Tag Archives: werewolf

Review of Bitten and Stolen (The Otherworld #1-2), by Kelley Armstrong

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I borrowed Bitten and Stolen (by Kelley Armstrong) from my local library.

Description:
Elena Michaels seems like the typically strong and sexy modern woman, She lives with her architect boyfriend, writes for a popular newspaper, and works out at the gym. She’s also a werewolf.

Elena has done all she can to assimilate to the human world, but the man whose bite changed her existence forever, and his legacy, continue to haunt her. Thrown into a desperate war for survival that tests her allegiance to a secret clan of werewolves, Elena must recon with who, and what, she is in this passionate, page-turning novel that begins the Women of the Otherworld series.

Review:
I liked but didn’t love this. I liked the idea of it. I enjoyed Elena’s stubborn nature and could relate to her not wanting to forgive someone for doing something that diverted her whole life, even if by accident. Plus, I like Armstrong’s writing style. But something about the whole thing just never wowed me. Perhaps it’s just a matter of the book being from 2010, so it feels like old news now days.

Description:
Elena Michaels, the female werewolf who finally came to terms with her feral appetites in Bitten, is back—and she has company: Katzen the sorcerer, Leah the telekinetic half-demon, Cassandra the vampire, and Savannah the twelve-year-old witch who is just coming into her considerable powers.

Vampires, demons, shamans, witches—in Stolen they all exist, and they’re all under attack. An obsessed tycoon with a sick curiosity is well on his way to amassing a private collection of supernaturals, and plans to harness their powers for himself—even if it means killing them. For Elena, kidnapped and imprisoned deep underground, separated from her Pack, unable to tell her friends from her enemies, choosing the right allies is a matter of life and death.

Review:
I enjoyed the first book in this series. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t regret reading it. I almost didn’t finish Stolen. I pretty much hated it from start to finish. Armstrong lowered herself to using TSTL stunts to put Elena in danger and move the plot alone. While in book one Elena was strong and stubborn, here she talked a big talk but just acquiesced over and over again. Even her escape wasn’t really of her own doings. I have the third book in the series, but I don’t think I’ll bother reading it.

Book Review of Pick Your Teeth With My Bones, by Carrie Newberry

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I won a copy of Carrie Newberry‘s Pick Your Teeth With My Bones through LibraryThing.

Description from Goodreads:
Tattoos. Scars. Wild black-and-silver hair. A near-permanent scowl. A collection of knives, and a vocabulary to make an oil rig captain blush like a virgin. Not to mention the tail. No one ever accuses shape-shifter Kellan Faolanni of being beautiful, but she’s very good at her job. Until now.

Kellan is a member of the secret Sankhain society, protectors of a deep and ancient forest magic, and their most devout warrior. When a man appears, smelling of Earl Gray tea and old books, he unravels secrets of the Sankhain that should no longer exist, secrets Kellan lives to protect. With the help of Tony, another Sankha, and her dog Galen, Kellan uses her unique sense of smell to follow the trail of lies leading to the traitor bartering Sankhain secrets. Answers hide in the very heart of the forest. What she uncovers there will shake her world to the core.

Kellan is over two hundred years old, and she’s living proof that you’re never too old to learn who you are.

Review:
This wasn’t wholly bad. It had an interesting idea, but it also had several elements that irritated me. The most obvious of which was the “strong woman” equals emotionally stunted, angry woman. I see this all the time. Authors want to write a strong, warrior woman, but they don’t know how to craft a warrior, except to give them male characteristics. As if a woman can’t possess female qualities and still be strong and warrior-like. The result is a woman so angry, sarcastic and emotionally illiterate that the reader is left wondering how she’s lived 200+ years.

What’s worse, she’d been in a sexual relationship with her boss for 180+ years without ever realizing that she wasn’t an equal in that relationship. She was so incapable of forethought and rational behavior that a 24(ish) year old boy showed up and she basically handed all decision-making off to him. Pair all this with the fact that she had lustful thoughts about every pretty man she encountered and formed unwanted attachments, and it made her feel stupid and child-like, as if she couldn’t control her temper, her thoughts, her actions, or her libido.

I’ll grant that a lot of the banter was funny and I do like the idea behind the world. I also appreciated the presence of some racial and sexual diversity in the cast. Even if of the four LGBT characters, the only gay man was mauled, one of the lesbians died and one turned out to be a villain. (That’s not really a resounding success for the LGBT crowd. There’s a trope named Bury Your Gays for a reason. This is sadly a rather common outcome of LGBT characters.)

All in all, I liked the idea of this book but thought it’s presentation was clumsy enough to detract from my enjoyment of it.

Mission: Improper

Book Review of Mission: Improper (London Steampunk: The Blue Blood Conspiracy #1), by Bec McMaster

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I snagged a copy of Bec McMaster‘s Mission: Improper from Amazon.

Description from Goodreads:
Three years ago, London society changed forever, with a revolution placing the widowed Queen firmly on the throne her blue blood husband tried to take from her. Humans, verwulfen and mechs are no longer considered the lesser classes, but not everybody is happy with the new order… 

Entire families have gone missing in the East End. When Caleb Byrnes receives an invitation to join the Company of Rogues as an undercover agent pledged to protect the crown, he jumps at the chance to find out who, or what, is behind the disappearances. Hunting criminals is what the darkly driven blue blood does best, and though he prefers to work alone, the opportunity is too good to resist. 

The problem? He’s partnered with Ingrid Miller, the fiery and passionate verwulfen woman who won a private bet against him a year ago. Byrnes has a score to settle, but one stolen kiss and suddenly the killer is not the only thing Byrnes is interested in hunting. 

Soon they’re chasing whispered rumours of a secret project gone wrong, and a monster that just might be more dangerous than either of them combined. The only way to find out more is to go undercover among the blue blood elite… But when their hunt uncovers a mysterious conspiracy, Byrnes and Ingrid must set aside their age-old rivalry if they have any chance at surviving a treacherous plot.

Review:
This was ok, not great for me, but not too bad either. It’s the sort of book that tempts me, but generally disappoints me in the end. It presents a strong-willed, self-reliant woman, one that even takes charge in the bedroom. But then always somehow turns the plotting just so, leaving her waiting passively to be claimed by the man. So close to something I love, just to turn into something that annoys me.

But I still might have enjoyed this a lot, McMaster’s can write well, except for a SERIOUS PET PEEVE. Some authors and/or publishers have this infuriating habit of looking at a running series and, I don’t know, deciding not enough people will but a sixth book in a series. So, they go, “Hey, let’s just make it a spinoff series and then we can call it book 1 and people who haven’t read the previous 5 books will still buy it.” Yay, sounds great. NO.

You see, Mission: Improper is labeled book 1. But it is book 6. Sure, I could follow the plot. But I could definitely feel I was missing a lot. All the characters knew one another. They had and discussed history that I’m fairly sure was the plot of past books in the London Steampunk series. I never felt I got to know the main characters, because they had already met before the start of this book. It’s a continuation of something. While technically this book stands on its own, you feel the lack of past books A LOT. And that’s seriously annoying when you are reading a ‘BOOK 1.’