Soulless

Series: The Parasol Protectorate (#1)
Genre: Romance/Adventure
Author: Gail Carriger
Publisher: Orbit

By all standards, I should have loved Soulless. The plot, while nothing new, is well-paced and executed. The setting is interesting, and certainly unique. The writing is witty and vibrant. The central couple has chemistry and they're entertainingly belligerent to each other. But somehow, the book didn't draw me in. I enjoyed myself, but it was a very tepid kind of enjoyment. In many ways Soulless is the opposite of last week's forray. That book made some mistakes, but drew me in nevertheless. Soulless does everything right, but failed to grab me.

Intertwined

Series: Intertwined (#1)
Genre: Adventure
Author: Gena Showalter
Publisher: Harlequin Teen

Sometimes, I run into books that put me in a quandary. Sometimes I'll read a book and like it, but have much more to say about what it does wrong than what it does right. I've got a lot of complaints about Intertwined. But for all that I'm about to heap on it, the one thing I can't say is that I disliked it. In fact, it was a lot of fun. Admittedly it was sometimes a RiffTrax kind of fun, but I kept reading, and even finished ahead of schedule, so Showalter must be doing something right.

Stray

Series: Shifters (#1)
Genre: Adventure
Author: Rachel Vincent
Publisher: MIRA

I try my best to keep Lupines and Lunatics on-topic, but when your topic is as niche as mine is, you find yourself straining to find a good read on occasion. So for the next few weeks, you might see us drifting a little off-topic. Stray is not the first step. It's billed as a werecat novel, but makes no mistake, these kitties are just werewolves by another name. All the cliches of a UF werewolf book are here: the rigid, chauvinistic social structures, the anger-management problems, the superstrength and metabolism, etc. etc.. The only real difference is that when the heroine gets called a bitch, it's not clever and meta. Not that there's anything wrong with this. A story is a story, after all, and whether you're a cat person or a dog person, this one turns out pretty good.

Kitty's House of Horrors

Series: Kitty Norville (#7)
Genre: Adventure/Horror
Author: Carrie Vaughn
Publisher: Hachette

By now I'm very familiar with the fact that Kitty Norville is a sequence of ups and downs. None of the books thus far has been a bad read, but the generally episodic nature of Carrie Vaughn's storytelling means that different books -- or even parts of the same book -- will fall somewhere in a range between awesome and mediocre. I'd have to say that Kitty's House of Horrors falls in the mediocre category. There's enough good stuff here to make it worthwhile, but a lot of it also has a phoned-in quality to it, and it comes off as an idea that seemed a lot better than it turned out.