothels). Sound sexy? Yeah, not so much as you might think.

I picked this up free a few months ago because 1) hello, free?, and 2) Moira Rogers is actually the writing team of Bree and Donna, who also write together under the name Kit Rocha, and Rocha's Beyond series is totally my kind of catnip. Alas, the Bloodhounds are not. There's just not enough to this story except for sex: the world-building is scant and vague, the character development is half-assed, and without any flesh to fill out the bare bones of this story, the romance between Wilder and Satira just falls flat.