Review: entertaining and thought-provoking
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 20, 2009
Dessa is a dryad who lives in one of the last existing forests in Afghanistan. With war tearing through her country, the forests are disappearing at an alarming rate, and most of the dryads have disappeared to live among mortal people. Dessa aches with loneliness, and her greatest desire is to have a daughter of her own to love and to help her protect the forest. When she meets the American Marine Second Lieutenant Nick Leandros, he warns her to leave the area, but she refuses, believing that she will be able to protect both her forest and the people who reside close by. The airstrike that follows kills the people who refused to leave, decimates her forest, and sends Dessa running...to the mortal world.Nick is wracked with guilt over the death of the shepherd family, especially the children. The resulting post traumatic stress disorder causes him to not only go AWOL from the military, it also changes his very being from man to chimera. Now instead of one, he is three, wandering the world broken and without conscience. It's not until he encounters Dessa five years later that he comes to understand the monster he has become.When she encounters Nick by chance in the Australian casino where she works, something within him calls to Dessa. He resounds of her lost forest. The years she has spent in the mortal world have not diluted her yearning for a daughter, and even though he is unwilling, she knows that Nick is her mate destined to give her a child. If she has to tether him, bind him to her with her dryad magic in order to get what she needs, so be it. They are both broken by war; can they possibly make each other whole again? Maybe instead of the bindings of magic, what they need is the healing power of the human heart.********In her novella Wild, Tethered, Bound, Stephanie Draven gives us an intriguing and emotional tale of pain, guilt, and the healing powers of love. This story mixes the brutal realism of war with creatures of mythos, giving us a reading experience that is both pleasurable and absolutely unique. This is no simple throw-away romance. While this novella is quite short, Ms. Draven packs a lot into its pages, and I found myself dwelling on it well after I had read the final page.Ms. Draven gives us strong and complicated characters in Dessa and Nick. Neither is what you would typically expect to find residing within the pages of a romance novel. Not only is Dessa a magical being surrounded with the mystique of an immortal, but she is strong and determined and hell-bent on obtaining that which she desires the most. She is also vulnerable enough to catch our sympathy, especially when she sees how her actions affect Nick.Nick is fascinating. He is a chimera, equal parts dragon, lion, and goat, but he is human as well and a very damaged and fragmented soul. This presents something of a puzzle to the reader. Is he really a chimera of myth? Is the split within him physical or simply psychological? I found myself repeatedly posing this question to myself as I read this story. Ms. Draven does an excellent job presenting Nick as three separate beings who are in actuality one person, and when this spills over into the story's love scene, the results are surprisingly sensual.In all, I found Wild, Tethered, Bound to be readable, entertaining, and quite thought-provoking. The blend of fantasy and reality that this story offers us is exceptional, and the conflict and characters ensnared me.  Ms. Draven is a writer to watch, I believe, and I am extremely interested to see what she comes out with next.