Red Moon Rising

Series: Stand-Alone
Genre: Drama
Author: Peter Moore
Publisher: Hyperion

Peter Moore is an obscure author. He doesn't have a website, at least not one that I could find, and his Goodreads page seems to conflate his work with that of several other people with the same name. This is probably why his book Red Moon Rising hasn't gotten a whole lot of press. It's a real shame, too, because this is excellent writing. It reaches above the usual love stories found in YA paranormal to give us a much deeper tale of bigotry and personal identity.

The Frenzy

Series: Stand-Alone
Genre: Horror
Author: Francesca Lia Block
Publisher: HarperTeen

I try to avoid ranting in my reviews. Yes, I'm not always full of praise and kudos. If I see a mistake, I point it out. If an author breaks rules they should know not to, I wag the finger reprovingly. If I find the characters or themes of the story offensive, I will say so. But I don't treat a bad book as a slap in the face. I don't come at an author with both barrels demanding the time I spent reading refunded. I don't take this stuff personally.

The Frenzy is bad in a way that I do take personally. It doesn't fail due to a lack of interesting ideas. In fact, it has some great ones. It doesn't fail due to a lack of skill on the authors part. Francesca Lia Block has over 30 published books and several prestigious awards to her credit, so she obviously knows what she's doing. No, the great failing of The Frenzy is laziness. It's a first draft. The author hasn't put in the work to make it the best it can be. It never should have found it's way to the bookshelves in it's current form. Someone somewhere along the way should have kicked it back to the author and said "We all know you can do better." Yes, yes, I know -- authors have to eat, deadlines have to be met, publishers have to turn in good quarterly reports. But there is still a very clear and distinct line between a book that has been polished to at least meet a certain standard of quality and a book that has been throw together by someone who doesn't give a damn. Don't ship the latter.

Hold Me Closer, Necromancer

Series: Stand-Alone
Genre: Adventure
Author: Lish McBride
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

How can you not love that title? Seriously, how can you? It gives you tone (tongue-in-cheek humor) and content (necromancers, or more broadly, wizardry in a modern setting), plus it rolls right off the tongue. Who cares if it's paraphrased from an old Elton John song? It's awesome. So I had some expectations of quality when I cracked this book open. And they were mostly met. Mostly. Hold Me Closer, Necromancer is a good read start to finish, but it's a somewhat better read at the start than it is at the finish. Somewhere along the way, it runs out of steam.

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.