Review Detail

If you come into The Demon Catchers of Milan expecting a fast-paced plot, intense exorcism scenes, a brassy heroine, and swoony Italian romance, you will be disappointed. This book has none of those things. However, The Demon Catchers of Milan is still a pretty good book, all things told.

The book opens with the main character, Mia, getting possessed by a demon. Her estranged Italian relatives are then called in to exorcise her, and then they take her back to Milan with them afterward for her own protection. After that, Mia sits around a lot, reads books, becomes quite fluent in Italian in less than three months, deals with the demon again (he didn’t like being evicted from her body), and at the end has to make a choice about her future.

It was a slow moving book, yes, but it was actually pretty interesting. Exorcism and demon catching are two things one doesn’t see much in the paranormal genre, so I liked that fresh element. And while no, the exorcisms (there were three) themselves weren’t very action-packed or thrilling, those scenes were still really well executed.

Toward the end of this book, I started thinking how this was like a better version of Anna and the French Kiss (American transplant in European city), with a less whiny female character who had real issues to deal with. Beyer did a great job of portraying her setting, and while I never felt info-dumped, Milan was a very real place throughout the course of this book.
One interesting thing about this book was the lack of romance. Mia had a crush for her cousin, Emilio, but he was too old for her and already taken. And then there was this Satanist fellow, Lucifero (not his real name), who appeared only to disappear. Honestly, I was really happy about that, since finding your soul mate should never be very important for a 16 year old girl who’s being chased by a demon.

It did seem, though, that Beyers wasn’t able to complete a lot of her novel. It felt like there were plot holes, and some characters weren’t fleshed out. Honestly, all of those problems could have been solved with another 100 pages or so.
Even though The Demon Catchers of Milan isn’t the norm for the paranormal genre, it was still a fun read. I enjoyed the storyline and Mia’s immersion into demon catching and Milan. The story itself could have been more rounded, but it wasn’t bad.