Finished Bitten by Kelley Armstrong. Several people have mentioned Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series to me, so I picked up the first book to try.

This book is about Elena Michaels, the world’s only female werewolf. Elena isn’t happy she was bitten and turned into a wolf, and she’s broken away from the Pack and is living on her own in Toronto. But when people start dying on Pack land in New York, Elena goes home to help the rest of the wolves figure out what’s going on. Once there, she has to deal with some dangerous enemies and Clayton, her former lover and the man who bit her and turned her into a wolf.

I’d read one of Armstrong’s short stories about Elena in one of the My Big Fat Supernatural anthologies, and I had high hopes for this book. There were a lot of things I liked about it. Elena is an intriguing character who isn’t afraid to be tough and ruthless when the situation calls for it. (There’s a really great scene at the end that shows her coming into her own.) Plus, Armstrong has some good descriptions of Toronto and what it’s like to be a werewolf. Her world building was very well done.

But ultimately, the book didn’t work for me for a number of reasons, the biggest of which was Clayton, the hero. I just didn’t like him. Clayton and Elena were engaged, and he took her home to meet his family (the Pack). While there, Clayton purposefully bit Elena to make her turn into a werewolf — a very painful process that could have resulted in her death. But the kicker is Clay never told her he was a werewolf. Elena never asked to be bitten, but Clay took it upon himself to decide what was best for her.

I’m not fond of alpha men (they usually just don’t work for me), and Clay is definitely an alpha who views Elena as his and his alone. There’s another scene where he takes Elena out into the woods and ties her to a tree. Elena doesn’t want to sleep with him at this point, but Clay presses the issue and she eventually gives in. Ugh. Forced seduction scenes like this one are something else I just don’t enjoy. No means no.

Overall, I thought Clay was selfish and manipulative. If I’d been Elena, I think I would have used my werewolf powers to rip his throat out. Not forgiven him for everything he put her through. I also wasn’t too fond of Jeremy, the leader of the Pack. I felt he could have done more to keep Elena from being bitten in the first place.

And then there was the Pack itself. It seems whenever the wolves (they’re all male) get a human woman pregnant and she has a boy, they take the child away from the mother with no explanation. Boys carry the werwolf gene and will eventually become wolves themselves. However, girls are ignored because they don’t carry the gene and will not become wolves.

I realize the wolves are taking the kids away so they can train them and keep their secret safe from the rest of the world. But the basic thought of the male wolves is that human women are good enough to sleep with and impregnate, but not good enough to raise a male werewolf. And the girls that the wolves father, don’t they care about them at all? It doesn’t seem like they do.  

So while there were things I liked about Bitten, I just couldn’t get over Clay’s character, how Elena goes back to him, and the overall actions of the Pack. Thumbs down.

On a side note, one of the women in my critique group mentioned that she likes Armstrong’s Otherworld books about a witch named Paige better than the werewolf books. I might give one of those a try.

Up next: Lover Enshrined by J.R. Ward.

Books in my TBR pile: About 13.