Emily May's Reviews > Moon Called

I should have liked this. I really wanted to like this. After all, it promises so many of the things I love about the Urban Fantasy genre: kick-ass heroine, supernatural creatures, murder mystery and hot other-wordly men. I'm actually not too demanding of the genre, Halfway to the Grave is one example of UF that is very light with little plot development and limited emphasis on the supernatural mystery element... and I really enjoyed it. If the author focuses on just one of the factors I mentioned above and milks that for all it's worth, sometimes I can forget about the lack of smutty fun and whatever else. In other words, an awesome heroine or just some funny banter can make a novel enjoyable, but this book just never seemed to deliver much of anything that I wanted to read.

It was a natural choice being both from the genre that I love and also being very highly rated by other UF lovers. But for me, the whole murder mystery that was supposed to be the basic plot ended up taking a backseat to werewolf politics. Sure, introduce it at the beginning so we know what we're dealing with, but Briggs mentions it constantly throughout... after a few chapters I was thinking "yeah, I get it, no one says no to the Alpha and women have zero say whatsoever". It was sooo slow going through all the pack rules and regulations - do we really care? I didn't.

Then, of course, Mercy Thompson was our heroine. But I found her rather wishy-washy, one moment she was all bad-ass and "I take orders from no one", the next she's in tears or cowering beneath a 'dominant' male werewolf... ugh. Then you find out that Samuel, her first love, is 200 years her senior and wanted to use her in order to have his little werebabies. Briggs could have redeemed him easily if she'd made him sexy and gave the reader the smut that (let's face it) they expect from good urban fantasy books. However, the most excitement we get in the whole novel is a drab kiss and, as I read in Tatiana's review, there is apparently no such sexiness until book 4. Credit where it's due, though, I thought Adam was hot.

Anyway, why the hell did Briggs have to make Mercy a 'skinwalker', which is apparently just another word in this sense for a 'werecoyote'? I'd rather she'd have just been a human. It seems ridiculously lame, quite like a lot of the messy array of creatures that the author decided to shove into the novel. Perhaps she wishes to use the witches and fae later in the series, but then she could have just pulled a Charlaine Harris trick and introduced them as they became important to the storyline, rather than producing a long list in the first chapter. I've never had much interest in the 'lesser fae', like goblins, elves and sprites... it brings back too many painful memories of books like The Hobbit. That's a place I never want to return. I really can't see me getting the next book in the series, I so far haven't managed to muster up any interest in the life of Mercy Thompson. It's disappointing.


EDIT: pg 129 of my edition: Mercy ponders the historical rumour about Queen Victoria and the laws against homosexual acts, stating that it is said that Queen V refused to believe that women would do such a thing, thereby making the law gender-biased and only specific to men. However, there is no record of this rumour until about 50 years ago when it began to circulate. Before that time it was unheard of, making it extremely unlikely to be anything more than a rumour. The gender specifics of the law is much more likely due to the all-male parliament of the time and the tendency to suppress female sexuality in victorian society - the MPS likely believed that 'perversions' (as homosexuality was once perceived to be) were solely male.