Tag Archives: shifter romance

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Book Review: The Rejected Shifter’s Required Bride, by Brigitte Delery

I picked up a copy of Brigitte Delery‘s The Rejected Shifter’s Required Bride during a freebie event last Christmas.

the rejected shifter's required bride

Promised to a stranger in an arranged marriage masked ball he wasn’t supposed to attend. Paired for life with a monster she doesn’t know how to tame. The last thing either expected to find was love.

Wolf shifter Malin Fenren of the Dark Claw Pack should have been celebrating his first days as a happily mated future Alpha. Instead, the woman he thought was his forever mate left him at the altar for someone else and his exciting future turned into something far more horrific- a fate where he turns into the worst kind of monster he could imagine before succumbing to his own destruction. In a last ditch effort to save him from a quick decline into madness and death, Malin’s parents swap him in for a spot in the Mate Masquerade, where volunteers from each supernatural community are paired in arranged marriages with strangers to maintain peace between them all.

As part of the often-maligned human community, Isabella Thompson stepped up as a volunteer for this year’s Mate Masquerade in exchange for payment of her father’s debts. She doesn’t quite know what she’s gotten herself into, but if it saves her sisters from poverty and destitution, she’s going to make the best of things. Getting paired with a monster who might kill her at any moment was a risk she’d have to take. But falling for her assigned mate definitely wasn’t part of the plan.

This paranormal fantasy romance book was originally part of the Wicked Arrangements collaboration and is now part of the Mate Masquerade series. Each book in this series features an arranged marriage masquerade ball where participants are paired and expected to wed and bed a stranger by the end of the night.

my review

The cover is atrocious. The editing is hit or miss, often miss. The plot is pretty predictable, and the necessity of the mate-ball being a masquerade makes little sense. (It’s my understanding that this was initially written as part of a multi-author shared world involving the mate masquerade.) Despite all of that, I enjoyed this. Isabella is immensely practical, and I love a practical heroine who will just get on with what must be done. Malin is just incredibly sweet and trying to hold it together to do the right thing in what is, for him, a very challenging situation. And the sister offers a little comic relief. All in all, it makes for an endearing read.

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Book Review: Dark City Omega, by Elizabeth Stephens

I received a copy of Elizabeth StephensDark City Omega in a Renegade Romance Book Box.

dark city omega cover

When Omegas run away, the beasts of Gatamora come out to play… Echo knew that being caught by a ruling Berserker would mean becoming his pawn, a play thing to be used for her powers. That wouldn’t be her fate. She’d rather run lost through the woods forever, dangerous though they may be. But there’s something even more sinister than beasts and Berserkers lurking in the woods. Something both undead and deadly. She can’t fight it alone. She’ll have to turn to the Berserker who’s caught the trail of her scent and won’t let it go. He says she’s his. She says never. He says forever. Bones, bonds and hearts will be broken. Some battles can’t be won. Run, Omega, run.

my review

I found this a really frustrating book to read because there would be moments when I would see such potential in it. But then Stephens would ALWAYS choose to lean into the cliched, patriarchal, usually flat-out misogynistic tropes instead of the interesting, dissident, sometimes even transgressive ones her own plotline, as written, would allow for. There were times she even did this when the plot couldn’t support it, forcing the characters to enact popular kink or BDSMy acts that fit neither of the characters’ personalities up to or beyond that point.

Or, for example, making the male lead grovel satisfyingly (as he should) while the female lead shows admirable backbone in setting reasonable boundaries. Then, immediately making him disregard everything she said, each boundary, and his own just spoken promises to bypass her consent and firmly stated boundaries to force a kiss on her and declare his desires and intent (which run counter to hers and disregard the fact he is doing what she just said she didn’t want). Of course, she then just accepts it, forgives him, and picks up right where they left off because sex makes it all OK. And make no mistake, Stephens wrote this to be romantic. He wants her this badly, bla, bla, bla. It’s almost a satisfying scene, but is utterly ruined by cliches instead of giving us true introspection and character growth.

I suppose I’ve just reached a point where, as much as I once enjoyed ABO fiction, stories that uncritically place women in socially submissive, abuse-as-romance cultures are a little too on the nose for contemporary America, and I can’t suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy them anymore. But Stephens also tries to have her cake and eat it too in this regard. She wants the dark city omega photoreader to believe Adam (and supposedly future berserker heroes) truly loves and value their omega mates (can see them as equals) and that omegas are rare and valuable. But she also placed them in a world that treats omega (which correlatively is a stand-in for women, even ifthere are two token male omegas—the mechanics of their omega-ness never addressed) where omegas are considered worthless trash to be caught and thoughtlessly raped to death. This is both displayed and explicitly voiced in the book. It’s one or the other. Maybe other authors can pull it off, but it definitely didn’t gel here.

All in all, I wish I liked this a lot more than I did. I saw a lot I could have liked if Stephens was a different sort of author, writing a different sort of book.


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Book Review: Dark City Omega by Elizabeth Stephens

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Book Review: Sweet Abandon, by Sarah Urquhart

I picked up a copy of Sarah Urquhart‘s Sweet Abandon as an Amazon freebie a few years back.

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Baker Bonnie Boone has had too many bikers dip their fingers in her butter cream. She’s done with them, but when a hot as hell biker rides into town, he slowly melts the single life she thought she wanted.

Easton Young, uncomfortable as a bear shifter in the city, hit the road in search of more of his own kind. His plans are delayed the moment he walks into Firebrook’s local bakery and smells his mate. Denying her will only cause them both pain.

She drops her guard, and he sees a home in her heart. But neither are willing to let go of their carefully laid plans, leaving their love in the dust, in sweet abandon.

my review

This was sweet, and I liked that he fell first and he was growly but not a controlling alpha-hole. However, I did find him insufferable for much of the book, thinking he could have his mate without having to actually give anything up while she was expected to accept whatever scraps he tossed her way. (Of course, he wasn’t thinking of it that way. But…) Meanwhile, she was obsessively holding on to a hurt and refusing to allow herself happiness in a manner that barely made sense and certainly showed no adult emotional intelligence. They did both eventually grow past it all, though.

The real problem for me was that the whole thing was just ridiculously contrived. All the tension and conflict in the book could have been solved with a single conversation, which made it a little hard to feel deeply invested. Plus, despite being book a prequel to a new series, the Firebrook Bears series, it is pretty obviously a spinoff of something else.

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