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Book Review: Fierce Cowboy Wolf, by Kait Ballenger

I won a copy of Kait Ballenger‘s Fierce Cowboy Wolf.

fierce cowboy wolf cover

She’s all he wanted, but was unable to claim…until now.

Sierra Cavanaugh has worked her whole life to become the first female elite warrior in Grey Wolf history. With her nomination finally put forward, all she needs is the pack council’s approval. But those stuffy old wolves refuse to elect her unless she finds herself a mate.

Packmaster Maverick Grey was reconciled to spending the rest of his life alone. Now, upon entering into treaty renegotiations with the other Seven Range clans, he needs the elite warrior vacancy filled—and fast. If Sierra needs a mate, this is his chance to claim her. But Sierra has an agenda of her own for their union, and they’ll need to work together against the assassin intent on barring the deal. For these two rivals, the only thing more dangerous than fighting the enemy at their backs is battling the war of seduction building between them…

my review

*Mild spoiler warning*

I’m very middle of the road on how I feel about this book. There were some things I liked a lot, some things I didn’t like at all, some things I thought I’d hate that turned out to be appreciable instead, and some things I thought I’d love but Ballenger managed to sully. That’s a mixed bag of feelings not easy to get on paper.

I guess the best I can do is take them one at a time, even if some of them overlap. I liked Sierra a lot. I liked that she was independent, forward thinking, and willing to pursue her own desires. I like watching strong men realize a woman is their emotional salvation, as Maverick eventually did. It’s one of those ‘Yes, it’s problematic but it ticks my sexy buttons’ sort of things. I liked that the sex didn’t get all dominant and submissive, undermining Sierra’s right to her strength, as was really popular in romance for a while.

I disliked that, even if Ballenger was willing to set aside many of the icky tropes so common in romance, she wasn’t willing to set aside the expectation of virginity one. She did try to give reasons Sierra was still a virgin well past the age one would expect it. But it still felt like a ‘qualifier of female purity’ line that she wasn’t willing to cross.

And as this plot point played out, it came to a scene where Sierra embarrassingly admitted her virginity to Maverick and asked him to teach her to pleasure a man. And I wanted to DNF the book right there. I thought, “Shit, she’s going to play the ingénue (which doesn’t fit her character at all) and I’m going to have to sit through all the trainee sex while Maverick goes all alpha dominant in the bedroom and teaches her about her own body.” I hate that. But Ballenger surprised me. She didn’t take the well worn and predictable path. Instead, Maverick refused and Sierra stepped up and negotiated for her desires. She knew her body, knew what she wanted, and refused to be denied her just rewards. I liked this.

I liked that throughout the book Sierra championed for women’s rights and Maverick was in support of them. I disliked that when he finally managed to push through all the equal rights changes the pack needed to bring them into the modern age, it was described through Sierra’s thoughts as:

Sierra cradled the pile of papers in her hands, staring down at them in awe before she glanced back up at him, tears pouring down her face. He’d done it. He’d placed her wants, her needs, and desires before all other duty and kept his promise.

I mean, woo-hoo for social equality. But I’d have appreciated if he’d passed all the reforms because he thought it was best for the pack or believed in them himself. Instead, he just gave his wife what she wanted in order to get her to forgive him for a past transgression. It seriously undermined the validity of the changes, or at least his deserved virtue for making them.

I liked that Sierra stood up for the idea of women being more than breeders and put her career first. But I disliked that Ballenger then ended the book with her pregnant, which back-pedaled the idea entirely. Sierra can claim she and women are good for more than popping out babies, but apparently the reader can’t be trusted to recognize a happy ending if it doesn’t involve said babies.

I liked the easily readable writing. But I grew to hate the “cowboy” and “warrior” titles. It felt really REALLY forced, frequently dropped in whenever Ballenger wanted to evoke the ascetic of a cowboy but too often not actually relevant to the scene. Here’s an example:

Her own eyes flashed to her wolf as she bared her teeth and let out a snarl of her own. She wasn’t intimidated by him in the least. “This is my fight. Not yours. Cowboy or not, you’re not leaving me standing here in you dust as you ride off into the fucking sunset. We do this together or don’t do this at all.”

The problem is that this was a scene where they’d just discovered who the villain was and he’d instructed another wolf to protect her while he went to kill the bad guy. What does that have to do with cowboy? “Pack-leader or not” would have fit the context, “Alpha wolf or not” would have made sense, even “Husband or not” would have matched the scene. But cowboy didn’t. I can’t even make the reference to riding into the sunset bring it into relevance.

And this happened over and over again, “cowboy” being dropped in to remind the reader that Maverick is apparently a cowboy (as if the constant readjusting of Stetsons or mention of cowboy boots or ranch-work wasn’t enough). And maybe it wasn’t, since what Maverick was was a werewolf pack-leader who owned a ranch. Giving him the cowboy title too and trying to make it dominant felt like Ballenger was sticking a name-tag to his chest and kept instructing the reader to look at it instead of the actual character development. What it felt like was that Ballenger had a note to remind herself to drop the word in every 25 pages or so to make the title of the book relevant. Similarly, Maverick’s random use of “warrior” to address Sierra lost meaning after a while.

