Stray (2007) by Rachel Vin­cent is the first book in the were­cat series. This book is avail­able as a paper­back and ebook at your favorite etailer. This guest review is from Sen­e­tra and this is a DNF review. stray-by-rachel-vincent-werecat

I thought I couldn’t stand Emma Wood­house. Hello, Faythe Sanders, 23-year old were­cat brat. The story opens with her whin­ing about her life: Her fam­ily didn’t want her to go to col­lege, so she tricked them into miss­ing her grad­u­a­tion. She resents that Daddy’s had spies on her for five years, but Daddy’s pay­ing the bills for grad­u­ate school, so she “has” to put up with it, but she won’t like it! She smells a were­cat who doesn’t belong in their ter­ri­tory, so she con­fronts him in an alley and gets mad when Daddy’s spy (and her ex-boyfriend) Mar­cus is a lit­tle late sav­ing her from a beat down. Page 6 and she’s already TSTL. Mom is too June Cleaver. Her ex-boyfriend wants to marry her and turn her into her mother (despite evi­dence to the con­trary). Blah, blah, blah. What­ever. Oh, and Daddy says that Faythe must drop out of school and come home NOW.

At some point, the world build­ing begins, and we find out that in the U.S., there are 10 Pride fam­i­lies. Each fam­ily has an Alpha and a Dam, their sons (toms), and hope­fully a daugh­ter (tabby). Out­side of the Alpha’s imme­di­ate fam­ily are the other males: assorted rel­a­tives and other Pride mem­bers, total­ing some addi­tional 40 mem­bers. Some were­cats live out­side of the Pride struc­ture, and are ignored unless they enter someone’s ter­ri­tory. There are also weres who are “strays”, humans who were bit­ten or scratched and became were­cats. For the most part, they aren’t wel­come, but Mar­cus is a stray. Faythe is an unmar­ried tabby, one of only eight in the entire coun­try. Find­ing this out makes me won­der how Faythe thinks that she can just live apart from the Pride. When it’s pointed out to her that if she did live alone, or even apart from the Pride with her mate, she would be at con­stant risk of attack because she is one of only eight mar­riage­able females of her entire species in the coun­try, she still believes it could hap­pen. Cue lec­ture on how Faythe is so busy break­ing and ignor­ing rules that she doesn’t see that some of them make sense and could actu­ally be bent to her advan­tage. Cue Faythe dis­miss­ing any attempt at rea­son and logic.

Once Faythe starts whin­ing about liv­ing on her own, we get back to the rea­son Faythe was pulled out of school. First, a tabby from another Pride went miss­ing, then one of Faythe’s cousins. There are some scenes with her broth­ers, she injures Mar­cus for no rea­son, and has a weird flir­ta­tion thing going on with another of her father’s enforcers. Some other stuff hap­pened, but I couldn’t tell you what it was since I decided to skip ahead by about 200 pages, and even then, it’s only the next day or so. Skip more pages. Faythe has been taken by the same strays who took her friend and cousin. I skipped ahead some more, found out who the vil­lains were, skipped some more pages and bloody fight scenes, and read the last two chap­ters, which set up the next book in the series, which I won’t be read­ing since chap­ter one of book three lays it all out.

I can’t give this book an actual grade because I didn’t read most of it, so: DNF.

Dis­clo­sure: I already owned book two, Rogue, and had got­ten book three, Pride, from the library. I didn’t read Rogue, but I did read Pride. I read the whole thing and gave it a B and plan to read book four, Prey.

*****

This review is apart of the TBR Chal­lenge 2009 and please make sure to check out the other par­tic­i­pants who did reviews today. Thanks.