Chaos Choreography by Seanan McGuire

I am skipping around in a series again, and this time, it appears to be a series where that's perfectly okay. I read the third book first, then jumped ahead to the fifth. While that may mean I know how previous books turned out, I'm still eager to read them, but don't feel like I lost anything in jumping around. Each book feels quite self-contained.

Of course, not only is this book about cryptids, this particular one is also about a So You Think You Can Dance-style reality show, and since I watched that obsessively for a few seasons, you could easily guess that I'm all in. Verity Price, who was on a previous season of Dance or Die in disguise, made it to the top four, but not to the very top. She's back for an all-star season, and for her, it's a last crack at maybe getting to explore a life that is not protecting cryptids and humans from each other.

She's a different person from her first try, though, with a new husband in tow as she dons her red wig and scanty costume and comes back. The show hostess is a dragon princess, and is at least a little behind the reunion show, wanting Verity to help procure a husband dragon for her daughters. (Many of the cryptid species seem to have female members who look like humans, and males who are very, very different. In the case of a dragon, big as a Greyhound bus different.)

But soon after the show starts, Verity finds a couple of just-eliminated fellow contestants truly eliminated, that is to say, dead, and their blood used to try to summon a snake god, which Verity is quite sure would be a very bad idea. Shortly thereafter, her grandmother Alice shows up, looking younger than any of them, and you know the shit is getting ready to truly hit the fan. (As I write this, from Twitter I know that the real Alice, a cat, has or will shortly leave the world, and it made reading the book a bit more poignant than it would otherwise be.)

I cannot dance to save my life, but boy do I like shows like this - not Dancing with the Stars, just people who actually, genuinely know how to dance. It's got a good mixture of camaraderie and rivalry, just like I'd hope.

And, of course, snake cultists killing dancers. Oh, and the Aeslin mice, who continue to be delightful!  I had this and another book with me when I worked a medical school exam a month or so ago, and an older woman who was also working it had forgotten her book. Since I was halfway through the other one, I loaned her Chaos Choreography for the evening. I wouldn't have pegged her as a genre reader, and wasn't sure what she'd make of it - as it turned out, she loved all of it she read, but particularly the mice. They are an inspired creation, and enliven every scene they're in.

But back to the snake cultists. With the help of other contestants who might only appear human, as well as her husband and grandmother, Verity tries to find out who is behind it before the next elimination round, only to find herself up against a very big snake indeed.

These are not deep books, but they're fun and entertaining and I would highly, highly recommend them. Particularly if you love things that go bump in the night.