Primal Possession by Katie Reus (Moon Shifter #2)
Paranormal Romance
Released: September 4, 2012
Penguin
Reviewed by May
December doesn’t trust shifters, and she just wants to run her shop and be left alone to live a happy normal life. Unfortunately, a shifter hating group already knows that Liam Armstrong is a lupine shifter (second-in-command actually) and that he has strong feelings for December. She is now a target for the group – they hope to make Liam go crazy (by trapping the woman he wants) so they can film him the harming humans that have her, and share the footage showing how dangerous shifters really are.
Liam knows that December is his mate, but they don’t have a relationship and I can’t speculate as to what steps he has taken to try and change that situation prior to the start of this novel. As this story opens, December is on a date and Liam is pretty much stalking her.
I do want to give the author a great deal of credit for making it so easy to jump into her world and understand who everyone was and really making a vivid world I could jump right into. The rules and players were all very clear, and I was optimistic about the story and how this shifter would win over the reluctant human that was his mate.
What made me exceptionally disappointed, and ultimately led to me disliking this book was that the characters felt flat, and their relationship didn’t convince me of true love or soul mate status. There is no dating or any kind of romantic gestures – instead he needs to protect her from a threat and eventually she gives in and has sex with him. Based on the amount of set up for the next book in the series, I’m going to speculate that in previous books we saw these characters as they first got to know each other and that series fans will find this book a lot more satisfying. As a first time reader of this series, I couldn’t buy into this romance.
One of my biggest problems was December herself. As heroines go in paranormal romance, she definitely played up the weak female trope and this bothered me a lot because once in a while she had moments of awesomeness and could have been so much more. She is going on a date to try and prove Liam is not someone she wants, yet she does want him. She also, I believe, knew he’d see the other man and be jealous. She wanted that.
She and Liam had no future, and going out with a random guy was the only way to show Liam and herself that she was serious about that.
One minute she’s saying how she could never get together with a shifter because once a shifter killed her brother – the next she’s in bed with Liam. For a woman so determined, she didn’t have much backbone and gave in pretty easily I felt given her whole reason for never wanting to be with a shifter in the first place. In fact, her brother tells her they will have no relationship if she gets in with the shifters, and yet she’s surprised when he cuts her off after she hooks up with Liam.
The growing plot with the anti-shifter terrorist group and the danger that they pose was really well done, and I appreciated the pace of the book and how the author built up the drama and feeling of characters being in danger with that. We get some peeks into the bad guys, and how that plot line can continue into future books.
The world of shifters and the human group that hates them in this small town was filled with interesting characters I’d be interested in knowing more about. I’m going to give this book the benefit of the doubt and assume that if I had read the series in order, some things (especially the relationship/romance) would have made more sense.
Grade: C-
Recent Reviews:
The Book Lovers Inc -4.5/5
Love to Read for Fun – B-
A Book Obsession
Book Binge – 4/5
Goodreads
Author’s Website l Series Listing
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