Talulla Rising

It's common in storytelling to end a tale with the death of a man and the birth of his son. A follow-up is rarely considered necessary – the genetics live on, the man lives on. No more you need to know. So it was for that reason that I felt exceptionally foolish when I was, for one, surprised that there was a sequel to The Last Werewolf, and secondly, that the story of the woman who would give birth to Jake Marlowe's children was far more appropriate for a tale of a person who is both a human and a vicious animal.

There's the obvious allegory – the moon cycle. There's the fact that this book opens with introducing us to the brutality of pregnancy and birth, and also the vulnerability of a pregnant woman, even when she can turn into a seven foot monster. She becomes an Other several times over - a woman, a mother, and a nearly extinct werewolf - and the fact that she is attacked from all sides reflects that. It takes the opportunity to look at the basic mammalian instincts of motherhood, and the modern angst of just not knowing what this little thing that looks like you is and what you could possibly offer it, and spins it into a driven and bloodthirsty story of a woman who needs to reunite her newborn twins after her son is taken.

For this reason, Tallulah Rising is far more focused that The Last Werewolf was. Jake Marlowe absently searched for someone or something to give him a reason not to die, whereas Tallulah Demetriou desperately has to live. The story is not nearly as convoluted (though it does get complicated towards the end, perhaps a little unnecessarily) as TLW, and it feels far more sincere. It's a lot nastier too, but also appropriately sentimental. Where Jake was a lone wolf, Tallulah finds family, not just in her children, but in a young pack of happy accidents and a former hunter - “His face was full of life focused on me, the blue-green eyes glimmering, the mouth edging into a less innocent version of its smile” Anyone think Walker was a carbon copy of Dean Winchester? Someone tell Jensen Ackles to keep an eye on the option rights for this one.

The characters in this book – the ones we care the most about, anyway, though I did love Madeline – get the crap beaten out of them. It's not an angry story, exactly, but it is about people crawling their way out from where they were buried in the basement and ripping the guts out of the person who put them there. Over and over Tallulah is taken as merely a means to end to be stripped and left in pieces, and over and over she kicks back with a force hell doesn't know. It's about the relationship between being hurt and dishing out hurt, and I think that this book handles that better than any other I've read (“I learnt two things. One was that no amount of violence you've done to others prepares you for violence done to yourself. The other was that you can't escape the marriage with your body. Divorce isn't an option. Even when you want to stop caring about it you can't”). If there's anything Glen Duncan does well its write sex and violence in the most brutal and beautiful ways. As well as being painfully clever, as usual.

(ARC provided by NetGalley.com)