Hello everyone!
It's been a while since I found a really good supernatural book that I'd actually enjoy to the point where I'd want to immediately gobble down the rest of the series; usually what'll happen is that I'll like the first book, but it won't hold my interest all that much that I'd want to devote more time to the subsequent ones.
Not with this.
I picked this one up at random, I think BookBub suggested it to me and the first in the series was free at the time, so I was like sure, why not.
I don't often like YA books, not anymore at least, because I think I've just outgrown them, and most feature a heroine who runs off at the first sight of problems when all you want to do is shake her and tell her to JUST. COMMUNICATE.
This one wasn't like that, which is probably part of the allure here.
Are you ready for this? Better have some hope, because Hope(less) is up next.
I'm not sure I have any supernatural books of this kind on my blog so I don't think I'll be linking any, but I'll hunt around a little and see if MAYBE there's a possibility. I doubt it though, since I don't even have the Twilight saga on here.
I know. Shocking.
But!
Hope(less) should change all that.
The story centers around human Gabby who has an interesting little quirk, or skill as you might call it - if she uses this skill, she can see the life force of beings around her, and for a long time she thinks it's just humans, until she has a run-in with an older gentleman, Sam, who shows her that he's a werewolf.
How does he do this, you ask? Well, he shape-shifts in front of her, and back. Good enough.
Anyway, he explains that he believes Gabby's special and no, not in a creepy manner - he has no romantic interest in her at all. Gabby puts some breaks on anyway and demands they get to know one another slowly at the hospital where she works before she introduces him to her foster parents. Now, her foster parents are expecting a baby which means they won't have room for Gabby anymore, so eventually they reach an agreement: Gabby will go with Sam, and she'll stay with him until she graduates and goes off to college.
A stipulation included in this arrangement is him taking her to the Compound, the location where the werewolf pack he belongs to (and is an Elder of, at that) gathers, and he explains to her that she may be a human compatible to Mate with one of the wolves, who seem to be going pretty much extinct.
Gabby has no intention of tying herself to anyone, since she wants to call her own shots, but she does agree to do this and spends the next two years getting to know the wolves and visiting the Compound regularly for Introductions, until she's eighteen and ready to head to college.
She thinks she's home free - even though she realizes the Introduction is much, MUCH bigger this time, and the Elders really want her Mated, so she breaks some of their rules and crosses out to where the unMated are, and thinks she might even get away with it all until a very random thing happens - someone by the door who wasn't even trying to get Introduced moves, and she feels the Mated Pull.
So does he. And his name is Clay.
He also looks like he may have just rolled out of the woods with long, matted hair, dirty clothing, and a beard to hide behind, so Gabby is horrified since she's still, at her core, human. She tries leaving that night, only to find herself back at the Compound the next day (why couldn't she drive? Well, Clay kind of pulled the truck interior apart to make her stay). She attempts to talk things out with Clay, who doesn't really talk back to her so she gets more and more frustrated, and eventually suggests they can get to know one another if he comes to the city where she'll be attending college.
Of course, she meant it as he can come into the same area; Clay understands this as they'll be living together, and shows up at her new house in his canine form, where her new roommate Rachel begs Gabby so they can keep him.
From here on out we get a cute montage of the two of them sort of getting used to each other, including but not limited to Clay sleeping at the foot of Gabby's bed, tagging along if she goes anywhere, and eventually fixing things around the house and taking up the role of her human friend Clay when she needs a man to deal with some stuff in her life.
What stuff?
See, Gabby has this other thing going for her.
Every male between 5 and 80 seems to be attracted to her on an unnatural level, and they don't always take no for an answer until she really has to be rude, after which the pull leaves them and they seem to be ashamed of themselves. It can be very intense and is the reason why she doesn't have friends before Rachel, who falls in love with Peter in this one, and Peter doesn't look at Gabby twice because he's so head-over-heels.
Now, as to why Clay needs to make a human appearance - Peter has a friend, Scott, who falls under the spell of the Pull and comes on really aggressively, and even drops in unannounced at the house one time when Peter can't shake him, which is when Gabby introduces Clay so that she can have some peace and quiet.
