Taken by Storm

Series: Raised by Wolves (#3)
Genre: Adventure
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Publisher: Egmont

I'm fanboyish about Jennifer Lynn Barnes' Raised by Wolves series. This shouldn't be a secret to anybody who reads this blog regularly. So the news that Taken by Storm would be the last chapter of this series, at least for the time being, made me sad. After having read the book, however, I can totally see why Barnes wants to wrap things up. Taken by Storm is by no means a bad book, but there's a sense of fatigue about it; a feeling that's it's time to move on. All great stories, after all, must come to an end.

The Wolf Gift

Series: Stand-Alone
Genre: Adventure
Author: Anne Rice
Publisher: Knopf

When I heard Anne Rice was writing a werewolf novel, my eyebrows were raised. Her novels are, after all, one of the major touchstones of modern urban fantasy, second only to Chris Claremont's run on X-Men in their influence. So the fact that she's writing a werewolf novel feels like a personal stamp of approval; a rebuttal to the people who think of the current craze for things lycanthropic as just another passing fad. This is, after all, not some newbie hoping to make it big; this is someone who knows what she's doing, and she thinks the subject has storytelling potential. And, as expected of a writer of her experience, she fulfills that potential on a level that most don't bother reaching for.