Review: The Abused Werewolf Rescue Group by Catherine Jinks

Release date: April 4, 2011
Synopsis (via Goodreads):

I still hadn't fully absorbed the terrible possibility that I might actually be a werewolf. A werewolf. I kept stumbling over that word; it made no sense to me. How could I be a werewolf? Werewolves didn't exist.

When Tobias Richard Vandevelde wakes up in hospital with no memory of the night before, his horrified mother tells him that he was found by the police. At Featherdale Park. In a dingo pen.

As if that isn't weird enough, suddenly a very menacing looking guy and a priest show up at his door.

As the mystery unfolds, Toby finds himself keeping company with some very strange and sickly looking people - members of a suburban vampire support group. And when he's abducted in broad daylight, he will need all their help to break free ... and to come to terms with his own incredibly rare condition.

My Thoughts: I'm a little torn about this book.  To start with, I haven't read The Reformed Vampire Support Group and I felt like I was missing something when Toby was meeting people who I can only assume were in the first book.  Yeah, I figured out what was going on but I still felt out of the loop for some reason.

While I did like the idea behind this book I would have enjoyed a little more backstory on the mythology behind the werewolves.  Once again, that might have been touched on in RVSG (or maybe it wasn't) but I felt the lack in this book.

The real part that has me torn, though, was the ending.  The final battle.  It seemed like things were just getting resolved when a whole new slew of issues would be tossed in.  Frankly, there was so much happening in the last few chapters that I kept losing track of who was where and why they were fighting.  It was disconcerting.

The bottom line is that I like YA books and I like werewolves but I never really felt a connection to any of the characters.  Reuben was the most interesting of the lot and he never really came across as fully fleshed out.  I wish the actual werewolves had been given more face time... or, well, any face time, to be exact.  Maybe that's where my dissatisfaction lies: for a book about werewolves it's all talk, no four-legged beasties.

And let's face it, I want werewolves in my werewolf books.

More books by Catherine Jinks

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