by Kelly Burton

Created on: August 21, 2009

The Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer has done something funny to my brain. Not only did I thoroughly enjoy that particular teen series of books and then devoured her more adult follow up, The Host, I actively went out and bought a book that was recommended to fans of the Meyer books!

I have never heard of the author of this book before despite Bitten being first released for publication in 2001 to a good reception and following it up with a further 9 novels. I thought this was an interesting fact as I seem to spy a lot of this sci-fi/fantasy genre in the bookstores at the moment and it was my cynical impression that a lot of authors were jumping on the bandwagon and creating all these books involving the likes of vampires and werewolves! Clearly, Kelley Armstrong has been around for a while and her writing career seems to have mainly involved this genre so she is by no means new to this!

The Plot

Not only is Bitten Armstrong's debut, but it is the first in a series entitled Women of the Otherworld featuring the worlds only female werewolf, Elena Michaels. Elena lives in Toronto with her boyfriend Phillip where she is trying out living her life as human after being tired of living with the pack. The problem with her situation is she will never be human; she cannot fight the change into a werewolf for long and her incredible appetite is difficult to cover up around humans. Yet she doesn't want to return to pack life where she constantly had to keep tabs on rogue werewolves and where she had to spend her time with the man who had bitten her and made her a werewolf in the first place!

She is soon called back by Pack Alpha Jeremy as the pack are under threat and need her help to stop their secret getting out.

A few thoughts

I wasn't sure If I was going to enjoy this or not but it wasn't long before I was involved in the story with Elena. Starting off in Toronto, it literally takes a couple of pages for Elena's biggest secret to be revealed to the readers and that is just how I like it; after last reading a book that seemed to take forever for any action to happen, this was a very welcome change. Setting up Elena's contrasting werewolf and human life certainly caught my attention and its fast pace was enough to keep me hooked.

Elena the reluctant werewolf

I also enjoyed the fact that the story is told in the first person narrative, Elena has a confidential tone which made me feel that she was pouring out her emotions into

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