Review: Dull
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 09 22, 2013
This novella suffers significantly from the author's decision to compress the story into such a short format.  As the story begins, we're dropped right into the middle of a drama that has apparently been developing for months as the female main character struggles to find a way to leave her abusive, and increasingly felonious, fiancé, Brad.This is a multicultural shifter romance.  I wasn't even aware these things exists before I downloaded this book, but apparently it is a thing.  Yes, the female main is black, but other than a handful of references to her skin tone and a single scene in the shower where she thinks about straightening her hair, I don't know if the "multicultural" part is significant enough to call out on the cover of the book.  Her race seems to stand in for anything else the author could have come up with to distinguish her character.  It stands in for her personality and her history.  She's blandly sweet.As she attempts to escape her boyfriend, she injures herself and is saved by a giant wolf.  In keeping with the well-established standards of the genre, he is immediately drawn to her.  Could she be his mate?The standards of the shifter society are familiar to the point of tediousness to anybody familiar with the genre.  Given the number of characters, I am assuming this is the intro to a larger series where each of the men will find their mate, probably multiculturally.The path the main characters travel to love is a routine one, but that isn't the problem.  The problem is that it feels so routine.  There is nothing exciting about this book.  It's almost as if the author herself didn't even have her heart in it.In a trope-driven genre such as romance, a work can -- and should -- be judged primarily on the freshness an author brings to even the most familiar material.  Wolf meets girl doesn't have to be dull, even if we understand how the plot will wind up in the end. Adding the word "black" in front of "girl" shouldn't mean the author is off the hook for bringing anything else interesting to the page.