Tamsin Baker, $2.99, ISBN 978-1370215751
Fantasy Romance, 2016
Grayson Nox, alpha male of course, is a werewolf waiting for his mate to enter his life.
In this setting, only the men of his kind get the hairy do-over during the full moon, while the women don’t, but these women will bear some kind of mark on their body to let their destined pee-pee for life know when to pounce and drag them back to the cave. Hence, Grayson has been eyeing women with the hope of finding “his black, gnarled tree-shaped mark” somewhere on their body.
Won’t it be hilarious if that woman had that mark laser’ed off? Perhaps she could have that mark covering the entire forehead—let’s see if he will love her then!
As it happens, while he is shopping for his pack’s groceries and such, he comes across his mate alright… and it’s a man.
So, the mate is Reagan Forster and he crashes his car so badly that our hero drags him off to his Wolf Manor to take care of the guy. So, on top of having the mate thing decide everything, the author also makes sure that the guy is in no shape or form to run away screaming from Grayson. Ah yes, werewolf romances, where the only agency is the post office.
He pushed the sleeve up, groaning aloud when he saw the mark he’d been looking for his whole life. The black gnarled tree that he carried on his own arm, imprinted on a human male!
“Oh, fuck!” Grayson pinched the bridge of his nose and let his eyes slide shut.
It was almost unheard of for an Alpha to have a human mate at all. Let alone a male.
What sort of trick is this?
Well, thanks to the power of matching skin blemishes, Grayson’s pee-pee has no issues rising to the occasion. Isn’t lycanthrophy wonderful?
Of course, Reagan has to learn the culture of the pack, and that’s what this story mostly is: exposition. We learn that these werewolves have a regimented hierarchy (alphas, betas, gammas) that determine even the kind of job you are allowed to take up, and somehow even your intelligence level is decided (or so these people claim) by what you are born into.
Naturally, the alphas are the smart ones while the gammas are not allowed to go to school because why bother. That and I’d assume keeping the worker caste, which the gammas are, ignorant also makes them easier to control.
Reagan is of course determined that things can change, and Grayson agrees because if his sexuality could change so easily like that, well, anything else could do the same, right?
Yet, the rogue werewolves—betas that broke free because they are tired of being forced to be subservient to the alphas—are portrayed as the bad guys.
Which is which? All this only leads to me think that maybe the author hasn’t properly thought out her setting before she set everything to paper.
Even then, all the exposition ends up going nowhere anyway, as in the end, Grayson automatically becomes gay for Reagan and they live happily ever after, and the “romance” is the usual protective-alpha-trembling-waif stuff that I have read many times before.
The narrative is clean and easy to read, the dialogues feel natural, and the two main characters are for the most part okay if forgettable.
Some parts of the narrative make me cringe a bit, though, because the author tries very hard to convince me that these werewolves are super rich, and the alphas are super, super strong and smart and they can’t be taken down easily because they have healing factor up to the wazoo.
Just like most of the exposition, the virtues of these alphas are never put to test because there isn’t a Thanos here that is going to snap half of these clichés out of existence. So, why bother showing me how awesome these alpha males are when they aren’t going to get to flex and show off these traits?
All these details, like all the other exposition dump here, are just filler, unless the author imagines that just the mention of these traits will send me screaming for a shower head, I suppose. Spoiler: that doesn’t work on me, sadly.
In the end, Grayson’s Mate is readable, but it’s just another formulaic mate-mate-mate thing with a canon that doesn’t feel as well put together as the author probably thinks it is. On the scale of “Awesome!” to “Oh, the pain!”, this one falls squarely on a resounding “Meh, whatever!” note.
