Long Hot Summoning book review

Long Hot Summoning, by Tanya Huff

$2.83 plus tax at the Parkville Bookworm

Tanya Huff's novel Long Hot Summoning is the third in her hilarious Keepers series; Long Hot Summoning is preceded by Summon the Keeper and The Second Summoning. The series is sci-fi/fantasy about two sisters, high school senior Diana Hansen and her twenty-eight-year-old sister Claire, who are known as keepers- they keep the metaphysical balance. In essence, keepers keep the world from being overrun by either good or evil, and they often get summoned to sites where one or the other is trying to get through so they can fix the problem.

In Long Hot Summoning, the day Diana graduates from high school- actually, make that the second she leaves the school building- she's summoned to her very first site as an active keeper, at a mall in a neighboring town. The Powers That Be have discovered that evil, aka Hell, is trying to get into the real world from the Otherside, and they would like Diana to rectify the situation. Hell must be stopped, but Diana can't do it all herself, so she fetches her older and more experienced sister, Claire, Claire's cat Austin, and Diana's former-angel-turned-cat Sam.(The angel-cum-cat story is explained in The Second Summoning, which I also have on my shelves, for $2.83 plus tax.) The sisters band together with a group of real-live mall elves and an archetype of King Arthur that looks like a teenage heartthrob.

A fun little side story is that, while Claire and Diana are trying to stop Hell from taking over the world, Claire's boyfriend Dean has a midget basketball team, a college professor accompanied by an evil life-force-sucking mummy, and a graduate student of the professor who exclaims everything and is determined to save the professor at any risk arrive at the inn Dean and Claire run. Dean's reaction to the midget basketball team is comical. Other humorous scenes in Long Hot Summoning include the one where, after the high school counselor approaches Diana, she relates that she can hear his thoughts and that he thinks about hockey, Pamela Anderson, and occasionally, Pamela Anderson playing hockey, and when Diana's cat Sam comes home with something gross in his mouth and Diana tells him to bury it where her mom won't see it, then has to backtrack and compliment Sam on his hunting skills, although I have a feeling she was being sarcastic.

I loved Summon The Keeper. The funny scenes made it good, but the cats made it spectacular. The only thing I didn't like about the book is that it's the last one in the Keepers series. Long Hot Summoning was published circa 2001, and while Tanya Huff has published other since Long Hot Summoning hit the shelves, she hasn't published any more books in this particular series. I'd like to see what happens next.