Reviews and Comments

Short Version: The core story and characters are good. The friends-to-lovers storyline and romance was good. The inevitable sex scene was decent. I'm interested in seeing what comes from this author as her skills develop, but it feels very much like a first novel.

Details:

However, there were a lot of new writer things that really broke me out of the story. Mostly it came down a lack of narrative time between mental states. A happy conversation rapidly turns unhappy when a stressful topic is accidentally mentioned, but then it's suddenly all good again.

The protagonist has convinced herself for a long time that expressing her feelings to her love interest (the pack alpha) will have terrible consequences for their relationship and the pack, but then within hours of a conversation about it with a friend - and essentially no time to internalize anything - she's managed to completely overturn those beliefs.

The world is fine, but there are so many things mentioned but not explained. There are werewolves, vampires, mermaids, werebobcats, werebears, humans, and who knows what else all just hang out and live around each other with no more problems than humans in the real world.

It feels wildly implausible to me that such diverse peoples - many of whom have strong ties to animal impulses - would have no more issues living and working side-by-side than humans do. I might be able to buy it if there was some sort of explanation, but there's literally none.

In the end I think I would have preferred it if there were about 100 more pages to fill in all the things in the world, and in people's backstories that are mentioned but not explained in any way. I want more time for characters to go between seemingly opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, and time for new ideas to be internalized and processed by them.

Short version: Like popcorn, it's a simple fun read that manages to rise above its all-too-common trope.

The core trope: Strong female protagonist with special ability / power gets embroiled in something dramatic, encounters hot and angry werewolf man, who helps address the central plot problem.

She's irrationally attracted to him even when he's being an ass-hole and the context is anything but horny-making.

He's irrationally mad at her, but ultimately forced to accept that she's right, and together they stop the bad guy.

I'm happy to report there's no hot vampire competing for her affections, and the protagonist and werewolf don't actually have sex before the book ends. 🤯

I'm happier to report that it rises above the standard crap that's written around this trope in many ways.

Kerri has written some unique characters, and an interesting new world setting where werewolves & witches are a significant part of government, at least as far as Australia is concerned, and wild magic sources are things witches protect for the good of all.

The main character's a low-powered witch with a human familiar who's just trying to run a coffee shop & stay hidden from her family.

Her familiar is a dark skinned "amazonian" hottie who is well written, but the story would be 1000x better if she was the love interest and they were just trying to have a happy life together instead of the tropey stuff about deep angry voices being hot despite all rational thought.

Honestly, the romantic interest subplot with the werewolf is the only real problem with this book.

If you're looking for a fun urban fantasy read, and can overlook that, I actually recommend it.