Paranormal Romance by Alisa Sheckley

The back-cover blurb for 'The better to hold' you, based on which, I might add, I hadn’t bought the book if I had read it before:
    Manhattan veterinarian Abra Barrow has more sense about animals than she has about men. 
   So when her adored journalist husband returns from a research trip to Romania and starts 
   pacing their apartment like a caged wolf, Abra agrees to move with him to a rural mansion 
   upstate in order to save her marriage. But while there are perks to her new life, particularly
   in the bedroom, Abra soon discovers that nothing in the bucolic town of Northside is what it 
   seems. Her husband has developed feral new appetites and a roving eye, and his lack of
   humanity isn’t entirely emotional. As the moon waxes full, Abra must choose between trusting
   the man she married, taking a chance on a seductive stranger, or following her own animal instincts.

I’m not enamoured with the first part of the book, like a Tim Burton movie you can break it apart in single elements all of which are possessed by their own charm but put together they jar at each other. It kept being stuck in my mind as a crude mix of emotional drama, chick-lit entertainment and paranormal mystery of which in the end only the emotional drama kept working. It’s only when Abra follows Hunter to live with him in the abandoned backwoods estate of his family, and when there’s nothing much left to focus on than the relationship between them, that Alisa’s story really begins to catch you. She’s possessed of a fine eye for what makes relations go and for the ease with which we hurt each other.
Forced to concentrate on the emotional side of her story she excels in her writing.

All in all I’m feeling torn down right in the middle. I like her writing a lot, the book is a fast reader that keeps you glued to the pages and I feel it to be easy to identify with the various characters, but the book doesn’t feel evened out switching from emotional realism to happy-go-lucky entertainment voice.
It's a hugely enjoyable book, that places its preference firmly at the romance part in paranormal romance, avoiding starry-eyed teen love prose or sounding like a wish fulfillment 'dear penthouse' letter (although there are a few quite realistic sex scenes in there).
Besides my personal misgivings it’s a book I can recommend to romance readers, but it is a cautious recommendation.

I hope that with the sequel 'Moon Burn' Alisa will take a firmer direction than she does in 'The better to hold you' which is at times jumping all over the place.

Last edited by Daninsky (2009-03-21 11:53:24)