I Promise The Next Review Will Be Positive

I don’t know if I’m in a pissy kind of mood recently, or if I just haven’t been listening to good books, but here’s another bad review.

This is another paranormal book from a series, but in this case the rest of the series was ok, not great, but fine for doing dishes or folding laundry to. In this instalment, we jump away from all of the original characters and storylines from the first 12 (don’t read the first one, it was SO BAD I didn’t make it past the second chapter), leaving Manhattan for the desert of Las Vegas.

Our protagonist is a young woman named Kitty, who after a car accident finds out she is a were-lion. After 24 years of assuming she is human like her mother and grandparents and all her friends and neighbors in Tennessee, surprise! Shape-shifting!! Her mother reveals her father’s name and she goes to meet him in Nevada.

Kitty stays at his hotel/casino, the Savannah, which is described as being both like it belongs in Africa and that it looks natural in its desert location, but in my experience, you can’t see much of the desert from the strip. At this point in the story I had the following Twitter exchange, which I am still giggling at a week later.

And so started the list of things that bugged me about the book:

• Kitty is wishy-washy and swings from anger to forgiveness in seconds
• The “hero” is overbearing, claims to be running a business, but seems to have all the free time in the world to drive Kitty around
• Kitty is a “stereotype librarian”, and claims that no one invites librarians to parties. She needs new friends, I’d love to party with librarians (shoutout to my #toastietwitter pals!)
• She claims that her grandparents were great parents, but also that she has been taking care of herself for a long time. She’s 24! How long is a long time?
• Kitty is too much of a bumpkin, and as a librarian I would assume she would research her father before flying across the country to meet him, rather than show up not knowing he’s a super-rich owner of a hotel/casino
• Hero gets really concerned about bruises Kitty gets after running into a tree two chapters after explaining the healing benefits of being a shape-shifter.
• Why ARE the were-lions (or Leos, as they call themselves) white? Werewolves come from Europe, like wolves do, so wouldn’t werelions come from Africa?
• and the kicker: ACTUAL LION SEX. Yep.

I don’t recommend this book, but the earlier books were fine (maybe 3 stars?)