Hunted by K. M. Shea, 2021

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Ever feel like you don’t belong?
Try being a hunter living with werewolves. I’m the definition of “doesn’t fit in”. I’m not Pack, but I’m not the enemy, either.
I struggle to survive among werewolves who are stronger and faster than me, and are competitive enough to break a bone or two for the sake of “fun.”
Greyson, their alpha, is the worst of them all.
Blatantly relentless and twice as deadly, Greyson rules the Pack and expands its territory even though it’s already the largest in the region. I just wish he’d stop interfering with my life. He’s got enough trouble of his own with his incomplete mate bond, but he’s made it his hobby to tease and test me at every opportunity.
Doesn’t my life sound fun?
When wolves from surrounding packs start mindlessly attacking the innocent humans in our city, Timber Ridge, everything changes.
Werewolves don’t turn feral without reason. Which means someone is making this happen, and they’re targeting our Pack.
I don’t like where this is going, but how am I supposed to stop a feral wolf outbreak when I’m just one hunter? Can Greyson and I set aside our differences to see the Pack through this?
(322 pages)

This is the first book in a new series that’s set in the same world as two of Shea’s other series, Hall of Blood and Mercy and Court of Midnight and Deception. They’re both fun, fluffy supernatural series that feature political intrigue, dry humor, and intriguing worldbuilding. They’re all also romances, but the romance is not the “point” of the books or the only focal point of the narrative. I really appreciate this balance, and I’ve grown to love this quirky world full of magical beings alternating between grand conflicts and inane bureaucracy. I’ve been excited for this latest series since I found out Shea was planning another story in the world, this time focused on werewolves, and if Hunted is any indication this series is going to be just as much fun as the other ones.

Let’s start with the less positive, just to get it out of the way. This book is not subtle. There’s a scene at the end of it where some new plot twists are introduced, and I had already predicted every single one of them. I was occasionally frustrated (especially in the second half) by how clueless Pip was about everything and by all the small hints and foreshadowing Shea dropped when I’d already long since figured things out. I also thought the relationship between Pip and Greyson wasn’t as fleshed out as it could have been. Pip is bitter that he was brought in to replace the previous alpha, who’d been a paternal figure for her, but besides being mentioned once or twice this doesn’t seem to really factor in to her relationship with him. She constantly claims to dislike him, including in her internal dialogue, but she never gives any concrete reasons or seem to find him anything worse than honorable-but-annoying. I’d have loved to see her take actual issue with him, perhaps morally disagreeing with his leadership style or decision-making or something. This was done really well with Killian and Hazel in the Hall of Blood and Mercy trilogy.

Now to the good. For starters, it’s fun. I had a great time reading it and never got bored – a true feat, since I read it on a plane. I usually get bored doing anything on a plane. I love the wry sense of humor in all of these series, mixing the dramatic supernatural stuff with mundane human stuff. Some of my favorite scenes were the ones where Pip was working in the welcome center for her town, wrangling the tourists seeking werewolf mementos and the werewolf women stalking Greyson with equal aplomb. I also love the scenes where she’s planning to defrost frozen pizza or trying to bully her mean, overweight cats into taking their medication. It adds such a great human dimension to the story.

I also like the angle on adoption that Shea takes here. Pip was adopted by a werewolf couple in the Pack when her first parents died, and they have now also passed away. Pip has inherited their house, she’s still treated like a Pack member even with her parents gone, and there’s just generally a baseline treatment of adoption as “real” family even past the point when her parents aren’t there to actively advocate for her anymore. This is done without taking anything away from Pip’s heritage as a hunter, or her memories of her earlier childhood, and watching her grapple with feeling alone in the world – not really a hunter, not quite a werewolf – was honestly one of the most fascinating things in the book. It mirrored a lot of the things I’ve heard from friends who were transracially adopted and what I read when we were adopting my younger sisters. I love seeing this treatment of adoption and exploration of its complications, especially when most books in this genre would likely have taken the “easy” path and treated Pip’s werewolf parents like temporary foster parents who didn’t matter once they were dead  - completely ignoring the complexities of her identity. 

All in all, this was a lot of fun. I’m glad I had the chance to read it, and I’m looking forward to seeing things continue in the sequel!

Questions about A Christmas Prince 2: A barely coherent rant

Here's the context for what you're about to read. When The Christmas Prince 2 came out on Netflix in 2018, I was in the throes of studying for my December exams. After I watched it during a study break, my feverish mind kept jumping off of my macroeconomics textbook to focus on the important questions: the logical issues with the world of The Christmas Prince.  I opened up Blogger, made a post entitled "Questions about A Christmas Prince 2", and threw all of my thoughts onto the page stream-of-conscious style. This rant periodically pops into my head once or twice a year, and it always makes me laugh to read it back over, so I thought it would be worth putting it out into the world. I make no promises about the accuracy of my statements about how the economy works, because after another two years of study I've concluded I still know nothing about the field. But anyway, hope you get some laughter out of it.

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How has her father never been to Aldovia before now?

Why does Emily's play get shut down? Surely they have a backup generator for power, and besides that all they need is permission from the people who own the building to use it. The workers don't own the building, do they? Anyway, why are the school workers striking? Surely most of their wages are fixed by contracts and they get to teach rich kids so their work is not really impacted?

Why is the strike so sudden? Usually there's a lot more negotiation before they jump into striking, and something that the workers actually are holding out for. Rebelling against a fiscal policy action as a whole doesn't make much sense.