All in all, the mixed feelings on this book drops it right in the middle of liked and disliked for me. This was the first Ballenger book I’ve read (which means I’ve not read the rest of this series, despite this being a 4th book). I think I’ll give her another change, gather a little more data before I decide how I feel about her books in general.

fierce cowboy wolf cover


Other Reviews:

Fierce Cowboy Wolf (Seven Range Shifters)by Kait Ballenger-review

Review: Fierce Cowboy Wolf by Kait Ballenger

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Book Review: Love Bites, by Cynthia St. Aubin

I picked up a copy of Cynthia St. Aubin‘s Love Bites when it was an Amazon freebie recently.

love bites cynthia st. aubin

A girl’s gotta eat—and so do her three cats. Recently divorced art history grad student Hanna Harvey has just fibbed her way into a job as the assistant to dangerously drool-worthy art gallery owner Mark Abernathy. For Hanna, working in the field she desperately loves provides the perfect opportunity to begin putting her life back together. Soon her cheese budget is in the black and her feline life partners are no longer eyeing her like a six-foot can of Fancy Feast.

But when her boss’s lady friends start turning up dead, Hanna finds herself in the cross hairs of a murder investigation. Even worse, hunky homicide detective James Morrison fears hers might be the next body he discovers.

With the “help” of the gallery’s quirky cast of resident artists, Hanna will have to hunt down the truth about Abernathy’s dark secret—before it hunts her.

my review

I’m going to start with a complaint. The title has no relevance to the story. Sure, it’s pithy and sharp, but there is no love or romance in the book. The main character hooks up with one guy and there’s a another that she’d like to, but there is no romance or even thoughts of love. Nor is there anyone who is love-averse such that the term Love Bites might be inferred to be in the pejorative. I understand the author has a naming convention going on with the series (Love BLANKs), but a title of Love Bites has no relevance to the story in this actual book.

Ok, moving past my admittedly pedantic complaint…I enjoyed this. I thought it was a lot of fun. I appreciated Hanna’s sense of humor and the banter between her and most everyone. Sure, there was a lot of “no one would actually say that in that situation,” but I’m not reading an urban fantasy book for the realism of it. Hanna and crew made me smile.

And while I might comment that there’s no love in the story yet, I did very much liked that Hanna was allowed to have a hook up (even sans love interest), enjoy it, and I didn’t have to sit through any passages of shame (be it from her or anyone else). She was just allowed to be a sexual adult and I appreciated the simplicity of it.

The book does end just about the time the plot looks like it might be moving past set-up. But I’d be happy to leap into the next book.

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Other Reviews:

https://storytellersbymarlou.wordpress.com/2020/11/03/love-bites-by-cynthia-st-aubin-book-review/

https://www.dreamcomereview.com/arc-review-once-upon-a-werewolf-by-cynthia-st-aubin/

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Book Review: The Hollow Gods, by A. J. Vrana

A.J. Vrana‘s The Hollow Gods‘ sequel, The Echoed Realm, was featured on Sadie’s Spotlight a while back. The post included some absolutely gorgeous art for the series and I’ve seen even more since then. (I mean check out the covers of these special edition copies!) Beautiful! So, I borrowed an audio copy of The Hollow Gods through Hoopla to give the series a shot. It was narrated by Eva Kaminsky.

audio cover the hollow gods

Black Hollow is a town with a dark secret.

For centuries, residents have foretold the return of the Dreamwalker—an ominous figure from local folklore said to lure young women into the woods and possess them. Yet the boundary between fact and fable is blurred by a troubling statistic: occasionally, women do go missing. And after they return, they almost always end up dead.

When Kai wakes up next to the lifeless body of a recently missing girl, his memory blank, he struggles to clear his already threadbare conscience.

Miya, a floundering university student, experiences signs that she may be the Dreamwalker’s next victim. Can she trust Kai as their paths collide, or does he herald her demise?

And after losing a young patient, crestfallen oncologist, Mason, embarks on a quest to debunk the town’s superstitions, only to find his sanity tested.

A maelstrom of ancient grudges, forgotten traumas, and deadly secrets loom in the foggy forests of Black Hollow. Can three unlikely heroes put aside their fears and unite to confront a centuries-old evil? Will they uncover the truth behind the fable, or will the cycle repeat?

my review

I liked this quite a lot. I’ll admit it wasn’t quite as intense as I’d expected, but I enjoyed it all the same. It was very atmospheric.

I liked the way Kai never truly tried to act human and how Miya accepted him for it all the same. And I liked the way Miya showed vulnerability, but also wasn’t a pushover and Kai appreciated that about her. I understood Mason’s difficulty and obsessive need to find answers. Though I thought his reluctance to believe lasted well past when it should have.

The prose is a little on the purple side. But I have a pretty high tolerance for that, often enjoying writing others complain about being too full of adjectives, similes, and metaphors. The story also wrapped around itself in a pleasant way, coming full circle and concluding nicely. But I never quite grasped The First’s motives, Madrix’s but not The Firsts. (I’m not certain I spelled that name right, since I never saw it in writing.)

All in all, I plan to read the second book too. But I’m not leaping straight in at the moment.

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Other Reviews:

https://dinipandareads.home.blog/2020/07/31/blog-tour-review-the-hollow-gods-by-a-j-vrana/

The Hollow Gods by A. J. Vrana – Review & Blog Tour

 

https://paperfury.com/the-hollow-gods-a-j-vrana-review/