Bitten

REVIEW

Very close to being good, but the author got too many details wrong. There were some red flags that could have been overlooked if everything else was better written. I stopped reading because the plot was too simple and slow paced. Also, this is a book about the characters, so there was very little time dedicated to developing the plot. And the characters were not that interesting.

- poor side characters
- weak plot
+ mostly a refreshing take on werewolves stories
+ well written first person narrative

SUMMARY

Elena is a werewolf living in Toronto. She had many hardships growing up, she lost her parents when she was young and had some bad experiences with her many foster parents. At college she met and fell in love with Clayton, the man who would later bite her, turning her into a werewolf against her will.

With her new found condition, she is unable to continue living among normal humans. She has violent urges and can't yet control her transformation. So she lives a life of isolation with the other pack members, the only other humans she is allowed to interact with.

In time she becomes a vital part of the pack. She is the one with the best nose for picking up scents, and so she becomes the pack's best tracker, and gets assigned the responsibility to keep tabs on the werewolves outside the pack, known as “muts”. Her job is to keep the pack safe from outsiders, and she monitors those muts to see if they are living without bringing attention from the outside world, killing humans and other things that would endanger the pack's continuing existence.

After a traumatic incident, she abandons the pack and goes out to live alone in the big city. There she meets a boyfriend and manages to get a decent life for herself. One year after her depart, her ex pack leader asks her to come back to the pack's home in a small and isolated town.

There she meets her old fiancee Clayton again. She hates him, but cannot resist their physical attraction. He betrayed her, condemning her to a life of horrors, but he is devout to her, and he has always been there for her in her whenever she needed him. He is still in love with her and a sort of relationship is rekindled by her returning home.

The reason for her return is that the pack, her former pack according to herself, is in trouble. A body has been found in their private property, a large patch of land that they pay a good amount of money to prevent outsiders from getting in. Investigations lead them to the culprit, a psychopath who was a serial killer when human. They kill him, but soon learn that he was not alone. There is a group of muts organizing order to destroy the pack, in order to gain their lands. There is some confrontations, the police gets involved, more bodies shows up, werewolves get killed on both sides.


ANALYSIS

The book starts with a prologue. I'm on the group of people who dislike prologues, but it was decent enough. Then we learn about our protagonist Elena, who lives in a constant state of victimhood: “Oh I'm a werewolf, one of only 30 in the whole world. I have superpowers that make me different from everyone else, and because of that I have no social skills, cannot get a boyfriend and live in constant pain. Poor me”.

In spite of her lack of social skills, she does get a boyfriend, nothing special about how that happened. She was there, he was there. He was insistent and that's it.

Elena behaves like an immature brat. That's fine if she is supposed to grow as a person by the end of the book and maybe overcome that, or become less “bratty”. One example, she accuses her ex fiancee, who may have many flaws, of lying to her, even though he has never lied to her about anything, as he points out. She is hostile to the pack leader, the man who took her in and treated her like a daughter. She betrays her boyfriend, and convinces herself that's alright. She delays helping out the pack and impose conditions for her help.

When she arrives at the pack headquarters, we get a major info dump in the form of a book of werewolves. The way to introduce characters is not to read them from a list of names and descriptions.

Becoming a werewolf is very cliche: you get bitten, you're it. I like the “revised” version much better, the one used by Patrica Briggs. It should be something brutal and rare. The easiness of contracting lycanthropy brings up too much inconsistencies and unneeded forced moments in the story.

Case and point, the plot was about a group of muts trying to destroy the pack. They did that by creating new werewolves. So consider, I can bite hundreds of people and enlist them into my army to destroy a 5 werewolves pack, while they take the “high road” and keep the “curse” to themselves.

On the positive notes, we can see the inception of Patrica Brigg's Marrok idea, one werewolf alpha who controls all the others, more through cunning then brute force. The sex scenes were good as well, there was no self righteous prudishness and they were neither unnecessarily explicit.

I almost made it through the end, but the story got too boring to continue, and I wasn't in love with any of the characters. All I could think about is “not Mercy Thompson” when reading it.

Read 8:50 / 12:55 68%

Kelley Armstrong pulls off first person point of view with skill, but the dialogue could use some work. There are quite a few long winded speeches in the beginning that do not feel very natural. We did have a look into Elena's thoughts, but thankfully the book was not dominated by this. I've found a few authors who become stuck in their characters head's with first person. The relationship between Elena and Clay is a bit confusing. Elena is so determined to stay with Philip, yet her actions are not inline with her thoughts. I feel like the first half of the book is filled with supposed morals Elena has that she ends up breaking half way through. This being the case, why were they mentioned at all? I remember the first time I read this book I highly enjoyed it. Kelley Armstrong is one of my favorite authors, but I was a bit more skeptical this time around. Don't get me wrong, the book is a fun read, just not as fun as I remembered

I have to tell the truth, I only read this book to compare it with the television series. There are some clear plot differences between the two, especially in the fact that the author leaves two key figures alive at the end of the book (that were killed off during the television series). The thing about the book that makes it worth reading is that the book examines in more depth the relationship of Elena to Clay and Jeremy and their roles in bringing her into her new life as a werewolf.