Curse of the Wolf King

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The other night, I picked up, started, and DNFed three whole books. Nothing was satisfying the urge I couldn't quite defined. I knew I wanted a fantasy romance, but nothing was really hitting the spot after the last book I read. I picked up Curse of the Wolf King after initially starting the second book in the series — Heart of the Raven Prince. I hate starting things in the middle, so I went back and started the first book.

Curse of the Wolf King is a Beauty and the Beast retelling, with fae. Sound familiar? Probably, because that's exactly what A Court of Thorns and Roses is, too. I love a good fae book, but this one was just okay. The writing was tolerable, the plot middling, and the characters...frequently infuriating.

Gemma is our main character — the Belle of the book, so to speak — and she is not very nice. She spends most of the novel desperately wishing to not be around people because they might judge her for her past “scandal”. Except no one in town knows about the scandal, because it happened far away. So she's prejudging these people before they can judge her. Gemma is “special' because she reads books instead of hoping for a husband.

Elliot is our Beast, and he is...well he's a piece of work at first. He's the unseelie king of the Winter Court. Once he gets he warms up to Gemma, he's a bit of a cinnamon roll, but a first he's infuriating and stubborn. No different than the original Beast, of course. The whole gist of the book is that they (Gemma and Elliot) must break the curse on him before all the petals fall from the roses in his garden. The curse being, of course, that a human must be willing to sacrifice their greatest treasure. Otherwise, the curse will kill Elliot (and the people living on his estate.) So Gemma comes up with a kind of stupid plan to manipulate her most hated townsperson into falling in love with Elliot and breaking his curse.

You can see where this goes wrong.

Anyway, the first half of the book is much better than the second half. The author writes yearning much better than they write actually being in a relationship. Overall, this was just okay — here's hoping my next read is much better.