I'm a dedicated Sarah MacLean fan. I have loved every single one of her books and I listen to her podcast, Fated Mates, regularly. There was no question really that I was going to love this book, especially since it's such a long awaited love story in the MacLean universe.
I've got all this sad poetry stuck to my ribcage;
the stubborn meat of a dead beast
hiding my heart from the vultures
even though it's screaming to be eaten.
To be pecked and torn and swallowed;
to be the last meal of the starved and the greedy.
Genre: Adult Fantasy/Fairytale Retelling
Alright, before we get into this, I have to say upfront that not only was this book a gift, I also received a copy that has been annotated by the author. I won it in a Twitter giveaway before it released and I'm incredibly lucky and grateful to have it in my possession. I had intended to read it immediately and review it before its release in June but time got away from me, as time often does. The thing is, I knew I was going to love this book and that it was going to drag me deep into my feelings and I wasn't ready for it yet. But I've done it now and here we are.
And I was right, I loved it a whole lot and I have a lot of feelings about it.
For The Wolf by Hannah Whitten is a home run book for me. It encompasses all my favorite things to find in a book -romance, complicated relationships with family, fairytale symbolism, magic forests, and breathless writing. And of course the exploration of what it means to be human and what it means to be a monster. Where and what are the lines and how do we walk them?
Rolling out across the fields she is thunder
on a dark night.
Water drips from her fingertips,
heart heavy with summer rain.
She screams,
cries.
So I have one of those story prompt journals that you can get at Barnes and Noble and I am trying to get in the habit of actually using it. I find it's a good exercise to do to get in the habit of writing more, working the creative muscles if you will, and I'm excited to share some of it here for thoughts and feedback. I'd also love to know what you'd have written for each prompt because I'm fascinated by the ways different people approach the same idea.
So, without any further rambling...
I read my very first romance novel at ten. Thinking about that now mostly has my head spinning about the fact that it's been 21 years since I was ten. Time and age are fickle things, advancing quickly while the daily hours seem to drag on forever. Anyways, it was 2000 and my cousin, who was twelve and therefore very wise and grown up in my eyes, handed me a romance novel she had borrowed from the library. It was a new release and she had just finished reading it and loved it so much that she wanted to talk about it with someone. Knowing how much I loved to read made me the obvious choice and I took it from her gladly. I read it while sprawled out across her bedroom floor over the course of the next two days, not looking up from it for hours at a time. I was totally enthralled.
My memory of what happened in this book are sparse. It was returned to the library and eventually I forgot about it altogether as I was engrossed in other books, a good portion of them more romance novels. Recently I did some digging based off of my vague memories of it and did manage to hunt down a copy. It was The Wish by Marianne Willman. It's not a book I've ever heard anyone talk about since it came out so I'm amazed I remembered at all. I haven't reread it yet but I absolutely plan to.
Sometimes hunger feels like emptiness,
a hollow weightlessness,
as if I might float away from everything
and drift into the waiting clouds.
Writing is something that I have done from a young age. I was always writing little short stories, bits of poetry, and even novels scrawled into composition notebooks. Most people who identify as writers have a similar story. I was born with a love of words as much as I was with blonde hair and pale skin.
Despite this deep love, my history with writing has been tumultuous. There have been periods of my life when I have written avidly -every day and all kinds of writing. I had notepads full of poetry (much of it morbid) and when I got older, endless word documents filled with scraps of stories. I have also had long stretches of time where writing is something I can't bring myself to do, no matter how much I love it. I'm having one of those stretches now, and it's been going on for a long time at this point.