(Discussion question about alpha females to follow the review.)
Elise, a werewolf, comes home one day to discover that her father has picked a mate for her — Kane, the alpha from a neighboring pack. Within hours, she has to set aside a lifetime of feelings for another man and give herself to a stranger. Hours after that, she’s leaving the only home she’s ever known, and meeting a new pack that has been having some…well, let’s just say difficulties.
This book got off to a pretty good start, although why we needed a flashback twenty seconds in was beyond me. I sympathized with the setup, and was eager to find out where things would go. The answer turned out to be not as far as I would have liked, ad not nearly as quickly.
I found the pacing of this book to be its biggest weakness. I freely admit that I skimmed through large parts of it — especially the parts where we sit and stew in Elise’s highly repetitive and circular thoughts for pages on end. And for all the skimming, I really didn’t feel like I missed any actual story.
The second biggest problem with this book was that it didn’t take long for me to stop caring about Elise’s lost opportunities with Bryin. For all the stewing she did in her mind, she accepted the entire situation far too readily, and came to love Kane far too quickly for me to feel like it was ever a real thing. I guess you could also call this problem lack of tension.
The world building was a bit weak, too, IMO, with the werewolf aspect of the novel turning out to be more a matter of setting than plot. Which is to say, the werewolf element wasn’t as all necessary — fun, but not necessary. One random believability issue tie in here: I had trouble believing how easily a wolf’s sense of smell could be fooled.
There were some things that just plain annoyed me, such as how many times Kane told Elise that she was his mate. “You are my mate.” “You are my MATE.” “You ARE my mate.” “YOU are my mate. “You are MY mate.” …. Nope, changing the inflection doesn’t make it any different. It just came up far too often. I even get into the whole, “You belong to me” thing in romance, but it loses its impact when overdone. On the same token, I was sick of hearing that Kane was the alpha. At one point, I found myself thinking that a real alpha wouldn’t have to say it all the time, it would be implicit.
Elise herself was an okay character, but she didn’t do much to try to take control of her own destiny. She also didn’t strike me as being an alpha female, which isn’t necessarily a problem, it’s just that it gave me pause when considering what the whole alpha male in a pack thing is really about. Isn’t the alpha male supposed to have all the females, and the betas can go…well, you know? The alpha female would then be the woman who asserted herself as leader of the other females? I don’t know…the alpha thing in most werewolf books has long been a source of confusion for me. I know what they’re going for…the whole dominant male thing (and hey, most of us do like that in a guy), but outside the bedroom, and in a pack situation, the role of the alpha’s mate in a monogamous culture isn’t entirely clear to me.
Hmmm….from all that, you’d think I hated the book, wouldn’t you? I really didn’t. It was okay. I’d say I thought it had unfulfilled potential. I might even consider giving the author another chance, to see if she fixes some of these technical issues later in the series, but not just now. I’m going to try another new author right now.
Discussion question: Is an alpha male’s mate automatically an alpha female?
Rating 2/5
Title: The Mating
Author: Nicky Charles
ISBN: 2940000826966
Published February 23, 2010