Samhain Publishing, $3.50, ISBN 978-1-60504-683-9
Fantasy Romance, 2009
Vivian Arend’s Wolf Flight takes us back to the British Columbia werewolves, where as usual it’s always about the mate-mate-mate stuff.
Missy Leason is a widow in a werewolf pack led by a really bad Alpha, her brother-in-law who also happened to kill her husband a month ago, and now she’s running to Yukon, away from her lecherous Alpha. Tad Maxwell didn’t know that he is a werewolf until he was older. He has been in love with Missy since he first saw in high school, he had been reluctant to take their relationship further as he knows that his mate is determined by his wolf side. Now, ten years since they last met, he bumps into her again and realizes that not only is he still attracted to her, his wolf side agrees enthusiastically. But first, they will have to deal with that annoying Alpha who also can’t get enough of the smell of Missy’s fragrant drawers.
This is a readable story, but it is also a pretty extreme example of how the mate-mate-mate thing can make “love” come off like something assembled in a machinery line. The author has created a system here in which two werewolves can form an attachment to each other thanks to hormonal interactions, and reading her detailed explanation only has me thinking that life will be so much simpler if these werewolves get a lobotomy and then proceed to have sex with anyone without worrying about getting caught in the mate-mate-mate thing. How do we know where love ends and pituitary gland overload begins? In this story, I’m not sure.
If you like your mate-mate-mate stories, this is a quick, easy, and painless read with likable characters. Me, I wish there is more romance here and less hormonal reactions.
| 
