BeWere My Heart, Book 2
Review of BeWere My Heart, Book 1
Heat Factor: Barely there (though there is some closed door hanky panky just before the end)
Character Chemistry: “I’m weirdly driven to procreate with you” + antagonism in the mode of grumpy/sunshine
Plot: Non-shifter accidentally rescues child werebear and gets roped into all the were-CPS crime-solving shenanigans
Overall: If you like your books with a healthy dose of absurdity, this checks the box
This book, like its predecessor, runs maybe into smut-adjacent territory. Though at least now we have answered the question of whether or not the story of Annette and David continues: it does not. The protagonists of this story are Annette’s foster brother, Oz, and the Stable (non-shifter) who moves into the neighborhood, Lila. Annette and David do make appearances, though, fear not. There is a romance thread running throughout, as Oz and Lila are both confusedly horny over each other the whole time, and they reveal themselves to each other more so than to anyone else. And Davidson does pull in some closed door sex right at the end, but I would say that the emotional development of the romantic thread is secondary to the adventure plot.
While Oz, like Annette, works at the Shifter version of CPS, most of this book occurs in the neighborhood where their foster mom lives. Lila moves into the Curs(ed) House down the street and, because she inadvertently rescued a werebear cub the night she moved in, she is immediately entangled in all of the chaos surrounding that cub, for whom Oz is the caseworker, and the extended foster family.
I personally like the “What even is this!?” moment(s) to occur as close to the first page as possible because that just allows me to let go and be there for the whole ride, and this book fits the bill. The laugh-out-loud moments didn’t carry through so much as the drama rolled on (the beginning was delightful though), but the absurdity and playfulness absolutely carried through.
Oz is the sunshine to Lila’s grumpy, which I found very entertaining.
“We’ve never had a normal conversation,” he said, and it was kind of cool how he made that sound like a desirable outcome. “Not once.”
Though if snark isn’t your jam (Lila is very prickly to protect her soft inner core), this might not work for you. Also, though the book isn’t riddled with the stream of consciousness style
She was she was she was here! Here in this old house that smelled like dust and
(lemons)
something sharp, something that would hurt his eyes and nose if he ate it and if she was here and he was here then she was safe but the other, the other
(cub)
girl, she was out in the world, out of his territory, but maybe maybe she would come to the house of dust and sharp smells and by now he’d prowled around twice and there weren’t any predators
(there’s me)
and the cub might come and then they would both be safe he would keep them safe and then his own cubs would come and he could make everyone safe not like not like
(the time Before)
when he was a cub…
like the first book in the series (there are fewer scenes from the animal POV) (but you can feel the dogishness coming through his wolf there, right?), the…disjointed?…writing style is still a hallmark of this author.
She was just getting the hang of the ambulance when she hit the wolf.
The thing was bulky and difficult to control (the ambulance, not the wolf), and whenever she got it back from its semiannual mechanically induced coma, it took her a few minutes to get the hang of driving it again.
She stood on the brakes
(oh shit oh shit oh shit)
and braced for the double-thump of the tires running over the animal, which didn’t come.
So. To summarize. This is a comedy, even though it deals with conspiracies and crimes surrounding the werecub and her (not?)dead parents. Be prepared for absurdity and snark and crime drama over deep emotional development and angst, though a lot of the outright bananas and laughs are frontloaded. I will say that the drama surrounding the Shifter Supremacist plot was several confusing threads to hold on to, so I guess it’s possible that a more careful reader (a la the people who found a Starbucks cup in that episode of Game of Thrones) would pick up on whether or not it all makes perfect sense, but because I was in the middle of absurd land I just shrugged and moved on.
And I was entertained.
I voluntarily read and reviewed a complimentary copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. We disclose this in accordance with 16 CFR §255.
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