Hidden Legacy Series

This is a complete rewriting and consolidation of my reviews for the Hidden Legacy series based on some of my older reviews and notes. These being less thorough than my more recent reviews, I must rely a lot on my memories of the series which are surprisingly sparse considering I even read books 4 and 5 twice as I had forgotten them by the time book 6 had come out. Frustratingly one of my old reviews reads “the story has gotten me on edge awaiting the 6th book, what else is there to say?” and I would have been very thankful for the old me to have had something more to say.

My choice to read Hidden Legacy was heavily influenced by the goal of finding something that could fill the London Steampunk shaped hole in my heart shortly after finishing that series. Similar to Kate Daniels by the same author, Hidden Legacy introduces a world where magic and technology coexist where a now banned serum activates latent magical genes in people which can be inherited, creating magical social castes and families. The concept was alluring and much better executed than the one in Kate Daniels and whilst not quite as slow as it was in Kate Daniels, the romance developing between the characters over several books is always a welcome sight to me over a full romantic arc in a singular book. Over 6 books, A Hidden Legacy, focuses on the story of one lower class family following the adventures of the oldest sister, Nevada, for the first 3 books and then Catalina in books 4 to 6. Each sister has their own romantic arc and whilst nothing has been announced yet, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a third trilogy come out in the future bringing Arabella, the third sister to her own happily ever after.

With the world and the characters set up this is where I would usually start covering the story, but unfortunately despite the praise I gave it in my past reviews, A Hidden Legacy’s…well legacy is frighteningly forgettable. I remember the concepts of the world quite strongly and I do the characters from how the magic works, to how different families have different powers, to how some people got turned into monsters by the magic serum, to Nevada’s tinkering aunt to her evil grandmother and so on. However, when it comes to the actual story, despite having read part of it twice, my memory is entirely blank. This is in small amount shown in some of my older review notes where I write that the biggest weakness of books 1 through 3 is that I didn’t care about the overarching story.

Whilst my feelings about the second trilogy’s story were more positive, it still failed to really create a memorable experience. In my revisited reviews, I noted that both romance and story in that trilogy are quite surface level on top of following more boring protagonist as Catalina is a sarcasm girl and not much else. Part of the issue is that whilst there is an overarching ever progressing story, the authors feel the need to have a full story resolved in each book. In book 4 this is a kidnapping, in book 5 it is a murder, both events are faintly related to the overarching storyline but take up the bulk of the characters’ focus which prevents the more important story from taking centre stage. The 6th and last entry unfortunately doesn’t solve any of theses issues as it also marks and dramatic shift in tone by becoming needlessly light, something Arabella will clumsily lampshade “nobody I care about died”. The family’s grandmother who had been the scheming big bad guy for the first 5 books suddenly becomes a slightly misguided loving grandmother. The dangerous Russian empire is left to scuffle with Arabella’s monster form in the background as a joke set up for a potential romance between her and the Russian prince. Even when the book tries to be darker by seemingly killing off the new grandfather figure, it backs out of that fake out virtually one paragraph later.

Whilst this all sounds very negative it was still held up by the world building and the individual characters which both remained very interesting amongst this terminally boring story. You’ll notice I still haven’t said anything solid about what happens in the story and that’s just how poorly I remember it, I simply do not know what happens in those books anymore which caps it at a 7/10 at best which it would be if it weren’t for book 6’s other issues…

Book 6 has Arkan as the big bad guy who killed Alessandro’s (Catalina’s love interest) father. An additional concept to the magical powers of this series is that a lot of magical types have a passive and an active power. Usually these two tend to be related to each other; for example, in the case of Nevada, as a truthseeker her passive power is that she can sense when people lie but she can also actively crack into people’s minds to read their thoughts. In Arkan’s case however, his active power is to stop time (which is already a bit absurd) but his passive is an invulnerability shield which seems more of a random association to make the big bad guy more threatening than something that makes sense in the lore. Catalina also gets a new active power in the form of her harpy form which allows her more direct control over other people which kind of came out of nowhere and gets developed in a rush and the overall power balance and cohesiveness of the world built up over the last 5 books kind of gets ruined by this sixth entry.

Hidden Legacy isn’t bad despite the extremely lukewarm description I make of it. Just like Kate Daniels or London Steampunk it checks every mark of the urban fantasy genre. It’s got adventure, magic, some strong handsome men, some beautiful independent women and a decent romance if a bit superficial at times but that at least doesn’t make sense the be all end all of the relationships. It gets the job done for what it is. The ending of book 6 as I said above does hint at a possible future trilogy focusing on Arabella although her character has always been the weakest, acting extremely petulant for her age which is a shame as book 6 world building issues not withstanding I would still love to read more about the world Ilona Andrews built here. If you’d asked me 4 years ago, I would have said that this whole series was an improvement over London Steampunk and miles above Kate Daniels, but looking at my more established rating system, it’s just fine and sits at a comfortable 7/10 read it, enjoy it, forget it.