Saturday, September 21, 2024

Review: Lone Wolf by Sam Hall

Lone Wolf by Sam Hall
Series: Reach for the Moon Trilogy #1
Publication date: March 26th, 2021
Pages: 320
Spice: 🌶️🌶️🌶️

Synopsis:
One man, one woman, that's how wolf shifter's find their mates and mine is supposed to be the next alpha of our town. But when I kiss Mason on my eighteenth birthday, he rejects me politely, but firmly.

So I leave town, not giving a damn about the succession, determined to make it as a lone wolf.

And I do. I'm strong, capable, able to take down almost any wolf shifter I go against, when I get the call. Dad's in hospital and I need to come back, to care for him and determine his successor before outright war breaks out.

So why do I feel like a little girl all over again?

I'm right back where I started, being expected to find my true mate, but what if instead of one, there's several? I know I need to choose, and my heart has: all of them.


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Review:
Paige had stopped thinking about the day she would inevitably be called home, but she had hoped it wouldn't be in the event of her father being hospitalized. When she returns she is put in a position to find a mate and assign an Alpha to lead the town in her father's absence. But what she hadn't realized was that she was more than she had originally thought she was. She was a being of wolf shifter lore that took several mates instead of just the one. So now Paige not only has to assign a new Alpha for the town but she has to find all the missing pieces of her heart and claim them as her own otherwise her call will continue to drive the available male population crazy with need. But there is also someone who may have played a hand in her father's death and she must gather her mates to her side as she searches for them to exact her blood revenge.

There are books in the industry where you read them and you can't understand why none of the big publishing companies have picked them up yet. Then there are indie books that you can tell are potentially something done by an author who is still learning their craft. This was one of the latter. The storyline shook from time to time. The twists were not all that surprising so they lacked the punch that they needed to hold undisturbed attention. The formatting needs some use which I read from the book's forward to be an ongoing struggle that seems to keep cropping up issues. The editing for the book seems to have been subpar if that is the case. I found myself struggling to connect with any of the characters. They all felt very one dimensional and lack a bit of draw that I would have liked them to have to pull me in.

I almost DNFed the book from the very beginning when the word 'vajayjay' was used. The infantile terminology made me a little uncomfortable what with the fact it was meant to be a reverse harem with sex around every corner. If you can't even call it by its real name or the romance genre's widely accepted term then it throws it in the young adult category in my mind which this was anything but. It would have been different if the character was saying the term, but it wasn't. Just... no.

I will say that there was at least a little bit of interest in what would happen with Paige and her mates because I will likely read the next book in the series. I think that was found within Mason's dynamic with her. He wasn't as quick to throw away all his independence and commit himself completely to Paige like he knew he would have to eventually. His push and pull while frustrating held my attention a bit and made him the most intriguing of the characters for me. The lackluster cast was disappointing but Mason saved it at least a little.