A Life Spent Reading

For a first novel, Bitten is pretty good. Kelley Armstrong tells a nicely paced tale of a female werewolf — the only one in existence — who finds herself torn between two men and two worlds.

Armstrong’s writing is good, if a bit clunky here and there. There were far too many times that she would go on about something, then finish the paragraph by saying “Okay, [admit something completely contradictory here], but that’s not the point.” Aside from that overused literary device, Bitten reads smoothly and — after the first fifty pages or so — will draw you into the narrative without much problem.

While the story and plot are competent, the real fun of the book is how well Armstrong depicts things from non-human points of view, both as-yet-unchanged werewolf and post-change wolf. With chapter headings like Hunt, Trail, and Stalking, the reader gets a full dose of life from a lupine perspective. Armstrong obviously spent a lot of time thinking about things from the other side, and she doesn’t miss a trick.

Bitten is the first of a series, and it kept me hooked enough that I’ll read the next one if I have a chance. Urban fantasy is a relatively new genre, one that, with its blend of magic and reality, would seem to offer a lot of very fertile ground for new writers. It’s also hot at the moment, with books about werewolves and vampires coming out of the publishing houses almost too quickly to count. Most of them, frankly, haven’t kept me interested long enough to get much past the first chapter. But this one is good.