Review: Fresh take on shifters
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 11, 2011
To be honest, I thought Amanda Alvarez lost me for good on page #2 with the line "Bad American 80's music blared from the speakers..."*gasp* It was like a stake through my black heart. My unholy love for all things 80's reared its head and I was *this close* to sending her a strongly worded missive (comprised of poorly cut out letters from magazine articles) expressing my shock and horror along with a mix tape of the best songs of the 80's (including, but not limited to Corey Hart, Duran Duran, Bonnie Tyler and Kajagoogoo) to prove her wrong. After a few deep breaths, though, I talked myself down, consoling myself with the possibility that, while her heroine Beth does not share my refined taste in music, the author might love it. I kept that in my head for the rest of the book in order to mentally prep myself to give a fair, unbiased review.All kidding aside, though, I enjoyed this book. I will say it started a little slow for me. Not the first chapter, that was pretty action packed and got me hooked right away. But there was a bit of a lull for me from Chapter two thru about page 80, where it felt like a lot of maybe not so necessary setup. I found myself wanting to skim past that section. Luckily, there are over 300 pages in this book, and it hits its stride after that point and we get to the meat of things. Since certain things are kept hush hush early on, I don't want to say too much, but I will say that Beth and Braden have great chemistry (plus some steamy love scenes), and Markko is a perfectly horrific bad guy. What I really liked is that, despite the number of shifter stories out there, this one still managed to feel fresh to me. I would definitely read more of Amanda Alvarez's work.