Red Moon

There are a lot of big ideas in this book, many of which are interesting. However the writing itself gets in the way of the storytelling. Choosing an omniscient, present-tense style in an attempt to make a “literary” genre novel only serves to make the book a very sterile experience. As an entry in the canon of werewolf novels, it has merit for the hyper-scientific approach to lycanthropy, and for the politics of known lycanthropes living in the real world. It's too bad the ending is so rushed it almost makes the reader's journey seem like a wasted effort, or that we don't really care about the fate of the characters. We want to, but somehow we just can't muster the empathy.

THIS BOOK WAS SO LONG. I mean it was good - but I was reading the ebook copy so I didn't have that visual cue that 800+ pages has when it's in paper form.

So! Werewolves with their own nation, freedom fighters vs terrorist, energy politics, a love story across species (?), nuclear winter, and the cliffhanger ending of more to come!

Don't be fooled that this will be something short and sweet, like I was, and try to speed through it.

I had to finish to see what became of the story, but Part III was really disjointed and frustrating. Everyone seems to recycle themselves. The deep character building dies with unnecessary gore.

Overall, this story is good enough to read through, but could have been reworked-possibly with a sequel. Not appropriate for kids due to sex and violence.

When I first picked up this book, I thought “Awesome! The Passage for werewolves!” So maybe I overhyped this book for myself, or maybe it just didn't live up to its own potential. The characters are very interesting. The premise has a lot of promise. But in the end, I feel like the author relied to heavily on American history for his plot–it was like he did a search and replace for any cultural upheaval and crammed it all into the story. Civil Rights movement, Vietnam War protests, War on Terror, Occupy Wall Street–all there, but replace African Americans, Muslims, hippies, occupiers with lycans.

Also, the ending was a bit of a letdown and left several main characters stranded. About 60 pages from the end, I kept thinking, there's no way he can wrap this up, there must be a sequel planned. But wrap it up he did (though there could still be room for a sequel–I mean, what happens to Miriam? Chase? Augustus? Max?), in a way that made me re-read the last chapter 3 times. The solution just didn't feel right to me. If that was what the Resistance was cooking up all along, why the previous carnage? They could have done that quietly at any time, without any need for a large resistance movement. And what was the Tall Man really after? He seemed to have a bigger agenda than just personal revenge, but we never see it fully played out. And what is the deal with Augustus, anyway?

The more I write about it, the more I'm talking myself down to a 2 or 2.5-star rating. . . .

Not my cup of tea.