The Accidental Druid’s Guide to Binding Demons Review

The Accidental Druid’s Guide to Binding Demons by Kari Gregg | Amazon | Goodreads | My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Blurb

After testing as mundane, David just wanted to earn his botany degree and enjoy his ordinary life. He didn’t count on a First Blood demon portaling into his part-time job to bind with anyone near that dormant nexus, though. Bad luck for David—demons only bind with magicals.

The jig is up.

Now outed as a druid, David navigates the Cumberland metro’s perilous magical community while exploring his link to that demon, Jae. David’s father, Teddy Mace, had closely guarded secrets, including how strong David’s powers were as a child, but what else had Teddy hidden? What got him killed? And once Jae helps David decipher his dad’s lost grimoire, will the murderers target them next?

Add in David’s godfather and Towpath Guild Boss John Griffith, an edible-loving imp sent to be David’s familiar, and frenemy roommate Finnegan who is inarguably the worst fire mage ever, and David’s dream of a normal life spectacularly implodes.

Whoever dismembered Teddy Mace will have to stand in line if they want to eliminate David to keep that cold case arctic. He and Jae are hard to catch. Fully bound? Killing this new demon/magical team may be impossible…if they can stop pissing each other off first.

Content violence, blood magic, explicit male/male sex, generational trauma, parental estrangement, alcoholism recovery…All these people are super fucked-up. But you don’t want to miss necromancy, the dragon of Pittsburgh, and a twelve-year-old oracle who can be bought with video games and chalupas.

No part of this work was created with generative AI.
131,160 Digital Words

Imaginative Urban Fantasy

The Accidental Druid’s Guide to Binding Demons, a thrilling roller-coaster ride of urban fantasy, will take you to rural Maryland and into a world of magical and mundane alike embroiled in an adventure with high stakes for all.

David

The book opens as a normal-seeming David, a young college student focusing on environmental science, heads to work. His job keeps him active at the local botanical garden. He thinks he’ll have a regular day at work, but his boss sends him out to investigate a grove of oaks. Everything seems mundane in that moment. However, it’s not long until the reader learns his secret: David has hidden his magical identity for more than a decade. Why? Someone killed his father and David, who has magic as strong and powerful as that of his father, is not safe if everyone knows he’s following in his father’s footsteps.

David is a complicated character. He doesn’t trust the magic community, for good reason. Someone killed his father because of his powers and whatever it was he was up to, secrets well hidden in his last grimoire. David also distrusts his mother, someone he’s cut out of his life for years due to childhood trauma. She reappears though and seems to be trying to make amends.

David is a lot of things. But he’s never not been a druid. So I don’t know how accidental he is, to be frank. His power has been there, latent, this whole time, and he always knew it. Hiding it did him a disservice. Because when he is in danger, he doesn’t have the practiced skill of a trained druid. He only has the semi-controlled, half-developed skill of someone with a lot of power but not a lot of know-how to do much with it. I wish he’d been able to practice and hone his skill in secret so he isn’t caught quite so unaware when Jae drops into his life and screws all his hard-earned peace to hell.

Jae

Jae is a First Blood demon who plops through a nexus gravely injured and into David’s life. Does David know what he’s doing when he promises he’ll get Jae to safety? Did Jae set him up so he’d make a promise and set the binding in motion? The author does not answer these questions in the story. I definitely wondered how it was that Jae appeared just where David would be so he could bind with him.

Demons are different from humans, with different cultures, norms, and powers. Jae is something of an enigma, prickly and glowering but with a hidden underbelly of softness. He’s nice to children and animals. Jay is definitely not like the other demons who have come into the human realm from other portals and brought utter destruction upon all who witnessed it.

Jae tends to call humans stupid, and I guess to him they are, but I liked it a lot when he got reamed out by the young oracle to stop being such a douchecanoe. Someone had to say it, I wish it didn’t happen so far into the novel. I didn’t like him calling David stupid so much.

Magical World Overlaid

Urban fantasy combines fantasy plot devices and magical characters and places them in a familiar world. It combines the out-of-the-ordinary with the familiar. With a backdrop of Cumberland, Maryland, The Accidental Druid’s Guide strikes that balance well. Descriptions pepper chapters of actual landmarks and details that transport the reader with their realism, all while an exciting adventure plays out with witches, sorcerers, mages sharing the city with fae, nymphs, imps, and demons. But maybe the demons are less welcome.

Cumberland, Maryland

The author’s love of the setting elevates the city of Cumberland and the countryside that surrounds it from just a backdrop to something important. The setting almost seems like a character in the story. I loved this. I had never heard of this place before I started this book and now I want to vacation there. It’s gorgeous, I looked it up.

At one point, David sneaks into town so his magical abilities can be properly tested and registered. Danger everywhere, demons and witches alike actively hunt him. David can’t escape their sights because they are unhappy that a newly bound human and demon encroach on territory that has been uncontested for some time. And they will go to lengths to get them out of the way before the binding can be cemented before David’s powers can be tested.

Reading the descriptions made the location seem so realistic, so I got curious and looked up the downtown area. I could track David’s perilous journey to the guild headquarters on Google Maps. Like I said, the love the author has for this area shines out so brilliantly in the story, that it sometimes reads as a love letter to this part of Maryland. I loved this. I loved that the setting came to life so vividly I wanted to track David’s journey up the Great Allegany Passage to meet the dragon.

Details, details, details

Worldbuilding is sparse in The Accidental Druid’s Guide. Urban fantasy tends to just roll with it, and not stop and say, hey reader, this is how it is. Supernatural elements plop down into the familiar world sans page-long prose to explain why, most of the time. It can be confusing. There’s a whole magical world to overlay over our familiar world. Whole cultures and societies subtly shift to make room for magic. But often that comes without much explanation. Without knowing that this is how urban fantasy tends to be, the reader could be left scratching their head. Sometimes details are just thrown into the mix. My advice is to just keep reading. Don’t think of the hows or what-ifs. Take it at face value.

Overall Impression

I loved this adventure. Loved. It. But I want more. I want to read about Skip and Andrew, for example, to follow John Griffith and his reconciliation with his son. Henry, I want to watch Henry grow up and come into his powers. I don’t know if this author normally writes series, or if Accidental Druid will be a one-off story. I enjoyed the setting so much that I’d love to read more about Cumberland, Maryland, and its colorful community of magical and mundane citizens. So I’m hoping for more!.

I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.

MM Romance Reviews

I write reviews on my blog, Goodreads, Bookbub, Amazon, and more. If you want me to read and review your upcoming novel read my review policy and submit a contact form.