Moonburn By Alisa Sheckley

Moonburn seems to be the second novel in a series by Alisa Sheckley.  However, you don't need to read the first book in the series in order to read this one because you are given all the important information. I thought the use of Native American Mythology was interesting in this novel but beside that, almost nothing else worked.  The characters are weak and uninteresting and there is so much going on that I can't find the plot.

Plot or what I found of it:  Abra, the main character, is a vet who has left a prestigious job in the city to move a small town in the country called Northridge because she has a secret.  She is a werewolf.  In this novel as in so many others, werewolfism is a virus and Abra caught the virus from her ex-husband. She moved to Northside because the folks there don't seem to mind a little weirdness from time to time, they just ignore ghosts in restaurants and werewolves as vets. Just when Abra thinks she has her life under control things start to get weirder again. Men start to follow her as if she is the last female on Earth.  And her new boyfriend, Red, who is also a werewolf, is also acting strange and there are weird beasties wandering in the forest.  So what in the world is going on and can Abra figure it all out?  You will have to read to find out.

There are so many side plots in this novel that it is mind boggling.  You have Abra’s loss of control over her wolf. You have her conflict with her ex-husband and his pack that happen to live next door. You have her boss who is the typical mad scientist and his experiments gone awry. Then there is Red’s behavior and the strange forest beasts. There is just too much going on in this novel to keep track of all of it and for it all to be cohesive. That is my first problem with this novel.

My second problem is that there is not a likeable or interesting character to be found in the novel. Abra is a weak character. She is whiney, spineless, and moody. She makes really bad choices including cheating on Red whom she is supposed to love. She is not a character I can get behind or want to read about. A character should have some faults in order to make them realistic but too many faults make them unlikeable. Red is too weird and not in the mysterious hero interesting way. He is weird in the “this guy should always live alone” kind of way, sort of like one of my exes. And Abra’s boss is the typical mad scientist with no more depth than that. The characters in this novel are uninteresting and forgettable.

Also the sex scenes are weird and push the human/animal boundaries with shifting (into and out of wolf form) in ways I feel most people would be uncomfortable with.

Overall for me, this book really has nothing going for it except its use of Native American Mythology which I thought was original but it is used at the end sort of like an afterthought. It is too little too late to save this novel. Bad plot. Bad characters. Give this one a pass.