At this point, she's comfortable enough with her companion that he can be in his human form more and more, especially when she goes to a Halloween party with another friend, Nicole, and Clay tags along with the two of them. Thankfully, since Gabby somehow transfers her powers of attraction to her friend, and falls sick immediately afterwards, sleeping for sixteen hours from the exertion and having neither the Pull nor her ability to see the life force of others in that time, making her essentially normal. She does this two other times afterwards, once by accident and once by design, and figures out that it CAN be transferred - with the right intent.
See, if she focuses and wishes that the person she's touching would find the one they're destined for, the spark transfers, but it drains her because the energy she expels bounces off a few others who are like her, coming back to her again and knocking her down.
This realization comes right at the time she clocks in that Clay has been fighting - and another Elder comes to visit, Joshua, who has a different spark than the other werewolves she's met up until this point. He actually has the same spark as a werewolf that attacked Clay and her a little while back, which would indicate there's either another pack, or another type somewhere out there.
But all of that is moot point once Sam explains just why Clay's been fighting - see, while the wolves have accepted Gabby into their world and explained some of the process behind the Introductions and Matings and everything else, they neglected to tell her there are certain rules to come along with it, too, like that she, as a human, has to accept and Claim the wolf she bonded with within six months of it happening, or else he's considered rejected and other wolves can be introduced again.
Basically, it's a never-ending rotation of Introductions until she's mated and producing pups for them, which makes Gabby livid and she demands to go back to the Compound to do it all like at the Introduction when she met Clay.
Of course she's also sick at that time from the whole transfer episodes so she collapses somewhere mid-way through after sensing one of the wolves leave (the one with the weird spark) and touching hands with Luke, a Forlorn werewolf like Clay (without a pack, that is), and sensing something else for him.
Luke helps Clay and her leave, and she gives him an address she thinks might lead him to his own Mate, though it turns out she's not eighteen yet so there's bound to be trouble there. However, when Gabby and Clay come back to the Compound a second time as all her thinking is coming to some satisfying conclusions, she does a little test run on Clay to see just who his Mate is - because they'd been attacked by two wolves of that different spark and she'd felt the same sort of Pull for one of them as she did with Clay, indicating that if the wolves are different, the potential for Mates increases, and isn't narrowed down to just one.
Gratifyingly, she sees herself as Clay's future and when the energy rebounds, she bites his neck and Claims him, which results in him finally speaking to her. They're sadly interrupted when Luke calls for help, surrounded by wolves of that same weird spark that Gabby's attackers had, so it's all hands on deck to save him - and the potential Mate he's bringing along. Because guess what, Gabby may just be a GPS for wolves to find who they're destined to be with, and she's stronger now with her bond to Clay solidified!
Easygoing, with drama coming from outside the couple rather than the couple themselves, Hope(less) is Melissa Haag's retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and her Beast doesn't say a word until the end of the book, which makes everything that much more interesting for the reader.
Or at least, it did for me! I really liked the dynamic that developed between Gabby and Clay, how she didn't just give in but he slowly chipped away at her resistance, and how he didn't actually demand anything of her, just sort of quietly waited and showed her that he was worth her love - by being there when she needed someone to listen, someone to care for her when she got sick, to fix the stuff around the house that was broken, help her in her daily routine, that sort of thing.
They fall in love naturally, or at least naturally enough for Gabby. As a human and without the senses that werewolves have, she needs this process to actually go through with the Claiming, because for Clay, considering everything he does in the book and his unwillingness to just step aside when the time's up, he's all-in from the get go, sort of tied to her because of the fact she's his Mate.
I liked Gabby's relationship with Rachel too, and with Nicole, because both women have the right mindset about Gabby's fear over her Pull: if a man would be pulled to her instead of them, he wasn't worth their time anyway.
Peter was also a pretty nice side character all in all, and I did enjoy the initial interactions Gabby had with Sam as well, because he comes across as the grandfather you want to have in your corner.
Until he isn't, because he doesn't share his ulterior motives regarding the Pack and how he desperately wants Gabby Mated, which ruins their bond and breaks her trust in him, so now they're slowly rebuilding it basically from scratch.
But!
Highly, highly recommend this is you want some fluff in your lives right now and don't need relationship drama. And tune in next week when we take a look inside Clay's head and see what he was thinking about throughout Gabby's little stunts.
Also, the vet scene. THE VET SCENE.
xx
*images not mine
No comments:
Post a Comment