A review by kiiitasticbooks
Defiance by Cheree Alsop

3.0

 

I’ve been trying to go through some of the old books I’ve had on my kindle for a long time, and as someone who is a big fan of books about werewolves, it was no surprise to find this book in the depths of my kindle.

Defiance is the story of Zev, a werewolf who is actively escaping his vampiric masters during the opening of the book. Just as he is about to be caught by the wolves on his tail, he gets hit by a car, and the teenage driver mistakes his wolf form for a large dog. Hoping to help, the teenager brings Zed to his sister, who is training to be a vet… and paints a target on the family’s backs as well.

I found this book interesting, but I think it relied a little too much on coincidences to tell its story. The teen who hits Zev with his car just so happens to have a sister who is training to be a vet, and the sister just so happens to remember training with their dead father when she was younger, learning his supernatural-hunting ways. The family also just so happens to know another family that can use magic, and while the enemies are hunting both Zev and the family down, they just so happen to want to deal with Zev first, rather than picking off the defenseless family while he’s not around.

I will say that I enjoyed seeing the world this author was building throughout the book. It’s not often in modern werewolf fiction that I see werewolves enslaved by vampires, and the pack hierarchy was an interesting spin on more traditional roles. The two human families, one of which has history being trained to fight supernatural creatures and the other which has access to magic, was also an interesting inclusion to this book, and I can’t help but wonder how the rest of this story will go on after this first book.

However, this book just didn’t grab my attention enough to make me want to continue on with the series. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. It just… exists.