She has a wonderful boyfriend, a close relationship with his family, and a fulfilling job as a newspaper reporter. Unfortunately, I couldn’t rate BITTEN any higher than three stars because of frustrations with our heroine.ĭetermined to deny her wolf, Elena Micheals leaves her home at Stonehaven behind when she moves to Toronto to live free from the Pack. I had a blast learning the mechanics of Armstrong’s world and pouted to be left out of werewolf hide and seek. Y’all! Once again I find myself annoyed I waited so damn long to read it.

The novel has graced my bookshelves for too long, so I finally gave it a shot during the COYER July read-a-thon. 1)įorecast: The sensual, non-genre jacket design will help to signal that this novel will also appeal to mainstream tastes.BITTEN by Kelley Armstrong is the first book in the prolific Women of the Otherworld series.

Filled with romance and supernatural intrigue, this book will surely remind readers of Anne Rice's sophisticated refurbishings of the vampire story. The sensuality of Elena's transformations and the viciousness of her kills mesh perfectly with her tough personality. Elena's feral sensibility, like her psychological vulnerabilities, seems a natural outgrowth of her abusive childhood, and her relationship with the pack is that of any prodigal child to a close-knit family. Her true achievement, though, is her depiction of werewolf nature in believably human context. Armstrong prepares readers for her tale's twists with several key revisions of werewolf lore-the werewolf taint is mostly hereditary, and werewolves can be killed as easily as any human or wolf. Reunited with her former lycanthrope lover and forced into brutally predatory confrontations, Elena finds the call of the wild subtly reasserting itself. All this is jeopardized when she agrees to help her old packmates hunt some troublesome mutts who are converting common criminals to werewolves and leaving a trail of conspicuous carnage. In the year since she relocated to Toronto, she's embarked on a career as a journalist and begun a pleasingly mundane relationship with a decent man. Elena Michaels is a self-described 'mutt,' a werewolf who left her secretive pack in upstate New York for a life among humans.

It's not easy to find a fresh angle for the werewolf theme, but this debut novel from a Canadian writer proves that solid storytelling and confident craftsmanship can rejuvenate one of the hoariest of all horror clichés.

Bitten armstrong