I picked up a copy of Jasmine Mas‘ Cruel Shifterverse series (Psycho Shifters) as an Amazon freebie. I purchased Psycho Fae and Psycho Beasts.

Fight like a girl…or a shifter of lore.

After growing up with nothing, I’ve finally found my path to freedom: I’m a shifter, an elite soldier who transforms into a monster.

All I have to do is survive.

I didn’t count on my three 6’5 roommates. Covered in tattoos, jeweled, and horned, these are like no men I’ve ever dealt with before.

They don’t think I belong.
They don’t think I’m strong enough for war.
They don’t think I can fight.

I’m about to prove them wrong.

The only problem, can I survive them discovering the secrets of my past? In the battle for life and death, everyone is so much more than they seem.

Jax, Ascher, and Cobra are going to be devastated when they discover my truth…just wait until they see my shifted form.

I read all of these back to back, so I’ll just review them as one. All in all, I thought this series began well, but it went downhill quickly. The whole thing started out bonkers and over the top, and I enjoyed it. But then the author just built on that theme, making it more bonkers and more ridiculous. Eventually, the jokes no longer felt like jokes. It was all just too slapstick to enjoy. It felt very much like Mas just needed an editor or BFF or someone to pull her back from the edge and suggest a little moderation. Plus, the plot of book three is basically a book two redux. I’d never go so far as to say I disliked it. But the series definitely lost any cache it might have started with.

But worst of all was just how strongly the author leaned into the ‘every woman except the heroine and her friends are worthless, slutty, and untrustworthy.’ The older I get, the less tolerant I am of this dynamic. And Mas went hard for it here. There are several passages in which we are explicitly told women are nothing but meaningless sluts with no worth. *Several* And those are just the times we’re told outright. We’re also shown over and over and over and over again, as every other female to grace the pages is either trying to get one of the men to sleep with her, betraying the heroine, or just evil in some other fashion. As a female reader, I just don’t enjoy filling my entertainment with paragraph after paragraph of how worthless my sex (and by extension) I am.

If I’m honest, it feels like a mark of immaturity.  Like the pick-me girls in high school who haven’t yet grown up and done the internal work of weeding out their own internalized misogyny. Could female authors maybe grow past doing the patriarchy’s job of them? This in NO WAY endears me to the heroine (or the author).

If I came across the rest of the series for free, I might read it to see what happens to Aron. But I’m not going out of my way for it.

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