Angie Daniels, $0.99
Fantasy Romance, 2017
We really should stop putting an “e” at the end of supposedly manly words like “wild” and “wolf” when it comes to stories with werewolves. That’s becoming a cliché wrapped in the carcass of a dead horse by now, although I suppose this practice makes sense when it comes to getting readers to look at the title and go, “Ah! Werewolf romance!” Still, that habit is really played out by now.
Wilde & Sexy is part of a series revolving around the Wilde clan. There are the brothers Chayton, Aidan, and Jax – maybe Jax is short for Jackson? – who are of course awesome werewolves, each with a unique superpower. Oh, and there’s the sister Cheyenne. I don’t remember her special power being mentioned, but then again, she’s a woman, and nobody reads a werewolf romance to admire a woman, judging from how so many of the authors in this genre do their thing. No, we readers hold our books in one hand and touch ourselves happily with the other because the heroes are all so sexy and nothing else matters in the entire genre.
Cheyenne runs away because she wants some time out from being made to marry some other werewolf from the Chadwick clan as part of her father’s grand plan, although she’s certain that her brothers will soon catch up with her and drag her back. In other words, she’s like that eight-year old girl who wants to run away only to reach the end of the road and sit there waiting for her parent to take her back home. She bumps into Adam Chadwick – aha! – who intends to indeed take her back to the clan, only he then sleeps with her, realizes that she’s a virgin, and announces that she’s now his because apparently if a virgin had been boinked by a werewolf, she immediately becomes his property. Indeed, our heroine spends quite a bit for the rest of the story saying that she’s his.
In other words, the plan to wed Cheyenne off to a Chadwick went as planned, and the only reason she found true love is because she is a virgin when she splayed her legs shortly after meeting the hero. The whole thing is positively medieval when it comes to gender politics, so of course it makes sense that this one is marketed as a new adult romance. Worse, the heroine has zero agency here, and nothing she does matters in the end, so I have no idea what the point of this story is.
