Book Review!

The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf by Molly Harper

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Y'know, after the debacle that was Twilight, and after burning through all the Sookie Stackhouse books on a rabid month-long bender, I swore to myself that I would never again fall prey to the supernatural romance/mystery genre. (Okay, there was that one lapse where I went back to Charlaine Harris for some of her Harper Connelly stuff, true . . .but that was it. And it was, for the most part, disappointing.) So you may be asking yourselves: MJ, what happened?



Molly Harper happened.



Never before have I read someone who treats the supernatural with such silly affection. I mean, I was baptized by Anne Rice and Stephen King, for godsakes. You don't get much more somber treatment than that. Then we went romping back into the scene with the angst-ridden Cullen clan, then we have Charlaine Harris and her sexy redneck vampire-bait waitress. That was close . . .so close. But Molly Harper is the promised land.



Okay, about this specific book: We're back in Grundy, Alaska, but instead of hearing everything through the thoughts and mind of the very human Mo Graham, we're living through the eyes of her new sister-in-law, Maggie Graham. Maggie is the Alpha female of her pack, but for the most part, her pack is unsettled -- because by nature, there should be an Alpha male. Maggie's brother has turned down the job he was born to, so she assumed the responsibility -- but until she marries another wolf, there won't be peace, or, for that matter, any conceivable end to the questions about her (lack of a) love life.



Enter the very human, very cute, and -- did I mention, not-wolf? -- single academic nerd, Nick Thatcher. He's put two and two together in a way no other human in the area seems willing or able to do, and he's sniffing around for werewolves. Can Maggie resist his nerdy charms? And if she can't, how does she protect him, her pack, and herself from a new threat that smells like dryer sheets?



I loved it. Did I mention that Molly Harper is funny? I mean, laugh out loud funny. She loves supernatural creatures, but she doesn't necessarily put them on pedestals. She makes their problems sound believable, and that's what makes it so easy to believe that they exist. After all, I'd be willing to blame all the buffet spots in the country on werewolves. It doesn't help my willingness to believe this that enormous human patrons waddle in and out regularly, but surely some of the skinny customers --



Oh well. Never mind.



Why only four stars? I guess it's because this book was a little less compelling, because the voice was that of a werewolf, not a human. She'd never been fully human, so I lost that scrap of connection that I'd built with Mo (and that I'm now building with Jane Jameson, newly-undead).



Even so, funny. Wonderfully, side-splittingly, beverage-spewingly funny. Thank you, Molly.



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