Theresa Hissong, $0.99, ISBN 978-1005627102
Fantasy Romance, 2022

Sora Weston and her grandmother are heading toward a new life, hopefully a good one. You see, they are shifter cougars, and they heading out to join the Quinn pride.

Sora is leaving, you see, because she was so awesome that she can usurp her father’s place in the pride, and naturally, this puts her father in a homicidal mood. Oh wait, that never happened, because the rest of the pride died from some disease before Sora really had to prove that she was really as awesome as the author claims she is. Naturally, she and her grandmother are immune to the disease because strong and independent women are immune to each and every type of disease.

So, with the pride all dead, she and Gran are heading off to be part of the Quinn pride. In our heroine’s case, well, she’s also going to be getting a part of the Lion-O, Maverick Quinn. Oh don’t worry, this is not some sordid sex cult or harem thing. This is better, even better than true love, because we are talking about the mate mate mate thing here.

“Please take care of my granddaughter,” Gran begged the alpha. “She will need you, too. She’s different…like you, but she will need your leadership. I will let her explain everything else.”

So much for Sora being better than any man to the point that men fear her…

Now, in reality, biology is triggering, because any offspring from different feline species coupling will result in infertile Panthera hybrids, but I don’t believe we ever had a lion and cougar producing any kid before. Hence I can only wonder what kind of children this coupling will result in, or why a lion and a cougar will somehow develop a mate bond as if they were just furries playing it up at some drug-fueled convention. For their sake, I hope the offspring will be something cute and not something like the monster from The Thing.

I’m wondering about this before there isn’t much about the story itself to dwell upon. Despite the initial premise, the story soon settles into the same groove that pretty much every other mate-mate-mate stories reside in.

There are the usual cult-in-a-compound overtones complete with weird norms that are designed solely to emphasize some kind of male-female segregation.

He made a motion to show he was wearing protective gloves so he wouldn’t hurt the widowed female. Even though alphas didn’t cause pain to a mated female when they touched, it was important to show them respect. His Guardians and other male members of their pride always carried gloves for an emergency. As a male, touching a mated female that wasn’t yours would cause the female’s skin to feel as if they’d been burned, and no male in his pride could handle it if they caused a female pain.

Sure, Sora may be the alpha, but she’d crumple in pain when a baby boy accidentally brushes up against her. Girl power and woo-hoo indeed.

Female strengths and powers are, of course, due to genetics because it’s so much cooler for women to get awesome powers due to a lucky circumstance of sperm meeting egg in her mother’s womb, instead of earning the powers. Feminism, after all, is all about having everything handed to the heroine so that she can be awesome without having to do anything. Even then, she will still need a big strong man to show her the ropes.

“If you say so,” Cohen chuckled and slapped him on the back. “Let’s get the females to show our newest members to their rooms when they return, and you need to make sure you talk to Sora. She just ran off on her own without your blood. I sure hope she knows her abilities as an alpha, because if she has no idea about her alpha gene, things are going to get really interesting very fast, Maverick.”

There are some interesting elements here, such as blood transfusion between an alpha to their underlings to keep these underlings hale, but for the most part, Sacred Shift doesn’t even play out like a romance story.

This story is mostly exposition. Characters’ conversations are designed to explain things to the readers, as is the more conventional narrative here. When these characters are not interacting to exposition-ate to readers, they are conducting some clinical negotiations to get Sora to settle down, put out, and be an alpha like the whole thing is a business contract in the making.

The author is too busy showing off to me all the bizarre details of her setting, like how the females will hurt badly when they let a man that isn’t their mate touch them (funny how the males don’t hurt when they want to touch those women they aren’t mated to, hmm) or the blood thing or everything else that resembles more of some mathematical calculation. Hence, what romance? See that mate bond? There, the author has mentioned it, so it’s love baby, and now hush and enjoy the information dump.

I can only conclude that this one is written to appease readers that are into made-up sexual dynamics designed to make sure that the hero will always remain the mightiest center of attraction and how the female, regardless of how much lip service is paid to her supposed awesomeness, will always remain in a position of weakness. Sadly, that’s not my fancy, so I’m not digging this one much.