Warning: If you haven’t read “Wild About You” by Kerrelyn Sparks, don’t read this review unless you don’t mind spoilers!
Happy First Day of October! I hope you all had a great September and that you have a wonderful October as well!
I’m back with another book review, and this time it’s “Wild About You” by Kerrelyn Sparks! I’ve read another book of hers before called “The Vampire And The Virgin” and enjoyed it, so I’m happy to pick up another book of hers. Here’s the summary so we know what it’s about:
“It’s not every day that Elsa Bjornberg feels delicate, not when she hosts a home renovation show where she can effortlessly demolish a kitchen. But from the moment she meets Howard Barr, this bear of a man makes her feel like a woman. And the way he looks at her, as if she were a pot of honey he’d like to lick…
Howard is not like most men. For one thing, he’s a shapeshifter. And he always thought his celebrity crush would never amount to anything more than drooling at Elsa on TV. When his meddling vampire employer gets involved, the star is suddenly within his grasp—and within a hair of her life. For an ancient curse forbids their newfound love, and Howard is suddenly torn between his desire for her and his desire to keep her alive.”
Howard and Elsa had some very good chemistry overall, despite the whole love-at-first-sight in the beginning. Despite the curse that reigns over whether Elsa may or may not stay alive (spoiler alert: she’s alive and has a happy ending with Howard), both are determined to make the relationship work with each other by the end, and they really do make it work. It took Elsa a while for her to really get together with Howard, given that her grandmothers were hellbent on killing Howard out of believing that he might end up harming Elsa because of the supposed curse, but I was certainly glad when she decided to go all-in with him. Both are incredibly protective of each other. Elsa tries to send Howard warning of his enemies (particularly Rhett, the main antagonist) and Howard does what he can to protect Elsa in return. I also love the courting scenes those two have together leading up to them getting together officially, too, and I am so glad they got the happy ending they got in the end.
Another thing I also really liked with Howard and Elsa were the close bonds that they shared with not just each other, but also with their own respective friends and family. I thought those bonds added depth to their characters as well. I also noted that given that this book is out of many books in a series, there were other relationships featuring other characters that were discussed, and it’s likely that they were continuity nods in this whole universe the series has set up which I found very interesting.
I thought the worldbuilding surrounding werebears and their conflict with the wolves as well as the guardians was pretty fleshed out overall, and it was fun to see Elsa embrace her guardian lineage and also not-completely-freak-out-constantly at Howard being a werebear (she does a little bit of this freaking out initially, but can you really blame her when she had no idea about his true identity for quite a while?). I also liked the ongoing threat that Rhett posed to Howard and Elsa, even if the guy himself didn’t actually appear in person until about the second half of the story.
If there was anything I can critique about this book, it’s all the backstory of Howard being slightly info-dumped in the second half, and the fact that Rhett isn’t given a lot of development as a villain except for what is discussed between the main characters.