I can't believe they talked to some random striker and he was the key to everything. What are the odds that he would have exactly the information they needed to figure out what's going on? And how come no one else thought to check up on this at all, besides the one guy who didn't really do it?

I'm not even going to talk about the absolute stupidity that is the idea that one person can have stolen enough money from the economy to single-handedly cause a recession. Or the idea that they could do that and not be noticed.

Why is the economy in such bad shape after just a year? Four financial quarters is not nearly enough time for all the king's changes to have taken effect. An increase in government spending can actually even result in a short-run recession before the stimulus takes effect (since a decrease in consumption spending necesssary for increased investment can result in decreased production in the short run), so without the theft it could have been that they just needed to wait a while to see the results. Also, giving a huge amount of money + Christmas bonuses out willy-nilly is almost certainly going to result in WAY too sharp a spike in the price level. Inflation will be a nightmare and exports will almost halt. Plus they'll have to swing back down at some point after this fiscal and monetary expansion, and there will be a hard recession.

What sort of communist country is this, anyway, where the king can personally pay everyone's wages? If the bad guy's company really did do the work they were paid for, then why are all the Aldovian workers who didn't do anything entitled to these big payouts? If they did do the work, then why is the government the one paying them? Was the Aldovian government really that close to going bankrupt that they couldn't pay for the work they hired people to do? It seems like either there was some gross financial error in the public works planning or the money was stolen directly from the government coffers, which should have been really easy to check.

On a financial document I saw that they are on the euro. If they're in the EU, why are they so focused on only using domestic producers? The whole point of the EU is to allow for easy trade and strong competition. Is the king going to push for Aldexit next? If all the money weren't going into the pocket of that one guy, I don't know if I'd have even had an issue with them using international companies to do the work. Assuming, of course, that those companies were cheaper and more efficient, which does seem suspect for something like local infrastructure construction.

If they are on the Euro but not in the EU, then they are most likely operating on a fixed exchange rate.

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At this point in my rant, the mention of a fixed exchange rate reminded me of the exam I was actually supposed to be studying for and I switched back to studying.

The Twelve Dancing "Princesses" by S. R. Nulton, 2019

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Portia is a girl with a problem. Several, actually. The first, and possibly most important, is that she's been cursed. Luckily, she has 11 other people to keep her company. Too bad they can't ask anyone for help. And they are going through a lot of shoes while waiting for rescue.
Eric is a man with a mission. He needs to find his sister and he'll stop at nothing to do so. But what happens when he gets sidetracked helping 12 missing women? And how do you help someone without them knowing? Because these girls are bound and determined to keep anyone from finding out what's going on. Too bad he can't just ask them outright.

As I've documented quite thoroughly with my review choices over the past year, I'm a big fan of fairytale retellings. After devouring as many as I could get my hands on for a long time, I've started to become a bit pickier. I'm drawn to the retellings of the stories that haven't already been told a million times, or the most unique retellings of the more common ones. My usual rule of thumb is that the more famous a story is, the more boring I'll find its average retelling - just because I'll have read so many others that play with similar tropes.

Somehow, Twelve Dancing Princesses is one of the few "big" fairytales that doesn't quite fit that rule. While famous, it's not adapted as frequently as its counterparts, probably because of the ridiculous number of characters. And the retellings I do find are very rarely shadows of each other. The challenge of this story is so great that each author comes up with a unique angle from which to attack it.

All that to say, I'm probably biased but I had a lot of fun with this book. I know that on an objective level it's not a great book - I kept mixing up some of the girls, and the romance was a bit too insta-lovey for my usual tastes - but I got so wrapped up in the plot that I forgot about it for the most part.

It took me a while to remember all the ins and outs of the book's backstory, especially as I was reading it out of order. I still don't know if a couple of the minor characters were references to other books, to be honest. But that wasn't a huge deal. And it was fun finally getting a book from Eric's point of view after following three of his sisters in some of the other books. I liked him as a character, even if he was slightly too generally-perfect-soldier-guy for my own tastes. As for Portia, she was great. I loved being in her head when she was confusing all of the people around her. Her tendency to get lost in thought mid-conversation then pop up with some completely random comment made me laugh (and only partially out of recognition of my own tendencies).

Perhaps what I liked the most about the book was the way it tackled the difficulty of needing to flesh out twelve main characters (as well as the men around them). It's genius, really: Nulton made having a one-note personality part of the curse. Literally. As the curse gets worse, each girl becomes more and more extreme with a single trait until it becomes very easy to tell them apart. Portia is ditzy to the point where she can't keep track of conversations even when she tries, another girl begins to mimic others so much that she loses her own personality, some girls get an obsession for water or animals or plants, and so on. It's an easy way to give each character a single defining trait without the reader feeling short-changed.

Looking back, my biggest issue with the book is probably some potential that was wasted. Some of Portia's magic introduced possibilities that would have been very fun (if a bit cheesy) in the romance storyline, but they were basically forgotten later on. And we're told a lot that Eric is too protective of the people he cares about, but that never really seems to get in the way of anything so I'm not entirely sure why it's there.

I read this book on an airplane, and it was the perfect travel read: interesting enough to keep me entertained, light and fluffy enough to keep me in good spirits, and long enough to last a few hours. If you're looking for a 12 Dancing Princesses retelling, you could definitely do worse (though my definitive favourite will always be Jessica Day George's Princess of the Midnight Ball, and Melanie Celliers's Dance of Silver and Shadows is a cute retelling as well!). Do you know of any other 12 Dancing Princesses retellings? If so, put them in the comments below so I can check them out!