Faith Hunter

I have distinctly mixed feelings about this book, but overall, I'm somewhat meh about it.

On the positive side, its premise of a Cherokee skinwalker is different enough, both from the often-cliché world of werewolves and vampires, and from other urban fantasy with a Native American base. The extra twists to Jane's skinwalker abilities (trying to avoid spoilers here) is fertile ground for the future, though only briefly edged into in this first volume.

Jane is snarky and occasionally funny. We're told she's more bad ass than we're actually shown, but she's still bad ass enough that you don't scoff. Given the indications that she's actually somewhat new to the business, that makes some sort of sense.

There are tons of ideas in the book without seeming like everything but the kitchen sink was dumped in.

On the less-positive side, I have a few issues.

I found the pidgin speech used when Beast is in control to be completely grating and totally cheesy. Your mileage may vary; perhaps you won't be as bothered by it. However, after just a few exposures, I started skimming those parts, paying only enough attention to make sure I didn't miss anything important. It seemed totally unnecessary as, more than once, Beast demonstrated higher thought processes totally at odds with the simpleton language. It was a cheap gimmick that came across as poor character construction.

My second issue is that the book is unbalanced. It's plot-light and description-heavy. A full two-thirds of the book passes before Jane even starts to come to grips with the whole point of the plot line: the monster hunt. Yet, we've had tons of food descriptions, admiring the beautiful men around her, (repetitious!) details of her stakes and knives and a Benelli shotgun's construction, etc. If you mentally strip away the fluff, it's a novella. The effect is to make the first part of the book drag and the ending to seem rushed.

Finally, that last positive thing—the tons of ideas—is also a negative. They're introduced and then went nowhere.

A good content editor could have tightened this book up, suggested a few places for more depth, and picked up on ideas that should be signaled as "coming later" to the reader. All of that would have turned this into a very good start to a series.

But as it is now, like I said at the beginning, a little meh.… (more)