Severine Wolfe, $2.99, ISBN 978-0463775332
Fantasy Romance, 2019
Severine Wolfe’s Beloved Wolf is set in an alternate Earth where it seems like every human is actually a Shifter. In the first page alone, the hero, a wolf naturally, identifies a polar bear and another wolf like the world is one big furry convention. How odd that there is no Shifter that turns into, say, a hamster.
Oh, sorry, I meant Wolf and Polar Bear. Yes, this is one of those, shall I say, very capital stories.
While coming down to Montana from Siberia, Adrik literally smells a woman in the air and realizes that she is his mate.
He breathed in again, and a figure appeared on the stairs and stopped. He looked up at the woman, and his breath stopped in mid-inhale. Her hand went to her chest as she stared down at him. He stared right back at her. She was exquisite. She was just lighter blonde as he was, and her eyes were a sky blue and wide, looking right into his. Her long hair fell from her head in thick waves and curls. He imagined that if she cut it short, she’d have corkscrew curls all over her head. He managed to suck in another breath of her alluring scent, and he closed his eyes. He heard her moan and his eyes opened wide.
Ooh, why is she moaning?
She stood with her hand over her mouth, her face bright red. She ran down the stairs and turned quickly, running out the back way. It was a moment before he could move and try to catch up with her. He saw her running into the trees behind the cabin, but he had her scent. He had her. She was his mate.
Hmmph. How old are these people? Five? They act like this is the first time they are out of their homes.
Anyway, as the author stated, Adrik has the woman’s smell now, so she is not getting away.
The woman is Alys Freeman. Unlike her last name, she is not so free as her father is determined to push her off to Ron Carver, who is predictably mean and what not, because that will help him rise in ranks among the wolf pack.
Sadly for Ron, he doesn’t make Alys want to feverishly touch herself at the sight of him.
She’d stepped out on to the landing and seen human perfection in the flesh. He was tall and built like a swimmer, strong shoulders and muscular legs she could see through his jeans. He had gold, blond hair that was short and a short, neatly trimmed mustache and beard. She could also see a huge bulge that was growing by the second as she watched. She wanted when she’d never wanted anything before. She wanted to rub herself all over him, rub her scent all over him, absorb his, then take him to bed for a couple of months.
My goodness, she seems like she’s having an allergic reaction or something.
She stopped in the woods and put her hand up to her mouth to stop a sob. She couldn’t do any of that, no matter how badly she wanted it. Even if he wanted it and she couldn’t imagine that he would. He was beautiful, the apex of the male being in her eyes. She closed her eyes to stop the tears of frustration and rage that furiously raced through her body. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t.
People, this is what happens when you keep romance heroines locked up in their bedroom and never let them out until they hit 25.
The rest of the story is trope tsunami coming to drown everyone. Shifters! Annoying capitalization of common words in some lame attempt to make everything seem special without really trying!
The hero being humongous and invulnerable, so the whole ‘plot’ is just tedious suspense-free filler!
Sequel baits walking all around and flexing their muscles to tell me to buy their stories too! I can’t tell these sequel baits from the hero because they are all basically the same cookie-cutter guy of this genre!
Pregnancy! Smell-mate-stalking is sexy “romance”! The heroine basically a fecund reproductive system being pushed around until the rightfully mated pee-pee gets in and knocks her up!
Sure, this one may resemble every other template shifter story out there, but it is bogged down by annoying misuse of capital letters, clunky prose, and a heroine that is determined to make it hard for herself and anyone that tries to help her because… of plot, I guess.
So, yes, one can read this one for another stroll down a super familiar, well worn path, but then again, there are surely better written and more polished stories of similar theme and style out there—stories that don’t make the main characters resemble socially stunted creatures that are touching grass for the first time.
