Howl for the Holidays by Bridget Essex

Howl for the Holidays
by Bridget Essex
Pages: 63
Date: December 13 2016
Publisher: Rose and Star Press
Series: None

Review
Rating: 3.70
Read: December 14 2016

Some deep emotions were released in this book. Quite interesting, really. Though they were the kind wherein I felt a somewhat deep dislike of the main and only point of view character. I did not like her actions.

Essex normally mixes up different types of people. And from a surface look, it seems as if she broke that specific trait here with this story. For the two main characters are both werewolves. We do not have knights meeting up/hooking up with librarians (or radio personalities); we do not have those looking for love suddenly finding it in a place they didn't even know existed (humans finding werewolves); nor guardian angels with humans, or vampires with . . . actually, I've not read any of the vampire ones so I do not know what's going on in those books. No, here we have two werewolves.

Except. The easiest (potentially) way to look at this story is to look at it through a particular mirror. A mirror I have to hide behind spoilers. This is not two female werewolves who love each other. Think of one of them as being transgender. And fearing the reaction of the other. And feeling confusion, feeling fear, feeling self-hatred of themselves - for they are in the wrong body. Here that 'wrong body' is 'werewolf' and right body is 'human', instead of 'male/female/other'. Seeing the story through that light provides an interesting twist. One that I've seen played with by this author before. Though the previous 'playing' involved setting up a 'coming out' type of 'LGBT' story, but having, instead of a LGBT person (well, still Lesbian, but the coming out isn't the lesbian part), you have a 'other' - in the form of a werewolf (I've forgotten which specific story this occurred in, might be the 'Christmas Wolf' one).

It is an interesting story, though not one I had expected. I had some vague idea of what the story was going to be about, but a lot more of it was captured within a flash back. Unfortunate that. Though, due to the nature of the story, the flashback was needed.

Rating: 3.70

December 14 2016