This is probably another novel I should never have embarked upon, but I liked the idea and I always hope for the best when starting a novel. Unfortunately, this one went wrong fast because of the author's focus on sex instead of upon a relationship.
I made it through the first third and quickly grew the feeling that this story was wrong-headed and not remotely appealing to me. I pressed on for a little while, hoping it would improve, but it just got worse. In the end (the end of the first third, anyway!), I DNF'd it for its obsession with sex, and the poor writing.
The story is of werewolf (or whatever the female term is, since the 'were' in werewolf, means man) named Marley, who has the sadly laughable last name of 'Gerwulf'. I mean really? Marley is lesbian and her friend Zara York, who she's known since high school, knows this. They know everything about each other. Yet never once have they connected or even talked about it, evidently, other than being BFFs.
This felt off to me, esspecailly since the book blurb insists that 'Marley's wolf' had identified Zara as her 'mate' the day they met. Yet here they are, both entering their thirties, and...Nothing. Got. Done. The blurb ridiculously says that "the urge to mate was strong," but this made zero sense, since as lesbians, they would not have the offpsring that mating implies, so whence this 'mating' urge? And if it's not mating, then why not use some other term? It felt like the author hadn't thoguht this through.
Don't get me wrong. Anyone who's read anything reasonably deep about the natural world knows that humans did not invent queer. We like to think we did, but the animal - and even plant - world had long had queer before we ever evolved. There are gay relationships all over nature; lesbian ones; bisexual ones, and even transgender arrived in nature long before humans thought they'd invented it. Hell, I just read in the news very recently that California condors have been shown to have reproduced asexually, which was not something science was aware they could do - not until now! Let's hear it for lesbian condors! Yeay!
There's nothing new under the sun, so the problem here isn't with a gay shifter relationship. It's with the 'mating compulsion' which implies a drive to produce offpsring, which will never materialize - not with each of the main characters as a biological parent. So whence this urge? What does it mean exactly? This would have been the perfect place for some self-examination by the main characters: a book like this one.
But the author never touches it! Why not? She never deals with it; never tries to explain it, and never discusses it. It's like she put this out there blindly as a wolf prerogative - a dominant wolf necessity - without thinking it through, and without even seeing the beautiful story possibilities that were here. It's like she was so obsessed with the sex that she never gave a minute's thought to the people she had created and was putting through this lackluster story. That's why this made no sense to me. It felt like a profligate waste of a glorious story opportunity - one that I am now going to have to write, and I don't even like shifter stories that much!
The blurb asks stupidly, "will Marley be able to protect Zara while resisting the call to mate" and the answer is hell no! They jump each other's bones the very first night they're stranded through the tired cliché of sharing a bed to stay warm. It's tedious. And no, there's no 'mating'. They have sex, but that's not what 'mating' implies!
So these two women set sail on a yatch, get caught in a storm which damages the engine, and shuts down all the electronics on their boat, and so they're adrift together until they get rescued. It would be the perfect place to explore a real relationship in depth, but this author sadly takes the path most traveled and therefore least interesting, and she squanders even that journey on sex scenes that read like a thesaurus of body parts. It's not erotic, not romantic, not exciting, and not entertaining, and I can't commend it at all.
