These books were described to me (I forget who by) as ‘if Bella got with Jacob’. Now I haven’t read Twilight but from what I do know, independent girl living in quiet-enough, reserved-enough, remote-enough, small-enough town who falls eternally in love with a stereo-type defying mythical boy and then wants to get married and have his children(okay so The Wolves of Mercy Falls doesn’t actually get that far but Sam and Grace do say they want to marry each other!), then yes TWoMF is something like Twilight.
I’ve been somewhat snowed under (literally) by work and other commitments so my time for reading has been sparse and limited to ‘just before I pass out in bed’ so I can’t definitively comment on the pacing but it did seem a bit on the slow side. On the up it’s not bad for a first person point of view story. As I’ve said before I like to see what all the other characters are doing too and TWoMF does not disappoint with regular (not too often) character switches that keep the action coming but also hold that mystery at bay that you keep coming back for.
They did however fall into the trap of ‘the couple gets together in the first book the end’. With no romantic tension between Grace (who is somewhat estranged from her absent-y parents) and Sam (who spends most of his nights in Grace’s bed unknown to her parents and resisting his manly urges) one has to look elsewhere. It’s actually really sad as most of the book seems to be about working one’s way up to a goodbye that you cannot afford while the rest of the world seems to crumble around you. It doesn’t help that in needing to keep your boyfriend above room temperate at all times you completely forget about the existence of your two friends. Both of whom do come back for what might pass as a cameo in the third book.
So while life slides down it’s slippery wintery slope Grace teams up with the local queen-bee, Isabel, who, though blonde, is clearly not stupid, and somewhat insistent that Grace help with the problem of her not-so-dead-recently-killed brother. Thankfully this didn’t turn into a werewolves vs. vampires story, because otherwise, really, this review would have began and ended with ‘if Bella got with Jacob’. No, instead Jack provides some action for book one and a set up for the next two.
By the time we get to book two there are a few unanswered questions, why doesn’t Grace shift despite having been bitten? what’s going to happen to Sam and Grace now? and what is going to happen to the three newly minted werewolves Beck (Sam’s adoptive father with the usual mix of tragic back story and heart of the house) brings back from Canada somewhere in the middle of book one. Now it’s very possible I missed something but there were three kids in the back of the truck, two boys, one girl. I assume the two boys are Cole and Victor but the girl in the tye-dye t-shirt never seems to make a re-appearance, even when the book seems to reach spring and Sam and Grace have their eyes pealed for the new wolves starting to shift back to human for the summer. Because she’s definitely not Grace, Rachel, Olivia, Isabel or Shelby… did I miss something?
But this does bring me to the point of shifting. Stereotypically we’re used to werewolves turning under the light of the full moon but not with TWoMF. Instead they shift in the winter, in the cold really, into a wolf and then back into a human for the summer, with some uncontrollable back and forth shifting during spring, and presumably autumn, as the weather stabilises. Beck’s profession as lawyer pays for a nice large house for the ‘pack’ during summer and keeps the heating on to delay shifting for as long as possible. Now personally I found this very refreshing, I also liked that the ‘full moon myth’ was addressed in the books with an explanation along the lines of ‘it’s colder at night so shifting got attributed to the moon by accident!’.
I also liked that in the absence of a ‘it’s magic’ explanation Cole tries to find a scientific cure (because being a world famous rock star isn’t enough, being the son of genius parents he plays amateur scientist with the Cole St Claire’s, also known as the werewolf toxins) and Grace points out it acts like Malaria. However we only really saw the cusp of Cole’s experiments so it did feel like an excuse to throw around big words so it’s got just enough science to avoid the ‘it’s magic’ syndrome. Still a valiant effort.
All in all my favourite characters were Cole and Isabel because Grace spent most of her time being loved up and Sam spent most of his being miserable, first about leaving Grace and then about her leaving him. Understandable as it is, it drags after three books. I like characters with a bit of bite. It looked, at the beginning of book two (Linger) that Isabel might make a pass at Sam (some romantic tension at last!) but it wasn’t to be, instead she threw herself on Cole’s mercy only to be rather embarrassingly rejected.
So various events in Shiver and Linger lead up to Forever in which Isabel’s father, Tom Culpeper, mounts an attack against the wolves. A legal attack with a helicopter and everything so it’s up to Grace, Sam and Cole to get the werewolves out of danger. To the residence of Mercy Falls it’s just a wolf pack living in the wolves, much like the one in Idaho before it was wiped out in the same way Culpeper plans to wipe out the Mercy Falls wolves. Has to be said I couldn’t put the book down at this point.
Something else I loved was the wolf behaviour, when the werewolves shifted they didn’t become deformed monstrous parodies of wolves, instead they became slightly larger than average (?) wolves. Unable to hold complex human thoughts and barely able to hold onto simple ones, although Sam, who Beck describes as ‘the best of us’, can hold more than average. So aspects of play and dominance and pack behaviour were clear in the books and it was really nice to see that grounding in reality.
The ending is very good it must be said, thrilling and well paced and not too rounded off.
On the whole I liked the series, I found the romance aspect a bit too plain but I loved the fantasy element and everything to do with the wolves. I didn’t that Graces friends just seemed to disappear, obviously there were some big problems to deal with but on the other hand they felt a bit superfluous. Still a good read.
I did really like the covers however, although I’m not sure why the black, white and red theme was broken with Forever being grey/silver. That said I love the US covers too, they a bit more about the contents though I’m not sure about the red.
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