Plot
This book is about a young woman named Vivian Gandillon. She’s a
loup-garoux, or a sort of fancy werewolf. She’s 16 years old, and her father
died about a year ago, and a bit of their pack with him. So they’ve moved to
somewhere safer. Vivian meets this young man in her school, a human boy, and
falls for him. And she can’t be with a human, because, you know, she’s a
werewolf. And also there is a gruesome murder, and the pack worries that the
cops will get onto them.
Thoughts
I didn’t really like it very much. There are pros and cons definitely.
There are some good things about Vivian as a young woman, and I like the
werewolf aspect, but there are also some gross things.
So my pros and cons. Vivian is a very beautiful young girl, and she’s
very confident. She knows she’s pretty, and it makes her tough, it doesn’t make
her too vain and conceited. It sort of annoyed me that she used her beauty for
everything. She was focused on it all
the time. She uses it all the time. Which annoyed me. Another good thing, she
is sexually active, and it’s something she’s never shamed for. She’s just this
16-year-old who’s very comfortable with her body and her sexuality.
Aiden, the human boy, annoyed me, but I think it’s because of how he is
around Vivian. The love story is so insta-love. It’s like Aiden sees Vivian,
and goes, hubba-hubba, and thus loves her. And Vivian thinks, he’s cute, and
“different” or whatever. Because he’s an emo dude who is interested in like
witches and stuff. I didn’t really like the love. It’s also a relationship in
the “Twilight” vein, although, this came before Twilight. They date for a
couple of months and they are passionately, psychotically in love and when it
goes wrong everything falls apart. I just felt like shaking Vivian and
shouting; “you are 16, he’s a fucking idiot, get over it, this isn’t
everything! YOU HARDLY KNOW HIM!”
I also think it tried to do a little too much. It’s just like 250-odd
page book, and a lot of stuff happens, a little too much all the time. So that
frustrated me, a lot.
Also, this isn’t really a beef with this book, well it is, but it’s more
with the genre in general. Why, oh why, in all werewolf books I’ve read are the
male werewolves stronger/more powerful than the female werewolves? As far as I
know in real wolf packs the wolves are quite equal and the power dynamic is
that they share power and responsibility, there’s one alpha male and one alpha
female. To be fair, this book has this, but the females basically just fight
over the alpha guy. They’re quite a bit smaller and weaker than the males. I
realize it’s common in nature that males are bigger than stronger than females,
but this is FANTASY, can one fantasy writer, once, make the sexes equal when it
comes to werewolves? ONCE! You’re making it up, make your own fucking
mythology, BAH! I am probably doing a big disservice to the fantasy writers out
there who don’t push their fantasy creatures into tired gender roles, it just
really annoy me when they do. So please recommend other urban fantasy books
with slightly more progressive gender roles.
Finally
I gave this two stars, I wasn’t overly impressed. It was fine. There
were ups and downs, sadly the downs outweighed the ups. So, yeah, it was fine,
but nothing more.
