“Bitten” Kelley Armstrong

I’ve decided to read my way through all the fiction we have on our shelves, which’ll take a while coz there’s on the order of 500 books, and also coz I’m still reading the various non-fiction books I’ve stacked up in the queue 🙂

First book up is “Bitten” by Kelley Armstrong – I’m pretty sure I bought this with a book token 5 or 6 years ago, then was going to get the rest of the series so I must’ve liked it at the time. I never did get round to buying the others, and I’m not sure how many I read from the library before I lost interest.

Re-reading it I’m not entirely sure why I liked it in the first place :/ I guess partly I’ve just read a lot more Urban Fantasy since then and it doesn’t feel as fresh as it maybe did before. It is fairly standard – our heroine is a werewolf, the only female one in existence, she’s in a love triangle and goes around being sarcastic & kicking ass. Unfortunately I didn’t like her much – very self-centred in a spoilt brat sort of way rather than in any interesting way. The back story (orphaned, been in foster homes & abused, had her “one chance of a normal life” snatched away by being made a werewolf) didn’t stop me wanting her to grow up and think about something outside her own desires every once in a while.

I also really wasn’t convinced by the love interests – one so bland I almost wanted him to turn out to have a dark secret just to make him more interesting (maybe he does in later books, but I had the impression from this one he’s just as bland as he looked). The other one actually is a sociopath and SPOILER: he’s the one that turned her into a werewolf against her will which I would’ve thought was a complete deal breaker, but she just can’t resist his manly, er, werewolfy charms.

Having failed to particularly empathise with the characters I didn’t find the plot engaging enough to make up for it – territorial disputes between the Pack and some rogue wolves, to do with rogues challenging the status quo.

Despite the overwhelming negative tone of this post there’s nothing actually wrong with the book – just it’s not for me. I was still entertained enough to finish the book to see what did happen in the end (partly hoping I’d misremembered and Mr Bland turned out to be more interesting). But off to the charity shop it goes, no need to keep it about to read another time.