Review: Forever Werewolf/​Moon Kissed

Posted by Cyn | Filed under Book Reviews, Reading

Forever Werewolf: Forever Werewolf\Moon KissedFor­ever Were­wolf: For­ever Werewolf\Moon Kissed by Michele Hauf

My rat­ing: 1 of 5 stars

Full dis­clo­sure: I was given a copy of this book to review. I’m glad I didn’t buy it. I imag­ine I might have been harsher.

In For­ever Were­wolf, Tryst is just deliv­er­ing a pack­age to Wulf­siege on behalf of his father’s secu­rity com­pany when he gets trapped there by an avalanche. He doesn’t mind, though, because the recip­i­ent of that pack­age has a lus­cious daugh­ter, Lexi.

Female were­wolves are rare, and those few are pro­tected like the pre­cious trea­sures they are. Even though Tryst wasn’t brought up in a pack, he knows that much. He also knows there’s some­thing very strange about the fact that Lexi isn’t claimed by any of the males in the pack — in fact, they seem to give her a wide berth. She’s obvi­ously highly intel­li­gent and com­pe­tent, and she’s beau­ti­ful. She’s far more allur­ing to him than her spoiled, pam­pered princess sis­ter could ever be.

Lexi is fas­ci­nated by Tryst, despite being warned away from the half-​​blooded wolf by her ail­ing father. He seems inter­ested in her, as well, but she fears that’s only because he doesn’t know her crip­pling secret: she hasn’t ever shifted. A were­wolf who can’t shift can’t mate, so she’s use­less in the eyes of the pack.

Tryst is warned away from Lexi by her father, head of the pack, as well, but he can’t seem to stay away from her. She’s like no other woman, were­wolf or mor­tal, he’s ever encoun­tered. What is it that draws them to each other? Is it worth risk­ing their lives for?

It was obvi­ous to me from the first pages of the book that Tryst and Lexi would get together, and that it would cost Tryst many bruises and much grief. The bad guy was all too obvi­ous, as well — if the aver­age reader can’t iden­tify him in the first men­tion, I’ll be shocked. (Per­haps I should be more spe­cific and say “expe­ri­enced romance reader” instead.)

As for Moon Kissed, it was so for­get­table that I’d have to look up the main male’s name. The female was Bella, some­thing I only recall due to bad mem­o­ries of Twi­light. Oh, wait, the male was Severo! Right then. Severo saves Bella from vam­pires who chase her, while fright­en­ing the hell out of her him­self, grop­ing her, and offer­ing absolutely no expla­na­tions of the strange new real­i­ties her world is sud­denly encompassing.

After that event, Bella learns that her best friend Seth’s new girl­friend is a vam­pire, some­thing Seth just hadn’t quite got­ten around to men­tion­ing. Seth explains that Severo (whose name she doesn’t yet know) is prob­a­bly a were­wolf, from her descrip­tion of him and his actions. Severo has, in the mean­time, started stalk­ing Bella to pro­tect her from the vam­pires he’s sure will con­tinue to hunt her (for rea­sons unknown to him when he starts on this plan of action). After see­ing Seth with vam­pire Evie, with whom Severo has his­tory, Severo real­izes that Evie prob­a­bly sicced the vam­pires on Bella due to jealousy.

One of the many, many things that both­ered me about this book is that Bella is sup­pos­edly a web designer, but she never seems to work. She cer­tainly doesn’t have a lap­top, which would be de rigeur, and she lives in a ridicu­lously upscale place (an apart­ment with its very own heated pool?) for some­one in that pro­fes­sion. She can afford a lot of dance lessons, too — but her real source of income or cap­i­tal is never explained. Appar­ently Hauf was just look­ing for a pro­fes­sion that could be “done any­where” and some­one sug­gested “web designer” so she grabbed that and ran with it.

Of course, Severo is also sup­posed to “do some­thing with real estate” — how believ­able is that as a char­ac­ter detail? I guess we’re sup­posed to just accept that he’s rich, can spend his time as he pleases, and let every­thing else go with­out ques­tion. How is it that he has a Brownie for a house­keeper? What’s the rela­tion­ship between Faery and were­wolves and vam­pires? Who knows?

The story does not get more believ­able as it goes on. Of course Bella falls in love with her stalker and trusts him com­pletely. There are evil vam­pires. There’s one good vam­pire, just to show that they aren’t uni­formly bad. But you can tell where Severo and Bella’s rela­tion­ship is going in the ear­li­est scenes, and that’s the most impor­tant part of the book, because it’s a romance. There are com­pli­ca­tions but they’ll be over­come, or it wouldn’t be a romance.



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Permalink | September 11th, 2012

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