In 2021, I picked S. Young‘s War of Hearts up as an Amazon freebie. I finally got around to reading it.
Thea Quinn has no idea what she is. All she knows is that her abilities have been a plague upon her life since she was a child. After years of suffering at the hands of a megalomaniac, Thea escaped and has been on the run ever since.
The leadership and protection of his pack are of the utmost importance to Conall MacLennan, Alpha and Chief of Clan MacLennan, the last werewolf pack in Scotland. Which is why watching his sister slowly die of a lycanthropic disease is emotional torture. When Conall is approached by a businessman who offers a cure for his sister in exchange for the use of Conall’s rare tracking ability, Conall forges an unbreakable contract with him. He has to find and retrieve the key to the cure: dangerous murderer, Thea Quinn.
Thea’s attempts to evade the ruthless werewolf are not only thwarted by the Alpha, but by outside dangers. With no choice but to rely on one another for survival, truths are revealed, intensifying a passionate connection they both fight to resist. At war with themselves and each other, Conall and Thea’s journey to Scotland forces them to face a heartrending choice between love and betrayal.
I enjoyed this. It reminded me a lot of older PNR, except that it didn’t have a toxic alpha a-hole MMC, and the FMC isn’t a doormat. (Yes, that’s a generalization about gender tropes in older PNR and doesn’t always hold true. But it was definitely the fad for a while.) I mean, it’s not wholly free of the icky genderings. The FMC still finds love but has to give up much of her power, as they so often do (and he doesn’t). She also gets awfully weepy as soon as she accepts him. But, honestly, it was so much less than is common. I’ll take any improvement I can get in this direction.
All in all, I liked the characters a lot. The world and the larger plotline seem interesting enough, and the writing is clean and easy to read. Plus, it didn’t end on a cliffhanger! The villain is pretty cliched, and the whole thing is largely predictable. There are no surprises here. But if you like earlier 2000s PNR, this one, published in 2019, will still serve the purpose.
Other Reviews:
Worse, this is very much lining up to be a `Cassidy and her crew of spunky investigators’ sort of series, and as much as I liked them all well enough (especially Chuck, who you meet toward the end), Sorren—arguably the most interesting character—is perpetually underutilized. He shows up to dispense wisdom and weapons and then fades away again (even when present).
