Bitten

Bitten is the perfect title for this book which is the first in a series of novels about this character and which starts rather abruptly. Perhaps this start was intentional to reflect how suddenly the main character’s life was changed when her ex-fiancé Clay turned her into a werewolf – or rather the werewolf, the only female werewolf in existence but I found it a little strange.

Despite the odd first lines the books actually starts very well, introducing the character as she lives, sneaking out at 2:00am to turn into a wolf and creep around in the suffocating surroundings of the city. The character craves freedom but craves normalcy and wants what many women want – the normal life, the husband, the family. She knows it would be cruel to have a family but some part of her stays in her safe relationship engaged to an older man named Philip under the pretense of living as a human.

Quite soon a phone message interrupts this existence – a call from her past to go and help out her `pack’: the group who helped her when she first was bitten, the group her ex-lover Clay belongs to and the group to which she owes her survival. The fact that she doesn’t go rushing off immediately but actually leaves messages and tries to find out what they want first is quite refreshing. Many a story, including some of my own, make the mistake of sending characters gun-ho into danger without thinking about how they would react first making some stories seem rushed. This novel actually has the opposite problem at first. In some places it seems to spend too much time narrating the history of Elena’s troubled childhood and transformation.

However having said that I enjoyed this book a great deal, the main character is funny, dark and different, her relationships seem almost deviant as she ends up re-kindling her love/hate relationship with her ex-fiancé Clay whom she is still angry at for biting her and she cannot help but follow her pack leader `Jeremy’ even when its at the expense of her own inner journey to discover for herself what she wants.

She spends most of the book as a sort of werewolf detective helping the pack look for `mutts’ who are usually random werewolves who cannot control themselves and kill humans. Elena soon discovers that the mutts involved aren’t random but have been newly created by old foes who intentionally picked murderers and rapists (and people generally good at hunting) to bring into the game.

Clay himself thinks more wolf than human and his ruthlessness is at contrast with his playfulness and possessiveness over Elena. There’s a great use of description and action as well as the development of relationships on a personal and sexual level but at the same time nothing seems gratuitous or out of place and the writer even forces Elena and Clay to return to Elena’s home and deal with her current fiancé which I thought was very necessary scene to clear the way for Elena’s future path.

The story fitted, the characters were varied and very human and the book was fun but mostly well-written. A good read, I’m certainly going to read the other books in this series and like many female werewolf novels I’ve read it deals with the deeper side of the character’s nature as well as the animalistic traits inherit in all of us.