Review: It's All About Choices.  Or Is It?
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 09 7, 2012
"Did you ever have to make up your mind?", the Loving Spoonful once sang, and Secret has to do that in spades in this book.  The problem is that people keep forcing the choices on her, and make sure she doesn't have the information to make them *good* choices.And I would say to some extent not only are they not good choices -- they are false choices.  To take the biggest one, Secret keeps being told she must embrace either her vampire or werewolf heritage, and it's starting to rub me the wrong way.  I hope that is intentional on Dean's part and that eventually Secret will see that she's not a half-breed vampire or a half-breed werewolf: She's a full-fledged werepire and to jettison either heritage is to be untrue to herself.To some extent I feel the same way about her complicated love-life.  She claims to be uncomfortable with polyamory, and claims to know that eventually she will choose, but methinks she protests too hard.  Just man-up, accept that you have 3 (4 if Sig is in the mix somewhere) boyfriends and get on with life.I will say that the plot of this book, which deals with her upcoming nuptials with Lucas seemed a bit forced.  Suddenly her uncle who has never been on-screen before has a potential veto on her marriage and she and Lucas have to go to Louisiana to get his blessing?  And Lucas seems totally OK with going unprotected into what is essentially enemny territory.  I believe that this and other incidents were designed largely as plot-points to undercut Lucas.  He's always been pushy and manipulating (while not totally unloveable), but in this book Dean writes almost a whole different character.  His choices at the end of the book don't even make sense other than as a device to make him a huge jerk.Holden seems to be a bit off as well.  He may have changed in one of the short stories I have not read, but he seemed a genuine friend (in a vampire kind of way) in earlier books, and he comes across as something of a SOB in this one.